By the time i post this, this will have been old news because I am Procrastinator HEAR ME ROAR

by alittlehoneyformyheart

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My book haul from my Jakarta trip! As the title mentions, i am about three books ahead already. But i’ll just go on with my review anyway since I have been meaning to review tons of other books and i shall have to begin somewhere!

I brought these books back with me from Jakarta in addition to the ones i’d already lugged there at the beginning (The Beach and Empress Wu, which i did not touch lol because who has time to properly read when you’re on holiday?!) and within less than a week of reaching home i’d finished all of them. All of them. That’s how jaded i was, all hung up on my post vacation blues. But now that the Sawaddee club has revived, i suppose it has gotten better in a way because now i can look forward to heading to Bangkok in May!

So i didn’t get these books all at the same place, BUT i did make sure i got them at reasonable prices which wasn’t very hard to do because come on, i’m from Brunei. Everything exported here is marked up twice the actual price. So i got Mrs. Kimble from a place called Aksara in Grand Indonesia on a 50% discount which made it about 15 BND which was an okay average price for me but the rest i got from my trip to Semarang at some secondhand booth that i happened to pass by on the way to the loo. So it was all amazingly cheap! Around…gosh 70 000 rupiah? About 7BND or less for each! Amaymay. Moving on!

Disclaimer: If you’re expecting a top notch review complete with text analysis and writing techniques, then i suggest you down a martini or five first as well as your expectations.

1) Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses. I actually really loved this book in the beginning HOWEVER, it got a bit draggy towards the middle…then towards the end as well. I was just sort of waiting for it to end so i could move on to something faster. Idk i guess i’ve always been a fiction sorta girl so when a book starts to get more on the preachy side, i lose interest (i’m looking at you Eat Pray Love)! I have a natural healthy dose of reality as it is and considering reading is my forte and my escape, i tend to shy away from books which preach. But i really wished Tan had played a little bit more on Kwan’s character whom i really, really loved in the book. Although i did not enjoy her constant flashbacks with Miss Banner and whatnot.  Also the ending i felt was a bit too rushed. Or maybe i was just disappointed that Kwan disappeared because i find for such an amazing, one of a kind character there are multitudes of possible explanations that Tan could have conjured up to give her readers (okay fine just me, i cannot fucking stand cliffhangers okay JUST TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED DAMMIT) some form of closure. Like perhaps, an epilogue from Kwan’s perspective depicting how she feels in her new “situation” or her take on what happened. Eugh getting goosebumps as i type this because it could have been such a great book!

3 stars out of 5!

2) Bridget Jones’ Diary. This wasn’t as funny as it could have been or as i had imagined it to be and somehow, weirdly enough as i do adore a good chick lit from time to time, i wanted it to end. Maybe i was just being greedy because i had like two other books to read after that which looked equally interesting but i don’t think that’s the case though. It was entertaining perhaps 65% of the time and the rest was just…ranting. The characters were pretty okay, although i did enjoy that stint where she catches Daniel (Hugh Grant) in the act of cheating  because i was fooled just for that moment so that was an expected surprise! Lol

2.5 stars out of 5!

3) The Nanny Diaries. This…this i didn’t expect to love because it looked like such a simplistic book, but i did anyway! Although i cried like a bitch at the end when she had to leave Grayer. God i hate goodbyes (tell me though, am i the only one who cries while reading books? I know it sounds ridiculous but then again, is it? Or do i just have an overactive imagination?). I really hated Mrs.X for not allowing her to say goodbye and i was really rooting for her to shout for Grayer to wake up, I MEAN THEY WERE RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER WHILE SHE WAS PACKING DAMMIT. What did she have to lose by waking him up? She was getting fired anyway! Okay i’m getting all fired up at the thought of their unfinished goodbye. Breathe breathe breathe. NO BUT REALLY WTF if i were Nanny i would have showed up at his school one day just to say goodbye. I swear.

4 stars out of 5!

4) Mrs. Kimble by Jennifer Haigh. Mother of everything. This was bloody good. And by bloody good, i mean the best fucking book i have read in a long, long, long time. And i have read a lot of good books in my time. It was light and heavy at the same time. I finished it within eight hours and ended up sleeping at 7 am because i just could not put it down despite having classes later in the day. I can’t even begin to explain exactly what it was that made it so insatiably good, it just was! (Okay probably has to do with the fact that i was supposed to post this three weeks ago so i’ve forgotten some details lol) BUT IT WAS AMAZING. It had closure for the readers, an amazing well developed plot which ended well, proper character development, i especially loved how Haigh establishes all the Mrs. Kimbles so well and yet leaves a very vague impression of Mr. Kimble which i think is unique because it leaves a certain air of mystery about it. And in the end, it serves him well. He began as a passing character and ended it the same way. That, in a sense, tells a lot more about the character that we expect.

Hoarder that i am, i’ve just gotten back from borrowing more books from the library including Life of Pi (update: That book was kind of bad. Immensely draggy. Not something i appreciate as an impatient reader with an unreliable attention span.). I’m sorry i’m only realizing now that i should have put a disclaimer at the beginning mentioning spoilers ahead… but then again no one ever wants to read posts with spoilers in it, do they? 😦 That’s all for now!
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