Love Walked In - Mariso de los Santos

I feel so sad. I got back from vacation and the amount of time I had to read plummeted. It took me over two weeks to get through this book. And it's a book I really liked.

"My life -my real life - started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit, and, yes, I know how that sounds." So begins Love Walked In. This book really just touched my heart in so many ways. I feel like I really connected in some way with the lead character, Cornelia. The book drew me in from the very first sentence and kept my hooked the entire way through.

This was an emotional book. One of those books were you just root and root for the two main characters, Cornelia and Clair. Scared and alone, each in their own way, Claire and Cornelia are drawn together finding the strength and love that both are looking and yearning for. Just when they start to believe that their lives just couldn't get any better, life throws them several "curve balls" testing the love, strength, courage and trust they've come to depend on from one another and those close to them.

I don't have enough good things to say about this book. Maybe it hit me at the right time. At a time when I was already feeling emotional and sappy. But it was really, really good.

The Gatecrasher - Madeleine Wickham

The premise of this book is a little uncomfortable. It is about a woman (Fleur Daxney) who creashes the funerals of people she does not know to pick up wealthy men. Fleur's ultimate goal is to seduce the men and then move in after their money. Fluer is a mysterious woman with a past, and a thirteen year old daughter, that threatens to haunt her has she hones in on her current target, Richard Favour.

Madeline Wickham is most famous for the books she wrote under the pen name Sophie Kinsella. She has recently begun to write ane release books under her real name. The books she has released under her real name, although still in the chick lit genre, are very different from the books she writes as Sophie Kinsella. These books, including this one, are quite a bit edgier in both the writing style and content. There is not a lot of likeness between the books released as Madeline and the books released as Sophie. This is especially true if you are looking for something that is light and laugh out loud funny. You will find very little of Sophie Kinsella in The Gatecrasher. But, at least in my opinion, this is a very worthy read. And it actually shows that Wickham depth as a writer.

The Stranger - Albert Camus

I figured since I was on vacation, I would attempt to read something a little bit deeper. I took quite a few philosophy classes in college and was familiar with Camus, but never read any of his books. I chose The Stranger because it looked promising.

The Stranger tells the story of an emotionally detached, amoral young man named Meursault. When the book opens, Mersault has just found out his mother has passed away. He does not cry at his mother's funeral, he does not believe in God, and, a day after he attends his mother's funeral, he kills a man he barely knows without any discernible motive. For his crime, Meursault is deemed a threat to society and sentenced to death. When he comes to accept the “gentle indifference of the world,” he finds peace with himself and with the society that persecutes him.

The Stranger illustrates Camus' philosophy of the absurd. Camus's absurdist philosophy implies that moral orders have no rational or natural basis, which differs slightly from exestentialism, which implies there is no “higher” meaning to the universe or to man's existence, and no rational order to the events of the world.

This was an interesting book to read. It really made me think a little about life and about just how much I disagree with Camus' philosophy. I would highly recommend reading this book. It is short and a fairly simple read with lots of great thought provoking themes.

The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

This is the second book I have completed thusfar during my vacation week. I pretty much finished it in one reading sitting by the pool. This is a short book of vignettes that add up to tell the larger overall story of Esperanza, who lives on Mango Street in Chicago.

The House on Mango Street is a wonderfully poetic book that is so written so simply, but, yet, tackles so many deep themes. It is a book about culture, about upbrining, about love, feminism, and oppression. It is a story about a girl coming into her own and having a bright future in front of her.

This was a really great book to read on vacation. It was so beautifully written and poetic that it just touched my heart in so many ways. I did not read this book in school and it I book I have been meaning to read for some time. I am so glad I finally read it.

Picture Perfect - Jodi Picoult

I believe this may have been one of Jodi Picoult's first books. It was published in 1995. I have read quite a few of Picoult's books now, and was curious to see how this early book compared to her more recent work.

Picture Perfect tells the story of Cassie, who, when the book starts, wakes up to find she has been beaten, but has amnesia, so she can't remember how she got where she is, or what happened to her. As the story begins to unravel, Cassie begins to piece back her memory, including the mystery of how she got beat up, who beat her up, and why she was out on the streets of LA alone.

I'm not sure that I loved this book. It didn't feel very realistic to me. The subject matter - a famous actor beating his wife - just wasn't quite told in a way that convinced me it was a "real" story. It was a fairly typical Picoult book. So, if you like her stuff in general, you will probably like this one, as well. It just left a little to be desired, for me.