books!

I have failed on the front of this blog being a place to talk about the books we have read. I read a couple of books in Costa Rica, and only talked about one of them! Failure!

But I read one that was so amazing that I want to write about it now.

It was...The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

The book was recommended to me by Shayna. This summer has been really awesome in that I have been exchanging book lists with people and been getting a lot of really good suggestions. SO to anyone who reads this blog, do you have a book list? If so PLEASE email it to me: laurinskii@gmail.com and I will post it on our blog for everyone to share. Or just put it as a comment and I will post it on the front page.

I think that books make some of the best gifts, and I am looking for materials to read for my 3 week family vacation that is coming up.

But back to Arundhati Roy. I would read her wikipedia page, because she is a rather amazing person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundhati_Roy. She appears to be a writer, activist, essayist, actress, screenplay writer, architect, etc. Mostly look at her activism section. Pretty inspiring.

But back to the book! The book is amazing. Roy is very very clever with grammar, capitalization, and sentence structure. The book spans about 20 years, but really focuses on the events of a week. It doesn't follow a clear time line, so at first it is hard to follow, but when you get into it, you have to go back and read the beginning to see just what you missed.

It is focuses around the lives of two twins (one boy, one girl), their single mother, divorced uncle, cruel great-aunt, and blind grandmother, and the Uncle's ex-wife and daughter coming for a visit. Sounds simple, but more it is about "the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much." It is about the caste system in India, and the Untouchables, and there are two love stories intertwined. Beautiful beautiful beautiful book.

Lol I bet our book reviews are never very in depth. But I don't want to give too much away...because I really want everyone who reads this blog to read this book.

A quote to leave you with: (it is after the twins have come to Velutha pretending to be old ladies dressed in Saris)

"It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do."