Ayesha at last book5/23/2023 ![]() ![]() Now you know that this one made the cut, check out my video review to see the others! I have read my way through 315 books to bring you my Top 10 Books of the Year (video). Looking into the rumors, she finds she has to deal with not only what she discovers about Khalid, but also the truth she realizes about herself. ![]() When a surprise engagement is announced between Khalid and Hafsa, Ayesha is torn between how she feels about the straightforward Khalid and the unsettling new gossip she hears about his family. She is irritatingly attracted to someone who looks down on her choices and who dresses like he belongs in the seventh century. ![]() Then she meets Khalid, who is just as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental. Though Ayesha is lonely, she doesn't want an arranged marriage. She lives with her boisterous Muslim family and is always being reminded that her flighty younger cousin, Hafsa, is close to rejecting her one hundredth marriage proposal. Her dreams of being a poet have been set aside for a teaching job so she can pay off her debts to her wealthy uncle. A modern-day Muslim Pride and Prejudice for a new generation of love.Īyesha Shamsi has a lot going on. ![]()
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The hobbit book trilogy5/23/2023 ![]() The most recent film, The Battle of the Five Armies, which covers approximately 72 pages of the novel, is 144 minutes long, allotting 2 minutes per page. With a total 474 minute running time (approximately 542 minutes for the extended editions) to its measly 293 page count, The Hobbit is unprecedented in how stretched the film is. Their conclusion? The Hobbit series is the most stretched film adaptation of a novel. But is the book actually stretched or do we just feel like it is? Well, Walt Hickey from the “ Data Lab” over at has taken a look at the numbers of running times and page counts of a wide swath of films adapted from popular novels to answer the question. I totally agree with that sentiment, making for a punishing 474 minutes of film to watch. ![]() One of the biggest complaints with Peter Jackson‘s adaptation of The Hobbit has been the unnecessary stretching of a simple, rather brief book into a bloated, three-movie series. ![]() Perfect rachel joyce synopsis5/23/2023 ![]() ![]() An instant classic, Perfect confirms Rachel Joyce as a major new British literary voice." ( Daily Express) Not least a twist that few will see coming and will leave you reeling and a redemptive ending that is perhaps the sweeter given all the pain that goes before. This is a darker, more complex novel than Joyce's first but readers will find other points of comparison. "Joyce's faith in the essential goodness of humanity and her observation of the comedy in the everyday shine through. readers who loved The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry will not be disappointed." ( Sunday Times) subtle touches give the book an intense, slightly mesmeric feel. "The power of Joyce's prose lies in small, astute observations. ![]() It is her clever did-I-read-that-right twist at the end that really got to me and had me scrabbling back through the chapters, open-mouthed." ( Evening Standard) Its unputdownable factor lies in its exploration of so many multilayered emotions. Joyce executes this story with precision and flair. " A near-flawless novel of emotional truth. ![]() Out natsuo5/23/2023 ![]() ![]() This changes for the best once Tsukiko meets Akihito Fujii. Rui grew up having to deal with her mother's constant disparaging talk about her father, which upsets her greatly. Rui is the younger of two daughters of Tsukiko Tachibana and her ex-husband, whom she divorced after he admitted to infidelity. Throughout the story, she opens up to people around her, becoming more emotionally expressive and more social, and she realizes her own ambition to become a chef and begins to reach towards that dream. When Natsuo lists all of her behavior he finds cute, especially to other people in front of her, she becomes overwhelmingly flustered.ĭuring the story progression, Rui goes through a lot of change. Rui is also surprisingly easy to embarrass in spite of her stoic personality. Rui has a tendency to pout when things don't go her way, though Natsuo finds this quirk of hers adorable. She is very supportive of people she cares about in spite of their flaws and even if their desires conflict with her own. ![]() In spite of this, it was hard at the beginning for her to express her feelings towards people she genuinely liked. Once someone sees through her initially cold demeanor, Rui is actually a very kind and loving girl throughout the series. Her standoffish personality made it difficult for her to socialize the first time she appears in the story, at a mixer, she didn't do much to interact with others. At the beginning, Rui was an aloof and blunt girl who was hard to read emotionally. ![]() The lingering sji holliday5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() Thrown together in a strange country, and the cramped cabin of the train, the women soon form a bond. When the two women meet in a Beijing Hotel, Carrie makes the impulsive decision to invite Violet to take her best friend’s place. ![]() She is also desperate for a ticket on the Trans-Siberian Express, but there is nothing available. Violet is also travelling alone, after splitting up with her boyfriend in Thailand. So it was with baited breath that I jumped into Violet.Ĭarrie’s best friend has an accident and can no longer make the round-the-world trip they’d planned together, so Carrie decides to go it alone. Whether it’s her long-suffering police officer, Davie Gray in her Banktoun trilogy, or her ghost-busting, The Lingering, or her Christmas novel, The Deaths of December – I’ve read them all. So a big thank you to Karen Sullivan! I don’t always get the chance to read every single book an author has written but I have with Susi. Even more so when you get handed a proof of Violet by SJI Holliday. ![]() ![]() ![]() The things that she is addicted to include an iced coffee and candy bars. ![]() She considers herself lucky to have spent more than 2 decades with her loving husband and looks forward to spending many more lovely years with him. ![]() In addition to being a full-time author, Dohner also performs the duties of a full-time mother and wife. A few of her books have been written in collaboration with author Kele Moon. Dohner has also contributed a collection of short stories called Alien along with other authors such as Leora Gonzales, Tara Nina, and Jaid Black. She is well known for writing the VLG series, Night Pack series, Vorge Crew series, Veslor Mates series, Cyborg Seduction series, Zorn Warriors series, and the Mating Heat series. Laurann Dohner is a reputed USA Today and NY Times bestselling American writer of paranormal, romance, fantasy, and science fiction stories. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, Certainty (2006) Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Priz Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages. ![]() Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This doesn’t mean that the dates of the following 60-plus new releases are set in stone, or that audiences will show up in pre-2020 numbers for those that are coming out in theaters. The question for movie-release status quo will continue in 2023, as some of the production-pipeline delays and COVID-era skittishness about theatrical releases appears to be dissipating. ![]() Stross halting state5/22/2023 ![]() I did not like this book, perhaps because it is about the online gaming community, by which I mean obsessives who spend way too much time playing World of Warcraft, and my idea of a video game binge still tends more toward playing through all of Super Mario World in one night. ![]() Then I realized that it is obnoxious to force readers to suffer an affected writing style or stylistic quirk unless you have a really good reason, and "because it's cute and mildly thematically relevant" is not a good enough reason, are you listening, Charles Stross? Then I thought maybe I would do the whole thing in code like a l33t haXor, which would have been appropriate since this book finds it the height of amusement to throw around with-it language like "n00b" and "pwned." I briefly toyed with doing the same for my review, but then I remembered that I already did that, and it wasn't that amusing. Charles Stross decided it would be a good idea to write Halting State entirely in second person. ![]() Be careful what you wish for novel5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() 46 Canadian picture books published in spring 2020. ![]() Are Eshana's wishes really coming true? If so, is having the life she's always wanted worth the costs? (From Orca Book Publishers) But then, after telling Wise One about a girl who has been bullying her, she hears that the girl has been injured in a car accident. The next day she goes to school and suddenly everyone wants to talk to her. Eshana admits to the Wise One how hard it is for her to make friends. ![]() She starts talking with someone called Wise One. One day she discovers a website that claims to be a safe space where young people can support each other in making their dreams come true. She feels more comfortable talking to people online than in person. ![]() |