Books lately

PS. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern

Highly recommended by one of my best pals, Nat. And it was indeed a very nice chick-lit romance getaway. It was romantic, funny, heartwarming, sad, heartbreaking, warm, and all kinds of girly-emotions all wrapped into one good read.

Holly Kennedy's husband, Gerry dies from a brain tumour. She is completely devastated. But, she receives a package from her husband. Inside, there are notes that she must open every month - things that she must do in order to live the rest of her life bravely without him. Her best friends help her through it, and of course, like every chick-lit novel, there is a happy happy ending - which is always the reason why we girls indulge in these books :)

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

It's very Amy-Tan-like, but with less flowery language. A lot of the English words used are direct translations from its Chinese words, like how all these books are usually written.

The book tells of how Snow Flower rose in ranks from a poor little farmer's daughter to the respected wife of a village head. It centralizes on her bittersweet relationship with her arranged-best-friend, her "old same" - Lily - and how they went through the ups and downs of being young girls to married wives and baby-making machines. Particularly, it emphasizes on the relationship between Snow Flower and Lily - as girls and as women. There's no happy ending, but there is an ending. It's a beautiful, engaging book.

Pompeii by Robert Harris

I rented this book because I thought I'd immerse myself in some Italian landscapes in order to appreciate the country better come this June. And, to be honest, this book did a very good job of detailing the Pompeii landscape.

Based in olden times during the days of the Roman empire, the Aqua Augusta is an aqueduct that supplies water all through the Bay of Naples. A young engineer is put in charge of this aqueduct and new on the job, he works very hard to find out what is wrong with the water when fishes start dying and water supply is slowly cut off along the long aqueduct stretch.

For those not in the know, Pompeii is the town in the Naples region of Italy which was completely engulfed by lava when the imposing Mount Vesuvius erupted a long time ago. (And I'll be visiting Pompeii this June!)

It brilliantly interfuses the lives of rich Italian villa owners with those of its poor working slaves, the common working folk with the renowned learned academicians, the community of Naples, the majesty of Mount Vesuvius, and more particularly, the author provides encyclopedic definitions of how a volcano erupts (which has made me rather interested in the news of the Indonesian Mount Merapi's impending blow-up). It's not the normal kind of fiction I read, and if I weren't going to Italy, it would be boring. However, for me, the countdown to Italy became very exciting after reading this :)