A Sonnet a day...

Here is another little nugget of Shakespearean poetry for you, as I still don't have a new review for you. Strange and Norrell have been taking up all my reading energies of late. But I'm over halfway through!

VIII

Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'Thou single wilt prove none.'

Friday Blog Hop once again!

I can't believe it's Friday again already! Time again for blog hop mania! Head on over to Crazy for Books to join in the fun and sign up to the McLinky! Happy hop-hop-hopping!

In other news, I'm about 300 pages into Strange and Norrell. Very slow progress, I know. So in celebration of National Poetry Month, I give you a lovely sonnet for a lovely day:

Sonnet 116, by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Happy Monday-what are you reading?

In an effort to keep the momentum of this blog chugging along, I'll turn the forum over to you: what are you reading? Have you read anything that particularly excited you? Or something just downright awful? Inquiring minds want to know!

I'm plodding my way through all 800+ pages of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and while it is an interesting book I am likely not going to finish it quickly. But that does bring me a step closer to my long books challenge-which I notice is not yet on the sidebar! The challenge is to read 3,000 pages from long books of 500 pages or more. So far I've read 2 long books this year-The Stand by Stephen King topping out at over 1100 pages, and the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is around 600. So far my challenge total is 1760. Over halfway there!

Friday Blog Hop

I just read my comment from the fabulous Wonderbunny who posted about a really neat way to get your book blog known. So hop to it and head on over to Crazy for Books, read the very simple rules and sign up to the McLinky! Take a peek and see what you might find!

To those who have hopped on over to this blog, welcome! Hope you like the place. Thanks for visiting and I hope you do it often.

Cool blog

Hi all
I recently stumbled upon this neat blog, Daydreams and Wanderings, and wanted to share. She is having a book giveaway soon, so run on over and check it out. This is my inspiration for launching my own follower goal giveaway. So don't forget to follow me too-my book is TBA, but it will be good!

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Spoiler Alert!

Three words come to mind when I think about this book: Ignorance is Bliss. I think I would have been better off not reading this book. It isn't because it was poorly written-on the contrary, it is very very well written. It is because the story line disturbed me so deeply that I wanted to shut my eyes and wish it away. This story is about Amir and Hassan, two friends that are set in different places in Afghanistan's caste system. Hassan is a decent, loyal and brave friend to Amir. Amir, on the other hand, is a coward, and when Hassan needs him the most he does nothing. And then Amir feels guilty, and that guilt destroys their friendship. So then he spends the last half of the book trying to make up for what he did to his former friend. I was disgusted at Amir, and felt even sadder that he ruined his chances of reconciliation, because he just waited too long.

Ugh. I can't take it. It was far too depressing. This book has the same place in my mind as when I read about dogs being abused. It is disturbing and makes me feel just terrible. A great novel, yes, but it will never sit right with me. I need to read some fluff now to take my mind off of it.

About the author:
Khaled Hosseini is a novelist and physician who was born in Afghanistan. Since he was 15, he has lived in the United States, where he is a citizen. In 1976, Hosseini's father obtained a job in Paris, France and moved the family there. They chose not to return to Afghanistan because the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had seized power through a bloody coup in April 1978. Instead, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California.

Hosseini earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1988 from Santa Clara University. The following year, he entered the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. in 1993. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1996. He practiced medicine until a year and a half after the release of The Kite Runner.

Hosseini is currently a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Roya, and their two children.

The Great Saur revolution, in a nutshell:
In 1973, the King Zahir Shah's brother-in-law, Mohammed Daoud Khan, launched a bloodless coup and became the first President of Afghanistan while Zahir Shah was on an official overseas visit. Mohammed Daoud Khan jammed Afghan radio with anti-Pakistani broadcasts and looked to the Soviet Union and the United States for aid for development.

In 1978, a prominent member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Mir Akbar Khyber (or "Kaibar"), was killed by the government. The leaders of PDPA apparently feared that Daoud was planning to exterminate them all, especially since most of them were arrested by the government shortly after. Hafizullah Amin and a number of military wing officers of the PDPA managed to remain at large and organized an uprising.

The PDPA, led by Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Amin overthrew the regime of Mohammad Daoud, who was killed along with his family. The uprising was known as the Khalq, or Great Saur Revolution ('Saur' means 'April' in Pashto). On May 1, 1978, Taraki became President, Prime Minister and General Secretary of the PDPA. The country was then renamed the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), and the PDPA regime lasted, in some form or another, until April 1992.

It's a Goood Friday!

Hi all,
Hope you like what I've done with the place. I now feel like my blog is to my liking (for now anyway). I want to try to bump up my list of followers, so I'm issuing a challenge. When I get 10 followers I will post a book giveaway. It'll be a good book-I promise! So join up, tell your friends and help me reach my goal of generating more traffic!