Book Worm’s Scavenger Hunt Update #2

Jen and I have been making our way through our scavenger hunt challenge and we are working on a few new challenges for a little later in the year. You can read about our scavenger hunt challenge here. For those of you participating in the challenge, we’ve decided to move back the end of the challenge to March 31 to give you all a little extra time to read books. Some prizes will be handed out at that point but others will be handed out at the end of the year to someone who has completed all 31 items. We highly recommend that you try completing “hidden” prize items by the March 31st deadline since those will be awarded at that time. It’s not too difficult to figure out which items those might be if you read the clues.

And now on to my challenge progress…

Previously read (and discussed in this post):

7 – Read Around the World = Temporary Kings Anthony Powell

10 – Find the purple heart = Shh it’s a secret

12 – Library Excursion = The Night Falling

14 – Ugly Cover = Books do Furnish a Room Anthony Powell

21 – No Images on Cover = Not If I See You First Eric Lindstrom

Latest items completed: 

Item # 8: Literary Excursion. For this item we needed to go on a literary excursion — visiting a literary site and reading a book related to that location. I chose to read The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. I am counting my trip to the Rochester Dickens Festival. This is an apt choice as Edwin Drood opens in an opium den in Rochester (although I didn’t spot any opium dens on my visit).

Edwin Drood is the believed to be the last book Dickens wrote. In fact he died before he could finish it. The story is a murder mystery and as the book is incomplete we never actually learn what was the intended solution to the mystery although I think Dickens left enough clues to fill in the blanks and solve the mystery.

Despite its incomplete status, this was a 4 star read for me. There is just something magical about the way Dickens writes.

Small cheat I am not in the picture but I am holding the camera 🙂

Item # 11: A book with a purple cover.

Book I selected: Therapy: An Alex Delaware Novel by Jonathan Kellerman. This is a book in the Alex Delaware series of psychological mysteries. It was a middling 3-star read –nothing outstandingly good and nothing outstandingly bad, just average.

The plot was interesting in terms of the reasons the why people got murdered but it was just very slow moving and perhaps a little too deep to deliver the thrill you expect from a good murder mystery.

 

Item #13: A book with animal(s) on the cover

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
★★★★★
I am so glad I finally got around to reading this book because I absolutely loved it! The only downside is that I now need to read the companion book: A God in Ruins.

The story revolves around one woman Ursula. It starts with her birth and follows her throughout her life. What is special about Ursula is that each time she dies, she returns to the day of her birth with memories and feelings from her previous life. As such, she won’t die the same way twice. With each new life she begins to remember more from the past and this means she can change certain events and prevent tragedy. But can she prevent the biggest tragedy in her lifetime, the holocaust?

I really liked Ursula as a character and enjoyed watching as she became more aware of her special nature and how she could put that to use. I also liked the fact that while in some versions of her life she was able to prevent tragedy in others the tragedy ended up taking a different form from the original.

I would highly recommend this to those who enjoyed books like The Time Traveller’s Wife.

Total tally: 8 out of 31. I really am slacking compared to the rest of you.

We want to hear from you. Which books and items have you completed? Which were your favorites and least favorites? Want to join in? There’s still time to join the challenge and win prizes at the end of the year.