Friday Favorite: A Good Book

Even though I work from home as a writer and affiliate marketer and I have no set hours I still like to think of the weekends as work-free time. If you see me posting on a weekend it is usually because I have post-dated my ramblings on Thursday or Friday to appear over the weekend.

I do yard work and I spend time with family over the weekends. I also like to read a good book if I can sneak it in. ;) Now I usually read books on green living, organic and local foods, or some other political cause I happen to endorse but now and again I sneak in a book that is just pure entertainment.

Three weeks ago I read The Painted Veil. It is about a young woman named Kitty who marries a Doctor for all the wrong reasons. She feels pressure from her family in their supreme disappointment that she has failed to find a mate. When her younger sister beats her to the bunch and becomes engaged, Kitty decides to marry and she impulsively chooses Edward Fane, a man who has become smitten with her, despite the fact that she is a spoiled and pampered and NOT in love with him.

The story begins in London but they move to Hong Kong where his practice is. Distraught with her choice and her life, Kitty begins having an affair, which is soon discovered by her adoring husband. In his anger, Edward decides to take Kitty into a cholera epidemic in China and serve as a Doctor for the infected.

Now this book was recently made into a movie with Edward Norton (a favorite of mine) and Naomi Watts. The book and movie differ quite a bit and I actually liked the movie version MUCH better. It teaches a valuable lesson about choosing to love a man that is honorable instead of one that is perhaps more attractive and social. I love the realization that eventually comes to Kitty about the man she married when she initially thought he was too plain and boring for her.

Last week I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It rocked! Nuff said….

This weekend I am reading The Golden Compass – His Dark Materials, Book 1. Here is Amazon’s description:

Some books improve with age–the age of the reader, that is. Such is certainly the case with Philip Pullman’s heroic, at times heart-wrenching novel, The Golden Compass, a story ostensibly for children but one perhaps even better appreciated by adults. The protagonist of this complex fantasy is young Lyra Belacqua, a precocious orphan growing up within the precincts of Oxford University. But it quickly becomes clear that Lyra’s Oxford is not precisely like our own–nor is her world. For one thing, people there each have a personal daemon, the manifestation of their souls in animal form. For another, hers is a universe in which science, theology, and magic are closely allied:

As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had daemons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them.

Not that Lyra spends much time worrying about it; what she likes best is “clambering over the College roofs with Roger the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war.” But Lyra’s carefree existence changes forever when she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, first prevent an assassination attempt against her uncle, the powerful Lord Asriel, and then overhear a secret discussion about a mysterious entity known as Dust. Soon she and Pan are swept up in a dangerous game involving disappearing children, a beautiful woman with a golden monkey daemon, a trip to the far north, and a set of allies ranging from “gyptians” to witches to an armor-clad polar bear.

Can’t wait to dig in! Happy Friday everyone!