Next is Emma by Alexander McCall Smith. This is a part of “The Jane Austen project” which is a series of books retelling Jane Austen’s main novels. This one is obviously a retelling of Emma, and I love the cover – but that is pretty much the nicest thing I can say about it… I really liked the first 70 pages or so, because you get a lot of backstory, which you don’t get in the original, but apart from that it was absolutely terrible. In the original book Emma makes some bad decisions, but you can always tell that she has good intentions, and you can clearly tell that she grows as a person. In this version however, Emma is just a b*tch (sorry) through the whole book, and in the end she doesn’t seem to have learned anything at all. The rest of the characters had also completely changed for the worse, and it was very obvious that the writer was an older person trying to imagine the behavior of younger people. Ok, you can probably tell that I’m not a fan of this book, so I’m just gonna stop rambling about it. :-D

I finally got around to reading The Maze Runner by James Asher last month. I really liked the movie, and although I liked the book too, I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to. The book is about a guy called Thomas, who is a part of a group trapped in the middle of a maze. The whole thing is a part of an experiment to test the people in the maze, and I guess you have to read the rest of the books to understand the whole thing (which I haven’t yet, so I’m still a bit confused :-D). I felt like the plot was a bit rushed, and too much of the story was spend focusing on insignificant details.

Continuing my Rainbow Rowell obsession I also read Landline. The book is about a woman called Georgie, who is a sitcom manuscript writer. Due to her working too much, her marriage to Neal is falling apart. After Georgie tells him that she can’t go to his parent’s for Christmas, because she has to work, Neal decides to go along with their two daughters, leaving Georgie home alone in the week leading up to Christmas. During this week she discovers a way to talk to Neal from the past, and now she has to figure out whether she wants to save their marriage, or stop it before it has even begun. I really liked the book, I just didn’t love it as much as her other books. It was really hard to be rooting for Neal, because he just seemed sooo unsympathetic and annoying. The story keeps shifting between the present, and flashbacks of how Georgie met Neal, and reading the flashbacks you can tell why the got together, but otherwise it is hard to see why they are still married. I did however like how realistic it is.

If you want to keep track of how I’m doing in the challenge, or you want to join in yourself you can find my Goodreads profile here.

- Lene

Book challenge progress: 8/30