Books I read on the Cruise

I read these books while I was gone:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
Absolutely outstanding. This will go into my list of favorite books I've ever read. It is a novel completely written in letters (kind of like "A Woman of Independent Means"), and you get to know the characters through their letters back and forth to each other. The main character, Juliet Ashton, is a writer just after World War II, who finds out about the German occupation of the channel island of Guernsey, and writes letters back and forth to the people there. The suffering they went through was heart-wrenching.

I adored each and every character in this book






Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

I have to say that I liked this book less than I liked a similar Austen-rewrite, Sense and Sensibility and SeaMonsters. But that is natural, because I really really enjoy the original Sense and Sensibility better than I like the original Pride and Prejudice.

Both of these re-writes are fascinating and funny, because of course we all know the original plots, and it is so hysterical to see the "P and P" plot mixed in with a zombie invasion, or in the case of "S and S and S", all sorts of maneating octupii and sharks.






Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler

This was just a bit of fluff, quite enjoyable though. The main character is a woman from 2010 who suddenly wakes up in Regency England, living the life of a woman in a Jane Austen novel. I loved the contrasts between what she was used to in our century and what she had to go through there (no baths, no toilets, strict social conventions, class boundaries between commoners and gentry, marriages of convenience.)