The Mark of Athena

Rick Riordan again (I warned you): «The Mark of Athena», the third book in «The Heroes of Olympus» series.

I’ll be honest, it was kind of boring. I finished it because I really want to know how Riordan is planning to end this series, but I did not enjoy it as much as the others. The adventures were predictable, the characters became sort of annoying (not Percy, of course), but at least Riordan had the decency of leaving the ending in cliffhanger.

Dear Life

So I went to the book store in hopes of finding a new book to read when I stumbled across a shelf full of Alice Munro’s works.

Alice Munro is a Canadian author. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 and is known as «master of the contemporary short story» (she only writes short stories). She writes mostly about Canadian women battling difficult relationships and other ordinary problems. She’s won a lot of literary prizes like the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction (three times). So I spent around fifteen minutes reading the back cover of each book and decided to buy Dear Life.

Her stories are simple, well-written and easy to read. She changes the situations so quickly that I had to read some parts more than once just to make sure. I recommend it to everyone who enjoys brief stories and simple plots.

I must admit I didn’t like it that much. Not because it was boring or anything, it’s just that I like to dive into the pages and lose myself in the story. I like to smile when the character is happy, to be afraid when they are in danger, to be embarrassed when they’re an awkward situation and to be sad when they’re sad. Here I just kept reading someone’s anecdotes without feeling much for them.