Waking Up With The Sunrise

Last month I did a buddy read with Jill from Mama Leest (Reading mom). I wanted to read the Harry Potter series in French. Why? I hear you thinking. I know, I already read it in my native language Dutch and also in English. I want to improve my French and a great way is to immerse myself in the language. I’ve already read The Little Prince in French. You can read my thought about that one here . The Little Prince is a children’s book, so since that went well, I wanted to do something just a bit harder. I thought I might be ready for Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers (Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone). I didn't think it was going to be as hard since I’ve already read it in two other languages. I already know what it says. It’s been a while though, since I’ve read the first one, so it's still a bit of a challenge. I told my friend I was interested in doing this, not actually meaning I wanted to do it now. But I guess I inspired her, because she bought the paperb...

 I haven’t read much from Tolkien yet. I saw the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, which made want to read his books. I’ve read one book from him so far, which also wasn’t in the Middle Earth universe, and that was The Story of Kullervo. It wasn’t really for me unfortunately. I found it hard to read about Kullervo, as it was such a dark character. For me a bit too dark, but I’m probably a bit of a sensitive soul, when it comes to these things. 😇 However, I liked this book, Mr. Bliss. It’s a children’s story, so no surprise there. 😂 I read it to my son. He didn’t understand much of it yet, but at least he liked the drawings, as he kept pointing at them or kept trying to grab the pages. I got this book from the library. And I’m not sure if every edition is like this, but I really liked this one. At one side, when you pointed the book vertically, it was the edited story.   Which means it held the drawings and the text was typed and placed nicely besides the drawings....

I’m not going to lie, this was hard to understand. But I expected that, since it was written a couple of centuries ago.  A couple of years ago I bought a book with all the collected works of Shakespeare. A very beautiful hardcover edition. You must think, wow, ‘why would you hold that book so long in your bookcase without reading it?’ Well a lot has happened, mostly bad, that totally crushed my will to read. Me and my hubby moved and the renovations in our new appartment have been a lot harder than expected. Lots of bad luck with fishy constructors along the road there. So there already wasn’t lots of time to read. Not only that, we’ve lost our firstborn child at 32 weeks of pregnancy in April 2018. So for a long time I haven’t felt so great, reading was the last thing on my mind. The birth of my second son brought me joy again and now my will to read and learn is slowly returning. I’m hoping to read all the books on my bookshelves soon, to see which ones are worth to keep, sel...

Yes! Another month, another classic. Reading classics has been more fun than expected. This month I’ve read a short read: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a book published in 1925 and it’s also set in the 1920’s. It’s about a man, called Nick Carraway who moves to New York. He starts renting a house in West Egg, a district of Long Island. His neighbor is a mysterious man called Jay Gatsby who lives in a big mansion and parties a lot. Nick has dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan and her husband, Tom. Nick gets introduced to Jordan Baker, a very cynical woman and begins a romantic relationship with her. Nick finally gets an invitation to a party from Gatsby. He discovers more about this Gatsby there, but I’m going to leave some things for you to read for yourself. I’m not sure I completely like this book, but I liked a lot of elements from it. There was lot of intrigue and for me too many wrong relationships.   I liked the mysterious tone of the book as it...

 One of my goals is to improve my French knowledge until I can speak it fluently. I already have a base, but I feel I’m still to insecure to start a random conversation in the language. One of the best things you can do when learning a language is to immerse yourself into it. And a good way for beginners with a minimum knowledge, is to read comics or children’s books in the language. So that’s what I tried this week to see if I already reached a good level of understanding for the book Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The book cover of my e-book: Le petit Prince is one of the only children’s books I know that are written by a French writer (for now). I’ve read it before in English as a child and a couple years ago I read it in French, but I still felt that I didn’t understand everything completely and I needed a dictionary most of the time. The verbs were also often to difficult as it’s, like in many books, in the past tense.  But now a couple...

Sorry for the long review, but I now consider this one of the best books I’ve read so far, so I couldn’t help myself. If you don’t want to read all of this, then here’s my opinion: ‘It was very good is an understatement.’ My copy from the library:     One of my book challenges is to read a list of classics. The first one I picked, was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It’s a book I’ve been looking forward to read for ages. I know this book is often on the to-read list for many schools from the US. I always thought they were lucky, as here in Belgium, I had to read very boring Flemish (North-Belgian) literature to graduate. I still feel like sleeping when I think of it. This book is/was banned in lots of places in the US and I must be honest, that I was curious why that was. I can remember seeing the movie a couple of years ago and I couldn’t remember something worth banning for. But now after reading it, I’m slightly changing my opinion on that. I can understand...