I always say I am going to keep up on my blog....but time slips away from me and I end up forgetting about it. I have read quite a few books since I last wrote. A few were great...some were not so good. This is how it happens.

One of the best books I read was called "The Dew Breaker" by Edwidge Danticat. She is a Haitian-American novelist who writes amazing books about Haiti and the people who live there. The Dew Breaker is set between the United States and Haiti, chronicling many different peoples lives in a thirty year time-span. Everyone's life is somehow connected, sometimes for the worst. The term dew breaker means torturer and the book looks at the political tortures that took place in Haiti. What makes this story interesting is that the first character we meet was a "dew breaker" and we read about how this has affected his life, and his families, after they emmigrated to America. I would highly recommend this novel.

Another great book was "Empire Falls" by Richard Russo. I had been meaning to read this for a while but, to be honest, was never that interested in picking it up. I saw it at the library here and decided to take the plunge.....and I am so glad I did. This is an excellent book that looks at small town America and the struggles of the people who live there. I could relate to this book when it talked about the closure of key industries and how people were left with nothing afterwards. The characters were very real and the book had a lot of humour in it. I am not going to say much more because there was a shocking turn of events towards the end that I did not see coming!

"West of Kabul, East of New York" by Tamim Ansary is a memior about the life of an Afghan-American man. The beginning of the book discusses why he wrote the book (it was due to September 11th) and then moves on to discuss his journey from being an Afghan child to an American man. I thought it was really interesting and very easy to read. My favorite part was when Tamim recalls his trip through North Africa and the Middle East in the late 70's and how even though he was born in Afghanistan and spoke Farsi, he was still hated because he had an American passport. People who are interested in reading about how the events of September 11 affected Afghan people who were living in America would really learn a lot from this book.

There are more but I have some more work to do. From now on I will keep up to date on my reading reviews. I promise!