A Chocolate With a Caramel Centre - a book that made you all gooey inside
This was a hard one, since I normally roll my eyes at the gooey, lovey-dovey bits and I prefer reading about fights and struggles and things of similar nature. The ONLY book that was full of things like that and I thought was written SO well, SO tastefully and I enjoyed every page of it was "40 Rules of Love - A Story of Rumi" by the Turkish author, Elif Shafak. The story takes place paralelly nowadays and in 13th century Turkey, where the spiritual leader and poet Rumi encounters a bizzare dervish called Shamz of Tebriz who later becomes his mentor and guide along the paths of spirituality, truth, sufism and love in its purest, most divine way. At the same time, we follow the story of Ella Rubinstein, unhappily married, who tries to rediscover the love of live and battles her fear of falling in love with a man. Her story and this of Shamz are a mirror reflection of one another and it's amazing to realise you can't live your life at it's fullest potential if you can't combine the two types of love. A great read by one of my favourite authors of all time.
A Chocolate With Salt Bits In It - a book that surprised you lately
The key word here is lately, since I enjoy picking the books I want to read at random, so the feeling of being surprised is a common one for me as a reader. I've chosen is "Why We Broke Up" by Daniel Handler (with the illustrations by Maira Kalman). It is a story of a teenage girl who falls in love with a popular boy. The book is a set of letters she wrote to him after they break up, giving him the reasons why that had happened. Min Green, the heroine, leaves a box of things that she had stocked as souvenirs of the relationship with Ed, adding a note or a letter to every one of them. We follow their unlikely relatinship from the beggining. The bizzare attraction ends up in tears, bitter feelings and heartbreak. So, if it's a typical American high-school love story, WHY IN EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY do I love it so much? Because it is so realistic I was actually shocked to find out that it was written by a middle-aged man. The letters have a very colloquial style and there are some mistakes woven into the discourse that you would find in a letter written by a heartbroken, sensitive teenage girl who gets all emotional and angry and sentimental at times. With those letters, we see the purification process that occurs within her and how the emotions come in tides (it is not all angry rant). I actully felt purified of many emotions related with my first heartbreak and all the breakups that I've been to that I had buried and didn't even realise were still there. I am closer in age to being 30 than a teen and YET this book really hit a nerve. Isn't that something?
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