Top Ten Books of 2013 (so far)

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week's Top Ten Tuesday topic is Top Ten Books of 2013 (so far), and I decided to participate and share some my favourites since January! Some of these are 2013 releases, but for the most part they're just my top reads.

1. Life In Outer Space - Melissa Keil
Quirky Australian YA with a great, believable trio of teenage boys at its centre.

(The US edition of this book looks to be currently 'Read Now' on Netgalley, if you're interested!)

2. The Dinner - Herman Koch
Dutch novel that busies itself skewering the middle classes over appetisers.

3. Steal My Sunshine - Emily Gale
More Australian YA, this time focusing on an uncertain teenage girl and the secrets of her grandmother.

4. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
Twisty, genuinely gripping thriller that everyone and their aunt seems to have read by now!

5. Lola and the Boy Next Door - Stephanie Perkins
A worthy follow up to Anna, and another YA novel from Perkins with real, heart-warming characters and one of the coolest protagonists I've met in a while.

6. Speechless - Hannah Harrington
This one totally exceeded my expectations - bratty girl is transformed by her pledge to remain silent after a horrifying incident.

7. Geek Girl - Holly Smale
Fun British YA - smart and daft and highly recommended.

8. Nemesis - Philip Roth
Roth's final novel, and a poignant one at that, focusing on the polio epidemic in New Jersey in 1944.

9. Be Awesome - Hadley Freeman (review coming soon!)
Friends with kids, terrible dating advice, magazines that do nothing but tear women's bodies apart - and how to deal with it all. Extremely funny.

10. My Mad, Fat Teenage Diary - Rae Earl
It's 1989, and 17 year old Rae is writing her diary in the depths of Lincolnshire, agonising over boys, analysing shitty friendships and writing bad poetry. A wonderful, hilarious book.

Showcase Sunday #25

Showcase Sunday is hosted by Vicky at Books, Biscuits and Tea.

It's been a few weeks since I did a Showcase Sunday, so here are a couple of things I've picked up recently, and a few reviews!

BUT FIRST: Yesterday some of my friends and I went to the Harry Potter Experience at Warner Brothers Studios outside London! It was a lot of fun, and there was so much to look at - a lot more than I was expecting. It was quite overwhelming at times, trying to take it all in - there were lots of little details and things you could quite easily miss (for instance, I loved that they had the house points counter in the Great Hall, but totally missed the Black family tapestry later on!).

I will try and write a full post on it sometime soon (and I am thinking about a HP re-read if anyone is interested in joining me over the summer), but I thought I'd post a couple of pictures here:

4 Privet Drive (ext.)

Diagon Alley

Hogwarts scale model

Highlights: Walking down Diagon Alley (a lot smaller than I expected!), seeing the complete model of Hogwarts, the exterior of 4 Privet Drive, walking across the Hogwarts bridge, and the Gryffindor common room / boys' dormitory sets - including the jumpers knitted by Mrs Weasley for Harry and Ron in the first film. :)

Anyway, on to the books...

Library

A couple of weeks ago I picked up The Dinner by Herman Koch, a Dutch novel that I reserved a while ago. I read this within a couple of days (short chapters = excellent for train commute!), and thought it was excellent. Highly recommended - review here! (This also counts for my 2013 Translation Challenge, run by Ellie, which I am having a lot of fun with.)

Netgalley

I received an eARC of Confessions of An Almost Girlfriend by Louise Rozett - thanks to MiraInk/Harlequin UK. I have started reading this on my Kindle to and from work, and am really enjoying it so far.

Recent reviews

The Hidden Child - Camilla Läckberg (7.5/10) - Swedish crime novel with some realistic domestic subplots.

Steal My Sunshine - Emily Gale (7/10) - New contemporary Australian YA with some interesting historical elements as part of the backstory.

It's Different for Girls - Jo Brand (5.5/10) - Funny novel about growing up as a teenage girl in 70s Hastings.

A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett (6/10) - The return of Tiffany Aching, as she learns how to be a witch (and why it's not quite as glamorous as she thought).

(After reading Steal My Sunshine, I wanted to find out more about the laundries that girls like Essie were sent to, so last night I ended up watching The Magdalene Sisters, a 2002 film made with Irish/Scottish backing and documenting what life in these laundries was like. Recommended.)

Review: The Dinner, Herman Koch

The Dinner

Herman Koch

Atlantic Books, 2012 (2009)

Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett

Goodreads

A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen year old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children, and as civility and friendship disintegrates, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

The Dinner takes place over the numerous courses of one dinner, one evening in Amsterdam. Paul, his wife Claire, his politician brother Serge and Serge's wife Babette meet at an exclusive restaurant. Ostensibly, the meal is a pleasant evening out between two couples, yet under the surface a horrific event lingers, boiling over just as dessert arrives.

As you might expect from a novel based entirely around one dinner, there is a lot of detail and a lot of insight into the minutiae of the lives of the Lohman family, particularly Paul, from whose perspective the dinner is viewed. The opening few chapters were biting and funny and razor sharp in their dismantling of people's public facades and secret intentions, and it was easy to see things from Paul's point of view as he observes the power games that he thinks his brother is currently playing with him.

These small observations and reflections on relationships and families and past events continue throughout the dinner, as the backgrounds of both Lohman families start to become clearer, and the horrific event is revealed. The Dinner is very clever, and rather insidious in its manipulation of the reader, as the parameters of reasonable behaviour start to shift before you really realise it.

The Dinner is quite difficult to talk about without giving too much away, but I highly recommend giving it a go. It's revelations about middle class privileges and the horrors that parents become in pursuit of their children's futures made this a compelling read, and one of my favourites of the year.

Overall rating: 9/10

Book source: Borrowed from the library.

This book counts towards my 2013 Translation Challenge.