Brand Spankin' New Reviews

Shopaholic Ties the Knot by Sophie Kinsella:
Every now and then, you need a good laugh and just an easy, fun read! I was stressed out and this book was the perfect way to relax. As in the other "Shopaholic," Becky Bloomwood is on a roll. She is living in New York with Luke (Brandon), enjoying her job. Luke and her go back to England to attend her best-friend's wedding...and surprise, surprise....Luke proposes. Blecky's parents are ecstatic and her mom starts planning the wedding immediately.
As Becky and Luke return to New York, Luke's mom starts planning (more like hiring a wedding planner) a wedding in a swanky hotel in NY. Becky is blown away by the cinderella-esque wedding being planned in the U.S. and decides to put off telling her mom about the second wedding and doesn't confront Luke's mom about the one being planned in England. I don't want to give too much away, but Becky is stuck between a rock and a hard place....she finds her way out, though, and comes out in style!
Read this book for a good belly laugh!!!!

The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges:
Amazingly beautiful short stories. If anything you should get this book simply to read one of the most awesome accounts ever, which is "The Other", which is about an encounter between the old and the young Borges. It's so awesomely surreal that you should run out the door and find this story!

In the Beginning by Chaim Potok:
David Lurie grows up during the depression in the Bronx. He is a frail child, who's often sick and who gets bullied by some kids in the neighborhood. Throughout the whole time, I just wanted to pick him up and make him feel better. Chaim Potok has an incredible way of making his characters human, as if they are reaching out to you through the pages. As in all of Potok's book, we find that the main character, David, is in a state of conflict. In his world, the study of Talmud is the right thing to do, while he wants to study bible, which departs boldly from the tradition of his teachers in the Yeshiva.
The story is about choosing ones one path.

Old Men at Midnight by Chaim Potok:
This novel is made up of three stories, linked by one person, Ilana Davita Chandal (Dinn). Davita from Davita's harp is once again in our midst. We can see her growing older through the stories that are told to her.
Here is the publisher's review, which does a much better job than me:
The ninth novel from Potok (The Chosen; My Name Is Asher Lev; etc.) is actually a series of three linked novellas, all of which vividly examine the horrors of war. The link is a woman, Ilana Davita Dinn, to whom three different men tell their stories. In "The Ark Builder," Davita, just out of high school in Brooklyn, gives English lessons to 16-year-old Noah Stremin in 1947. The only Jew from his Polish town to survive the Holocaust, he slowly opens up to Davita, telling her of his friendship with Reb Binyomin, the caretaker of his village's synagogue. As a graduate student in "The War Doctor," Davita encourages visiting lecturer Leon Shertov to write about his experiences under Stalin. A young soldier in World War I, Leon was saved by a Jewish doctor, whom he secretly taught to read Hebrew. Later, Leon became a KGB interrogator, and after World War II, he encounters the doctor again this time as a prisoner, a victim of Stalin's paranoid campaign against physicians. Finally Davita, now a successful author herself, befriends renowned history professor Benjamin Walter as he struggles to write his memoirs. She helps him to remember such pivotal events as his adolescent tutelage under Mr. Zapiski, who served in World War I with his father, as well as his own experiences in World War II. The stories Potok's men tell as they "roar with rage against the void" are as moving as they are riveting. Unfortunately, Davita's role as confessor reduces her to little more than a cipher, and it seems a mistake to have her narrate the first story (Potok at no point sounds like a 17-year-old girl). But "The War Doctor," the grimmest and most nuanced of the stories, alone is worth the price of admission.
The stories are really gripping. Another must-read by Potok!