Just a quick recommendation. Yes, you guessed it, I will include an affiliate link, but sincerely these books were amazing and I would love you to enjoy them, too.

A couple of weeks ago I read Isabelle Allende’s The House Of The Spirits and  The Japanese Lover. Both books gripped me and I couldn’t put them down. I didn’t realise until I had already read Portrait in Sepia that this in fact was the last in a series of books by Isabelle Allende, books which quietly referred to each other once in a while, with extended families and acquaintances who sometimes reappeared in the sidelines in one book or another. The order I should have read them in apparently was as follows:

1 – The House Of The Spirits

2 – Daughter of Fortune (Oprah’s Book Club)

3 – Portrait in Sepia

I read these books in reverse order and that worked out just beautifully for me. I feel that reading them in this order gave me the discipline and patience to read The House of Spirits all the way through, it required some more of my attention and resolve to complete. Not because it was lacking in content but maybe because I sometimes missed fragments, it seemed like a mean editor stole small sections of the story from the writer. The book covers the lifetime of it’s key protagonists, not all reach the end.

When I finished The House Of The Spirits I needed more and finally just gave into temptation and bought The Japanese Lover, which was just so, so, so much to brief. What will I do now? Has Isabelle Allende written more books since The Japanese Lover ? I really hope that she did. But I know that there are a few more in the back catalogue for me to enjoy, hide in bed for as many days as each one requires to complete reading. Oh and then every time the eagerness to reach the next page, only matched by the anxiety that one of these pages will be the last.. It’s somehow like life. Always so impatient to reach the next moment, sometimes missing this one or the one before due to rushing to much.. And then one day there won’t be more moments and won’t we then wish we had lingered a little more?

Lingering is something that is really hard for me at the moment. I have little alone time, little absolute privacy, I share my life with my (utterly and completely) wonderful partner and while I wish for a little more solitude I again am missing a moment that should be pleasure, should be savoured, who knows what tomorrow will bring? It is so very hard to yield to the moment and be just here, not anywhere else.

What will I read next?

P.s. If you purchase any of these books after clicking to Amazon then I will receive between 1-4% as a referral fee, it will not cost you any more than the standard price.

USA links as promised:

1 – The House of the Spirits

2 – Daughter of Fortune

3 – There seems to be no US / Amazon link for A Portrait in Sepia, which is a tragedy! You MUST try and read this wonderful book!

4 – the latest book I read: The Japanese Lover

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