Let me come clean from the outset and state that I am absolutely NOT a fan of stories of romance.  In fact, I am quite allergic to hokey sentiment and most writing of this genre has me laughing so early on, there is no chance of tears by bedtime!

BUT  - I loved this book and was really pleasantly surprised by it.  Everyone should experience the kind of love it portrays, at least once in their lives. 

The book (which featured on the New York Times bestseller list for years on end in the 90s), centres on an intense four day love-affair between housewife, Francesca Johnson, and photographer, Robert Kincaid, against a background of 1960s rural Madison County.

Francesca’s husband and children go away for a few days.  The house is empty and she’s alone and isolated.  By chance she meets well-known National Geographic photographer, Robert Kincaid, who is in town for an assignment and an intense love-affair ensues.

It was not their destiny to be together (she stayed with her husband and children); however, neither of them ever got over each other after that short romance, and Francesca and Robert both died still deeply in love with each other. 

After Francesca’s death, all is revealed when her children find Robert’s letters and mementoes from over the years and receive their mother’s message, from beyond the grave, to follow their hearts.

‘When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals’ is about Sadie, a circus elephant who couldn't get the hang of a trick she was learning.  Her trainers punished her with beatings.  ‘Sadie, who was lying down, began to utter racking sobs, and tears poured from her eyes. The dumbfounded trainers knelt by Sadie, caressing her.’  She was never punished again, and ‘she learned the act and became a “good' circus elephant.’

This is a very touching book, which explores the emotional lives of animals: buffaloes who ice-skate, a chimpanzee who mourned the loss of his mother until he died from heart-break, a gorilla who uses sign-language and plays with dolls and crows who use the gold onion domes of the Kremlin – as slides!
I read it when I was much much younger and the book made me want to adopt these sensitive and intelligent creatures, as well as prompting a burning desire to study wildlife.

Although the book had a profound and lasting effect on the way I see animals, I soon realised that the part of me that wanted to get down and dirty with animals was in fairly major conflict with the part of me that hates both getting down and getting dirty. An adult career devoted to the well-being of animals was not to be!

This book is the very definition of dysfunction and I absolutely loved it. 

'Running with Scissors' is a bizarre and hilarious autobiography of the author’s early childhood and teens.  His parents hate each other: a mentally ill, chainsmoking, later-to-be-lesbian hippie, wannabe-poet mum, and a math professor father whom the author describes as having ‘the loving, affectionate and outgoing personality of petrified wood’.

At the age of 12, after his parents have divorced, Augusten’s mother has a nervous breakdown.  He is then taken to live with her psychiatrist, Dr Finch, and his very own highly dysfunctional family, who later adopt him.  Scatological fortune-telling, Dr Finch’s ‘masturbatorium’, eating dog biscuits while watching movies and taking the kitchen ceiling down on a whim prove to be nothing out of the ordinary.

As an underage teenage gay boy, he is seduced by an older man, Bookman, another dysfunctional adoptee of Dr. Finch.  Having dropped out of school, he dreams of becoming a hairdresser because, in his own words, ‘I don't care about the actual hair part. I'm only really interested in the product lines that can carry my name.'  Eventually, his true calling, writing, becomes clear and it is at that which he succeeds, going on to become a successful copywriter in the advertising industry - and the author of this and other autobiographical and fictional tomes.

If, like me, you come from your very own moderately dysfunctional and whacky family, Augusten and his folks will seem pretty par for the course.  It's one of those books where there is no middle ground.  You'll either love it - or hate it!

‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ is an intimate description of an Afghan household and paints a very disturbing picture of real people living in an intensely conservative society.

The author, a Norwegian journalist, moves in with an Afghan bookstore owner named Shah Mohammed Rais and his family. She asks to write about his home life in order to document a different side of Afghanistan than the one commonly seen on televised news reports and he agrees to it.

Seierstad goes on to live with the family for four months and writes a detailed account of the experience, in which she portrays the bookseller as a liberal intellectual in public, but a tyrant to his family.  The author particularly focuses on how women and other vulnerable citizens are treated in Afghan society. For example, Rais exiles his loyal wife of 16 years to Pakistan in order to make room for a 16-year-old second wife. When a destitute carpenter steals postcards from his shop, he makes sure the man is jailed for three years while his wife and seven children starve. 

Childhood is portrayed as being over very quickly.  The bookseller forces his 12-year-old son to spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in a hotel lobby, working by himself selling candy in a dank little booth the child refers to as ''the dreary room.'' The cruelties go on.

Paulo Coelho's book is something of a cult and deservedly so.  It's a small book with a lot of big, thought-provoking wisdoms on offer.

On its simplest level, The Alchemist is a story of a Spanish shepherd boy, Santiago, who dreams of traveling the world in search of a treasure.  But the book is laden with symbolism and deeper meaning.  During his subsequent travels, Santiago encounters an alchemist, a king, an Englishman and a Gypsy woman who share their wisdom with the boy and help him on his journey and his self-discovery.

In the simple message within the book is a broader message: you already have what you’re searching for! It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary and, wherever your heart and your dreams are, that is where you will find your treasure.