Three Books and No Real Winner

I have read three books this past month of May and none of them really grabbed me.  I gave up on one of them.  The other two were worth reading.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley is the book I quit.  I read 224 pages, over half the book and I just never got into it enough to care about the characters or the plot.  I love the cover of the book and had read some good reviews, so I bought it.  Bad decision.  Since giving up on it, I have read reviews that have agreed with me.  So I don't feel like I am losing my taste in books...it just wasn't my "cup of tea".  For those who care, it is the story of a young girl, Flavia, who aspires to be a scientist and, it seems to me, also a detective.  She discovers a dead bird on her doorstep with a stamp stuck through it's beak.  Then, the same day, she discovers a man dying in the family's garden. Flavia sets out to learn more about the man.  I believe that this is the beginning of a series of books about Flavia (although I'm not certain of that, and don't care enough to actually find out!).

I next read Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada.  It was an interesting book, and I did finish it, but I am still on the fence about it.  What interested me the most was reading on the back cover that the author wrote the book "in a feverish twenty-four days, soon after the end of World War II and his release from a Nazi insane asylum.  He did not live to see its publication."  The book is 509 pages (and not large print by any means). 

It may be a classical type book...I guess that I just need more time to think about it.  The story is based on a true story which occurred during Nazi occupied Germany.  It basically is the story of a couple who stood up for what is right and what they believed in, after they received the news that their only child/son had been killed in the war.

I think that I would recommend this book, just with the caveat that it is a very long book.

Lastly, I read Still Alice by Lisa Genova.  I had heard and read so much about this book that I had great expectations for it, and the book just didn't meet my expectations.  I had avoided reading it for quite some time, but one day it just appealed to me and I read it. 

The story is about 50 year old Alice, a psychology professor at Harvard, who begins to be aware of memory problems.  She is diagnosed with early onset of Alzheimer's.  The book tells of the struggles of Alice, her husband John and their three grown children as they deal with the diagnosis and the in-their-face reality of Alzheimer's affecting their wife/mother.

For some reason, I had thought that the story was a true story and that the husband narrated it.  I was totally wrong.  It is a novel and told by Alice herself.  I found the writing to be rather simplistic and never felt like I really knew the characters.  It was an easy read and there is a lot of information about Alzheimer's in the book.  Again, I guess that I would recommend it, also.