A major accomplishment!

Well, an accomplishment in my eyes anyway. A few months ago I set out to read all of the books that people had lent to me. I wanted to return the three that Mum had sent me home with first so that I could bring them back to her when we head to Smithers for the wedding, and then I wanted to read the other daunting books that friends had lent me before I started any of the many many books I've recently purchased for myself.
I started with Gap Creek by Robert Morgan. The cover said "The Story of a Marriage" and it seemed like a good place to start. It's one of Oprah's Book Club books which really doesn't mean much to me. It was reasonably short, but took a little while to get through. The story was good, but it was one of those books where the characters encounter hardship after hardship and things just keep getting worse with no reprieve. By the time I was halfway through I was almost anxious each time the author introduced a new character coming to the door of the little cabin. The end was not terribly uplifting either, but the main character, Julie, had so much strength it kept me going.
After that I read the Birth House by Ami McKay. While the characters faced huge hardships in this story too, it was filled with hope and the underlying feeling that good would triumph and the antagonists would get what was coming to them. I loved the characters and burned through the story in just over a week.
The last book that Mum lent me was Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts. It was made into a move which I haven't seen but would like to. The story is about a girl who's loser boyfriend abandons her at a WalMart in Oklahoma. I was really pleasantly surprised by this one. The characters were endearing and charming and seemed very real. I tried to rent the movie over the weekend but couldn't find it.
Once those three were done, I moved on to the books that friends had lent me, starting with the Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. Bev had sent me home with this book almost a year ago and it sat on my shelf, but I finally decided to take a crack at it. It's written in the form of a legitimate reference for the event of a zombie uprising. The author never breaks from the tone that it is all very real and plausible. I have known a lot of people who would have really enjoyed it (and some who may have taken it fairly literally), but I found it to be a little tedious. Maybe it's just that I'm not really interested in zombies...I'm not sure. Not my cup of tea, but then again, I'm always game to try a new kind of book.
Finally, the last book that was lent to me was World Without End by Ken Follett. This one is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth which I read last year. It was certainly the most daunting of the books I've read lately coming in at 1014 pages in hardcover (I'm not really a big fan of hardcover as they're so cumbersome to read). Much like Pillars, the characters were really well written and relateable, but also very distinctly good or bad. There wasn't a lot of grey area. Some started as neutral but became corrupted, whereas others just further developed their evil natures. I found Pillars a little harder to read...it seemd the characters faced one terrible hardship after another and just when things were starting to look up their hopes would be dashed. World Without End definitely had a lot of that, but they seemed to triumph more often, or maybe they were just stronger. It was a really good read though, and I absolutely would recommend it to someone with a lot of time on their hands.
I plan to take three or four books with me on our honeymoon. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get some more reading in. Now that I'm on to the books that I've bought for myself, I can enjoy them without feeling like I should be reading something else.