august book report.

The Hundred-Foot Journey. I decided to read this book as soon as I saw the previews for the movie with Helen Miren. I had really high hopes for it because the premise of it sounds really delightful and easy to love, but I actually found it kind of hard to get into and continue with. Hassan writes his own story starting with living in India as a boy and growing up around cooking throughout his whole life because of his family in the restaurant business. His family ends up in France living across the street from a French restaurant, and open up an Indian restaurant. The story follows Hassan through life and how he becomes a chef of French cuisine. The descriptions of food definitely made me hungry, but other than that I found the characters to be kind of uninteresting and simple, and there are large chunks of time just missing from the story and summed up in one or two lines, which is something that bothers me about any book in general. But for this book, the time that was skipped could have been written about to demonstrate the kinds of struggles that Hassan goes through to get to where he is in the end of the book. It's all just too easy for me, and there was nothing about the writing that really grabbed me and kept me going. This was definitely a struggle to finish for me, and can't find myself recommending it.
“There are many points in life when we cannot see what awaits us around the corner, and it is precisely at such times, when our path forward is unclear, that we must bravely keep our nerve, resolutely putting one foot before the other as we march blindly into the dark.” 


16/25 of my 2014 reading goal complete. Though this book was not on it, check out my paperback lust list for this year.