The 2018 Reading Challenge - #8 - A Book with a Time of the Day in the Title

Hey guys ^^

How are you?

I´ll probably say this all the time but how is it possible that February is already over and we are starting a new month so soon already and how is it possible that today is already the eighth book review of this reading challenge?

Todays´ book is for the category - A Book with a Time of the Day in the Title.

I have to admit that I thought it would be hard to din a book for this and had to be proven wrong because I have already a few at home ;) ya well there is a point when you just loose the overview about the books you have ^^ hahaha

The Night Circus

by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus is a 2011 fantasy novel by Erin Morgenstern. It was originally written for the annual writing competition NaNoWriMo over the span of three NaNoWriMos. The novel is written in third-person present tense, and arranged to have a nonlinear narrative written from multiple viewpoints.

Again a little summary from goodreads:

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"The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. 

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway - a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love - a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. 

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus per­formers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead. 

Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart."

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I´ll give it a 8 out of 10
I enjoyed reading it a lot...which might be because this is on my tbr list for so long now and I generally like fantasy novels ;)

The Night Circus is a sprawling historical novel about magic and the circus.
There is so much imagination and such a strong fantastic imagery, fantastic ;) you could say contrivance is this books raison d'être. The story is so intensely visual, so much so that what remains in its wake are almost exclusively images – more so than plot, or character, its a story to dream of, weeks after you finished reading it. Many precise, evocative and visually lush scenes within the tents of her fictional circus, surrounding the scenes and giving everything that happens a wonderful background. Reading the novel is often more like watching a film in the making, an imaginative collaboration between writer and reader and even those of you who might say that you are not the most imaginative type...this book pretty much wont give you a chance to say I could not imagine anything ;) A very entertaining and enchanting read which wont leave you untouched even tho you migt not like the slightly sentimental ending ;) noooo spoilers don´t you worry ^^
So be welcome to the Le Cirque des Rêves and I hope you´ll like it I did and I recommend it even to those who are not necessarily the biggest fantasy novel lovers ;)
Let me know what you think about it :)

For a little more inspiration and some alternatives ^^

(all summaries are from goodreads and easily found when searching for the title):

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.

Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work. First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom. The action covers a fateful, heart-rending day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones - the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte Cristo Cottage. One theme of the play is addiction and the resulting dysfunction of the family. All three males are alcoholics and Mary is addicted to morphine. They all constantly conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and half-sincere attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation.

Some more inspiration?

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie

Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

and even more on goodreads on this list or this one or this one

Which book did you choose for this category?

Did you read the Night Circus and did you like it?

and there is a movie isn´t it did you watch it and like it?

With lots of love

♥♥♥

Verena