Call the Midwife - Jennifer Worth

Title: Call the Midwife
Author: Jennifer Worth
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 340 pages
Date read: November, 2017

At the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in post war London's East End slums. The colorful characters she meets while delivering babies all over London-from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives to the woman with twenty-four children who can't speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city's seedier side-illuminate a fascinating time in history.


Not a bad book, but for some reason it took me more than 6 months to get through it! Not because it was boring, but because it was just much too easy to put down, so unless I prioritized it as my "active" book months could (and did) go by between each time I picked it up.

The story is very anecdotal in nature which was part of its appeal. I loved reading about the different characters Jennifer met along the way, and the start especially made me want to reread the Sue Barton series by Helen Dore Boylston. But of course the anecdotal structure of the book also meant that it was easier to put down, and that not all anecdotes were of equal interest.

All in all I liked it, and am glad to have read it, but I have absolutely no desire to neither pick up later books in the series nor check out the TV series.

Artemis - Andy Weir

Title: Artemis
Author: Andy Weir
Genre: sci-fi
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 384
Date read: November, 2017

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she's stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself - and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.


Very, very different from "The Martian" and I might actually have rated it higher if I hadn't kept comparing the two books at every turn. "The Martian" blew me away, "Artemis" was just a rather good book.

The premise of the book had me hooked from the very first page. I loved the thought of setting a book on the moon and not having space travel be the main premise, but rather just taken for granted. People lived on the moon and that was that. Unfortunately the suspense part of the story left me rather cold, and that's what brought it down to three stars. I would have preferred to read more about everyday life on the moon and less about Jazz' shenanigans.

In the end I liked the book, but it didn't become the instant favourite that "The Martian" did.