Aneya & Lauren: What We're Reading [part 3].

Aneya: Going back to that picture we took of all our books, you can clearly see not one, not two, but three Jodi Picoult titles in the mix. Anyone who knows Lauren I'm sure figured they weren't hers, as she's more of a "high brow" reader that that. Well, it's true, they're mine. And I'm not ashamed. A lot of people assume Picoult writes popular chick lit fluff, plane reads if you will, and it's simply not true. I used to read a ton of chick lit back in the day (I especially loved Irish authors like Maeve Binchy and Brits like Jane Green) so I know what that genre is all about. And Picoult is not that.

Yes, she writes about love and relationships, about families and dramas and betrayals. But she also tackles highly controversial subjects such as euthanasia, sexual abuse, pedophiles, stem cell research, school shootings and teen suicide, among others. Picoult is an amazing storyteller above all else, each book is suspenseful, a page turner, a mystery and she keeps the reader intrigued until the very end. She weaves in and out of different narratives, she always creates realistic, flawed characters you can relate to. Her writing is often beautiful, lyrical and set in her native New England.

Anyway, my favorite out of the three that I brought is, without a doubt, The Pact. It's one of her older ones, and it's a classic. A teenage love story, between two people brought up basically as brother and sister. Their parents lived across the street from one another and Emily and Chris were inseparable from a young age. They become a couple in high school and then one day, the unthinkable happens. Emily is found dead, shot to death by her boyfriend, Chris, in what appears to be an apparent suicide pact that didn't go through. The book is suspenseful, a page turner, heartbreaking and at the same time, maddening. It's written with compassion and grace and is one of her finest to date.

Lauren: So I've started reading What is the What and am really enjoying it ... if you can really enjoy a book about genocide and ethnic cleansing. It super captures the voice of Valentino, the Sudanese refugee living in the U.S. and gives a lot of history and background into the conflict in Sudan, tracing tensions between the Arabs and Dinka back to independence from British imperialism in 1953 while still having a very narrative tone.

It's one of the few books that I actually stay up until 2 a.m. just to squeeze in a few more pages. Usually if I try to read anything after 10 p.m. I'm out like a light.

Something else I've read recently from the Chilean newspaper La Tercera is that carpooling is getting big in popularity in Chile. The article goes on to explain to people what carpooling is ("when you share your car to go to work," the deck says) and says that it became popular with college students. Now that they've graduated, they've taken sharing their cars to their professional life. I was just flabbergasted that people here didn't know what that was, AND that it's just becoming popular now.

I also saw in El Mercurio that bullying in Chilean schools has recently shot up, with a third of children in primary school saying they've been victims of bullying -- which El Mercurio explains is triple the number then in Switzerland and double the number for bullying in Canada. The piece they did was really great, super thorough.

-- Aneya & Lauren