More a reflection on an author than a book review
It’s a funny thing when an icon of children’s literature dies. The small child in you considered the books so legendary that they must have been written long before your life and the author must have died with the icons of a former time. The older part of you is sad, as with any death of someone not really known, and the childish part of you is envious of those who still have a childhood where picture books are new. Maurice Sendak did not patronize children with his stories, nor did he create a perfect neon hued world. He softly drew and told the world both good and bad in a way the suited children without pandering to what he thought they’d be.
Naked Pictures of Famous People (Jon Stewart)
It should hardly surprise you that this book is funny. John Stewart masquerades through time as himself, and cleverly makes things up about well known people. It is irreverant and funny. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false because dry whit and dirty humor never go amiss. It’s more of a collection of short stories than one coherent story, which I would say is a positive feature because I would have grown tired of fake stories about only one famous person, while the variety gave Naked Pictures of Famous People the comedic timing it needed.
The Lover’s Dictionary (David Levithan)
The Lover’s Dictionary is a quick read, because it’s not written like a normal story. Instead, it’s a dictionary of words written as a narrative chronicle of a relationship between two people who use words to describe — almost in journal fashion — how they reacted to their love, their relationship and the composition of it.
It’s not exactly a book I’d normally pick up, but I’d been yearning for a book that I could start and not put down and this one seemed to be a book that might accomplish that task and sure enough; it’s been precisely that kind of novel.
I found myself getting more and more engrossed as time went on, though ot wasn’t an especially linear story. It seems apparent that things happened and that we’re getting it from both of their vantage points, but I didn’t feel like it was always coherent. It was quotable, ease to identify with and uniquely setup. If you’re looking for a breezy read that’ll be enjoyable, The Lover’s Dictiomary would be a worthwhile addition,The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
Similar To: The Giver
There is a lot of hype given to this book currently, and as long as it doesn’t become like Twilight I agree with it. The plot is astounding; it is set in post-USA North America in a country called Panem. There are 12 districts and due to a rebellion by the 13th district (who was later obliterated) each district is required to give 2 tributes to the Hunger Games who kill all the other tributes to become the winner. The most significant prize is food. Food is expensive in Panem, but you can insure a year supply of grain for yourself by entering your name an extra time in to the Hunger Games Drawing. The story follows Katniss (Catnip) a brave girl who volunteers as the girl tribute to save her sister who’s only 12. She and Peeta eat and train in the Capitol before the Games. They end up being a team, and outsmarting the system.
You read this book, not because you want to know what happens next, but because you want to know what is happening that instant. It may not be beautifully written, it doesn’t become a work of art, but it doesn’t need to; there is nothing mundane and every detail connects into the story later. It’s not a beautiful story and the writing style matches the tone.
A good book— well worth the time it will take to read it (but that’s not a very long time)
We’re reblogging ourselves. The Hunger Games was the first book we reviewed back in December of 2010. How’s that for being ahead of the curve?
Source: heyreadthisbook
To Serve God and Wal-mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Bethany Moreton)
The story of Wal-mart is one that has been chronicled and reviewed in a glut of documentaries, books and throughout the culture in recent years. This book deconstructed the myth of Sam Walton creating an empire from his bootstraps and paints a more complex picture of timing, opportunity and government help that evolved from mom-and-pop origins to create the world’s largest retailer.
Where this book is extremely valuable, is the unpacking of the history of the U.S. during the post-war years. There’s an ethos that we’ve consumed as a culture that says the olden days prosperity came from a lot of self-help, when the reality was a lot of government aid birthed the prosperity of the Greatest Generation.
The problem of the book is that it was an upchuck of stories from the older, bygone days of Walmart rather than the modern state of the firm and how it operates in the global economy. That might not have been the desired focus and that’s why we get what we do now, but…that made it harder to read and eventually made me tune it out.
Still, it’s a worthwhile bookshelf book from the perspective of the historian seeking understanding to the ways that the myths of white populist Southerns have been promulgated beyond generations, as a lot of smaller towns have been propped up for decades by various schemes of investment made years ago and have left places that might have otherwise been impoverished as economic engines in their own right.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
Source: The Atlantic
The Fault In Our Stars (John Green)
It’s hardly surprising that a book about cancer is gritty. Yet capturing the gritty realities of being a teenager is what John Green does best. The Fault In Our Stars follows Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters through their lives which are drastically different from the norm. Though they maintain their wonderfully dry sense of humor, their is an underlying tension that stems from the mortality that they are so desperately aware of which most teenagers flagrantly deny. They have their own fairy tale as only they could— with a heavy dose of twisted irony and a strong shot of reality.
Green wastes no words and makes nothing beautiful that is ugly and nothing ugly that is beautiful. He wittily encapsulates the mechanisms that teenagers employ to survive. He lets the characters drown in disillusionment, but carefully keeps them from becoming bitter, merely laced with sarcasm. In the harsh reality he so deftly painted, Green never forgets the importance of love and friendship.
The Fault In Our Stars will kick you in the gut and leave you asking for more. It will beat you up and then drape you in warming embrace. It won’t take you long to read it, but in that time you will have gone through life and a good story.
The Rook (Daniel O’Malley)
Ok, so I can’t recall the last book review I wrote here but I’m trying to stem the tide. In any case, this book is about a character named Myfanwy who awakens to find out she’s inhabiting the body of someone else who has left her notes and she has to retrace all of these steps to her past memories to figure out how she got where she is.
A lot of the reviews basically call it “The Bourne Identity” female version and I can see that element. The real problem is, it’s the sort of book I want to get engrossed into, but there’s something off about the writing. This is O’Malley’s first book and it sort of shows. There’s a lot of energy here, some good ideas and yet, I couldn’t ever fully get invested enough to overlook all of the problems with the book.
I’d love to recommend this, but not as a best seller. Wait for it to come out on paperback or get it from the library, because it’s the kind of story that will mostly infuriate you if you appreciate consistency and not a bunch of ideas thrown onto a wall in the hopes they’ll piece together some kind of coherent narrative.
Which is unfortunate, because it’s a book I really wanted to like. Like I said, check it out once it’s on discount because there’s some fragments of a good story within its midst somewhere. It might get your creative juices flowing.
This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The “Great American Novelist” wrote a book that isn’t The Great Gatsby though the importance placed on love is just as high. Amory Blaine spends glorious years of sophistication with his mother in Europe before moving to a midwest privileged life, then into a prestigious boarding school, and then into Princeton. Amory skates through life until the end when he loses his inheritance, and lives off of a standard wage.
Fitzgerald has a talent with language, Amory is a fantastic charactonym, but his metaphors and sentence structure don’t save the pretension within this plot. Without his privilege, Amory would not be successful, yet he tries to reject classism once he and his mother have spent all their money—- which is nobody’s fault, but their own.
Fitzgerald may be a great author, but this autobiographical novel made him seem pretentious, yet deeply romantic. The imagery is not as beautiful as The Great Gatsby. It’s a book of high credentials, and essentially defines the flapper; however, I found it an aggravating read
edited with: http://seldazayre.tumblr.com/
Book review tennis between two friends. The same folks behind 