On Becoming a Book, and two spolier free reviews.

I am just going to say it, I get excited about books. Like I mean really excited. I order them months in advance, and then spend all my time agonizing over how long I have to wait to read them. From the day they ship until the day I get them, I check the tracking info every five seconds, and the mail box every ten. Or, I head straight to the book store. Once I see the book, I usually shove the copy in front out of my way and grab one as close to the back as I can get, because who wants the copy that so many other people have already had their filthy little hands all over.

Once said book is my possession, I hunker down and read. I snarl at any one who dares to get in my way, or perhaps don't even notice that they exist. If for any reason I have to stop reading and attend to something else, I have been known to become quite useless. My mind is still there, in that book, trying to guess what happens next, or analyzing what has already happened. I forget that a word exists outside of the book.  When I read Lord of the Rings, I can smell the food at Bilbos birthday party. I can feel the moss beneath Frodos feet under my feet. When I read Harry Potter, I am right there on that broom with him, and my god its terrifying, brooms are not made for someone afraid of heights.Point being, just as one does not simply walk into Mordor, I do not simply read a book. I become the book. So here is a review about two books I recently became.

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

What can I really say about The Fault In Our Stars that hasn't already been said? Like everyone else who read the book, I laughed, and I cried. The sixteen year old girl in me fell a little in love with Augustus waters, and the adult I am wanted to smack a certain arrogant prick across the face.Of course I was touched by this book, as I knew I would be the second I pre-ordered it back in the summer. Yes, like thousands of others, I preordered this when I heard that John green was taking on the task of signing every copy from the first printing. Did this make more people pre-order it? Absolutely. Would it still have sold as many copies had he not made this promise? Given his massive online following, combined with his beautiful way with words, I have to think it would have. Don't get me wrong, I was eager to get a J scribble. However, I still would have preordered this book, on account of how much I love the mans writing. While I don't want to say to much about the book itself, I will say that I wish YA novels had been this fantastic when I was a young adult myself.

We first meet Hazel Grace as she is one her way "into the heart of Jesus", which is what she calls the location of the weekly cancer support group she attends, quite begrudgingly. The story opens on the day she finds out that her only support group friend, Issac, who has "some fantastically improbable eye cancer", is going to lose his eyes. Its also the day she meets Augustus Waters. And that's all I am going to say about this book. Just read it. Whether you are a teenager, or an adult, or something stuck in between, this book will touch you. And make you wish you could shake John Greens hand and say 'Thanks for that. It was good.'


Moving on to a completely different book, from a completely different genre, I give you:


Shadows in Flight, by Orson Scott Card.

While I know that some boycott Cards books based on his personal beliefs, which I by no means agree with, I feel that I can still love the books, and not have to love the man behind them. If anyone reading this has a hate on for him, that is fine, and I am on your side of the argument. However, if everyone stopped reading a series of  books just because someone else hated the author, no one would ever read anything. Just sayin.

 Before I go on, if you've not read the rest of the Ender series, STOP READING THIS NOW. Because while I wont give spoilers about this book, it will be hard to review without referencing the rest of the series.

Shadows is the sixth book in the Bean half of the Enders Game series, and it has been long awaited. Originally, it was the first half of the longer, obviously unreleased novel Shadows Alive. I am still not sure why he broke it up, and I wont hide my disappointment upon seeing how small this book was for the first time. But I digress... Shadows in Flight tells the story of Bean and the three of his children who have Antons Key turned in them. They leave Earth and take to space, hoping that in the extended time available to the scientists on Earth, they will discover a cure. They leave Petra and the other kids behind, knowing that they will never see them again. Bean grows to large to fit anywhere on the ship save the cargo hold, and and the children are slowly growing to hate him. And then one day, they come across another ship. A ship that is not moving, and does not respond to their calls.

As someone who grew up with the Ender books, and probably started reading them way to young, I can honestly say that this one gave me a very different feeling. Don't get me wrong, when Ender dies in Children of The Mind, I shed a tear or two. But nothing like reading this book. I am not going to say why, but I will say that this book has one of the saddest last sentences I have ever read.

Whenever I read an Ender book, or a new one is released, I cant help but think of my brother. It is because of him that I read Enders Game to begin with, and he is the only other person I know who loves them as much as I do, if not more. Despite living half a country apart, Ender and Bean have made us closer, and when Shadows came out, we had two very long phone calls about the book. I don't think I could write an Ender review, or recommend the books to someone, without mentioning him. So, Booter, virtual high five!! Ow! You always high five too hard, my hand stings!



I have been severely slacking in the writing reviews department of late, and I will make up for that very shortly. I have received and read a few more Early Reviewers courtesy of LibraryThing, and I also have been reading a lot lately, so I am going to try and get another review or two up this week, and be more consistent with them as well.
Until then, happy reading!

Naming pets after beloved literary characters.

I got a cat! Welcome to the family, Bilbo Baggins! You will be much loved!

The Maze Runner Trilogy

Hello all!
I recently finished reading The Maze Runner trilogy, by James Dashner. I read the first two probably a year ago, and I did put a very short review in an earlier post, but now Ill go a little more in depth with it.
The first book, The Maze Runner, starts off with the man character Thomas, waking up in a dark, metal box.  He has no idea where he is, whats going on, or even who he is, aside from his name. The box starts to move, and when the top opens up, he sees a group of boys looking down on him. He soon learns that he has been placed in a large, farm like place the other boys call the glade. Large stone walls surround the glade, with doors that open every morning, and close every night. And on the other side of the walls lies a maze. A maze that doesn't appear to have a solution. A maze that fills with monsters every night when the doors close.
A few weeks after Thomas arrives, the box he arrived in opens again, and for the first time, the glade has a female resident. Teresa is unconscious when she is lifted out, and in her hand, a note that says 'She is the last one. Ever.' When she comes to, all she says is 'Everything is going to change,' and then passes back out. And she is right. Everything does change.
Without giving to much away, the second book, The Scorch Trials, and the third book, The Death Cure, are equally as enticing and equally as good of a read as The Maze Runner. I really enjoyed all three books, although I feel like the second and third could very well have been a single book. I also have to think that, by the end of the Death Trials, there were quite a few unanswered questions still in my mind. And that is one thing that annoys me quite a bit. Why mention something if you are just going to leave it up in the air, especially when you have finsihed the book in a way that there cannot be a sequel.
But I don't want to criticize to much, because I really did enjoy the books, and I definitely would recommend them. I find that I have a bit of a thing for dystopian novels, and if anyone has any suggestions of other, let me know!

And so it ends...

Ah, NaNoWriMo. How I loathe you while you are here, and yet how I miss you when your gone. Technically, its been over for only two days, but I actually validated on the 25th, and I'm sad to say I barely glanced at my novel again after that. Five wasted days, in which I could have gotten at least 10k more, and instead I did nothing. I don't really feel to bad about it though, for a couple reasons. One being that I feel like my novel this year was much more original, and much more enjoyable. Not a single zombie makes an appearance, although a man eating monkey makes up for it.And the other being that I got a job and actually had other things to do with my time, unlike the rest of the month.
Right now, I am happy for the break from thinking of nothing but my novel. I am happy for the break for my wrists, which started to get quite achy around the tenth. But this year, I really want to get somewhere with this novel. The biggest obstacle in that is going to be the fact that I now need to rewrite the whole thing. About halfway through, I decided that having my main character be a middle aged man made no sense with the rest of the plot, and that really, he should be an orphaned teenager. I really didn't want to scrap the twenty or so thousand words I had at that point, so I just kept writing it the way it was, thinking that a complete rewrite wouldn't suck as much as being wordless in the middle of the month. And I was right, it doesn't. I have started the rewrite, and its going well. I'm just going to tell myself that it is still November, and keep trying to reach a respectable word count every day.

I am quite glad that NaNo came into my life. I love the challenge of it, and I think it had changed who I am. Now that I know I can do something as crazy as write a book in a month, I know I can do anything. (Hooray for cheesy lines!!) When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a writer. Now, I'm twenty six, and I still want to be a writer. And with every NaNo I do, the closer I get to that dream. Hats off to my fellow wrimos, the crazy bunch that they are!

I getting another early review book from LibraryThing, so expect a review of that once I receive the book, as well a combined review for The Maze Runner Trilogy, which I just finished reading.

Somehow in The Middle of NaNoWriMo I still found time to read

Its been awhile since I posted anything, and I thought I would get back to what this blog was supposed to be. Book reviews.

Tritcheon Hash By Sue Lang
I got this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers
Tritcheon Hash is set one thousand years from now on a planet called Coney Island. The woman of earth have had enough of the men, left them behind on the already dieing planet and set up house on Coney Island, where they are thriving nicely. They have contact with the men once a year to exchange male babies for frozen sperm. The men are not doing so well. They want to reunify with the woman. The people in charge of Coney Island want to be sure that the men are telling the truth about the sad state of their planet, so they send Tritcheon Hash on a recon mission to get soil, water and air samples. She gets caught almost immediately, and teams up with a man to try and get home.
Ill be honest here, I didn't much like this book. It felt like I was reading a rough draft at parts, not a polished, published novel. Being that it is quite short, I don't feel like I was given enough time to really get to know the characters, and thus felt they were slightly unbelievable.
I feel like the idea that us woman are better and smarter and you will all die without us was pushed to the forefront too much. I am not a feminist by any standards, I'm just a regular person who thinks having a penis or a vagina doesn't make someone better. I didn't like how feminist this book was, even going so far as to say the men were slobby meat eating cavemen, and the women were nice clean vegetarians. I am a woman, and I'll push anyone down who gets in between me and a steak.
All in all, I feel like this book needed some more time on the editing table. I might recommend it to a few people, but I think I would only give this book 2.5 stars out of five.





Looking For Alaska By John Green 
Looking For Alaska is a book about boarding school. It's a book about love, and death. Its a book about drinking shitty wine and sneaking cigarettes. Its a book about friendship, and never to be forgotten pranks. But mostly, its a book about Alaska. Miles is the main character, and it is told from his POV, but its still a book about Alaska. About how beautiful and funny and smart and stupid and crazy and missed she is. John Green writes beautifully. I love his style, and the voice he gives his characters.
I wish John Green had been writing books when I was a teenager. Sometimes I feel like they would have changed my life.

I don't really want to say anything else about this book, because I want everyone to go out and read it. It wont take long, and it is a YA novel, keep in mind. But it is worth the read, trust me.

NaNo donations, and The Magicians

The time to start planning my NaNo novel has arrived, and I have indeed begun the process. Now that I'm unemployed, I have a whole lot of time on my hands with which to write. Hopefully, by the time November comes, I will not be unemployed, but at least I can utilize the free time for something productive.
Last year, when I successfully completed NaNo, I made the decision to donate a couple bucks to them in an effort to help keep the program going. Donations are what OLL (the Office of Letters and Light, the charity that runs NaNo) run off of. Aside from paying their staff to keep the website running smoothly during the high traffic times in November, they also get the program into schools, encouraging kids and adults alike to write.
So basically, if you would like to donate something, and in turn earn the right to heckle the shit out of me this November about completing my novel, awesome! If you don't want to/cant donate, I guess you can still heckle me. Surprisingly, its very motivating.
Donate here.

 Onto other things now. Perhaps a book review?

As a general rule, I try to stay away from books that seem to get a lot of hype in the media. It is my experience that they are never as good as they are made out to be. Reading The Magicians By Lev Grossman only further proved my point. I don't mean to say it was terrible. The characters were splendid, although in some cases quite undeveloped. The plot had its good points, although it wasn't the most original Ive ever read. Okay, Ill come right out and say it, does he think he is the first to write a book about normal people magically entering another world? And lets be clear on this, Brakebills pretty much IS Hogwarts, and Fillroy pretty much IS Narnia.
That judgement aside, I could see people liking this book. And I can see why it seemed to get some media attention. I just generally didn't like it. I feel like the author sped through certain time periods, which yes, a lot of authors do to progress the plot. But he speed through parts I think would have been more entertaining then parts he spent a lot of time on. All in all, I will not be reading another book by Lev Grossman. In my opinion, it just came a little to close to using someone else's ideas and ruining them. Try coming up with your own fantasy worlds, Mr. Grossman.

The one where I cant wait till March for The Hunger Games movie

Ive just finished rereading the Hunger Games trilogy for about the fifth time, and then watched this a couple of times. I don't want to wait. March is so far away.