Nose in a Book

Well, I created a personal twitter account a long time ago, but I finally decided I should create a separate one for this blog and twittering about books.  Come check me out and follow me!

This week, weekly geeks asks:

“Have you ever changed your mind about a book or author the second time around? Have you ever given a book or author a second chance?
If you have, I’d love to hear your stories. Blog about your experience(s) in giving second chances.”

The first book that comes to mind is The Lord of the Rings.   I tried to read it when I was younger (I think I was 13 or 14) and I just could not get into it.  I don’t think I even made it past the first 50 pages.  I considered going back to it and had several people over the years strongly recommend it but I just never had the interest in going back to the books.  Then, while I was in university, the first movie came out.  I was so disappointed by the non-ending, that I had to read the books to find out what happened next.  From the first page, I was mesmerized.  I couldn’t put it down.  I remember reading on the bus on the way to university, and fully knowing I was missing my bus stop but not being able to stop reading to get off the bus.  The series is now in my top ten favourites of all time!

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Read for: Orbis Terrarum Challenge – India

This book has been on my TBR list for a long time and I happened to see it on the shelf at the library so I decided to pick it up.  I’ve read mixed reviews so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  Now that I’ve read it, I’m still not sure how I feel about it and I don’t even know how to summarize it!

Ghosh begins by slowing introducing you to his cast of characters (and it is quite a cast of characters).  And I say slowly because he doesn’t try and include all the characters right from the beginning, which I appreciated because there were so many.  I have to be honest, even toward the end of the book I was still having trouble keeping everybody straight.  Each of these people is destined to become a passenger on the Ibis, a former slave trading vessel, en route to Mauritius from Calcutta, India.

Ghosh takes two-thirds of this first book in a trilogy to get all of his characters onto the ship and the voyage to begin.  I’m still not sure how I feel about this.  On one hand, it seems like a lot of extra leading up to the main event of the book, but on the other hand, it really gives the reader the opportunity to really get to know and understand each of the characters and their motivations.

The book ends basically at the climax.  There is a huge build-up to this final event, but then the novel just ends.  It’s kind of like the season finale of your favourite TV show.  I was just as disappointed as when I read the first book of The Lord of the Rings for the first time.  I think I’ll most likely read the rest of the trilogy when they are available because I really do want to know what happens next.

Besides the confusion of the multiple characters, there are several languages used in the book without translations provided.  The crew on the ship speak a couple of strange dialects that I could just not follow.  In the back of the book there was a glossary, but it seemed to be kind of sporadic in the definitions it contained and I gave up on that early in the book. I could quite often figure out the basics of the meaning, but it was just extremely distracting and tedious to try to pick out some meaning from these conversations.

I’m still on the fence about this book.  I felt like it took a really long time to get interesting and start making sense because there were so many characters that came from so many different places and backgrounds and I couldn’t see how they were ever going to all come together.  (It actually was quite surprising in some cases, how they came to be aboard the Ibis in the end.)  I would have given up on this book altogether around the 250 page mark if I hadn’t already invested so much time in it!  Overall, I think I’m going to give it a 6.5/10, but after reading the rest of the trilogy, I may feel differently about this one.

Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary

I just finished reading this with my 6 year old and we loved it!  I read all of the Ramona books when I was younger, but I had forgotten how delightful and funny they are.

In this first book about Ramona she is four and she is really good at annoying her older sister.  From taking one bite out of a whole box of apples to baking her plastic doll into Beezus’ birthday cake, she gets into a lot of trouble!  And Beezus, who has a hard time loving her when she’s causing so much trouble, learns an important lesson about sisters.  We can’t wait to start the next one tomorrow.   I would give this book a 10/10.

Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins

I decided to read this book after reading The Hunger Games also by Suzanne Collins.  This book was entirely different (which I was expecting) but I still really liked it.   I’ve got the next four books on hold at the library and I’m hoping they come soon!

Gregor, young boy (I think he’s 10) is helping his mother out by doing the laundry and watching his younger sister (2) when she disappears behind the dryer.  When Gregor goes to investigate he is sucked into the vent and into the Underland.  There he meets the Underlanders who are human and a bunch of giant bugs.  He ends up going on a quest with several underlanders.  I don’t want to say much more because it would give away too much.  This book moved fast and lacked depth but not in a bad way – the book is intended for younger readers and I will definitely read this to my son when he’s a little older.  Some of it might be a little scary to him right now, but I know he’ll love it in a few years.  I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series and I would  give this one an 8/10.

Has anyone else read this book?  Please leave your reviews/links in the comments.

So, I’m a little late this week but I really liked the question!  This week Booking Through Thursday asks:

What’s the most serious book you’ve read recently?

The first one I thought of was The Book of Negroes which deals with the slave trade, but I also read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas just before that one, which as many of you may know, deals with some pretty serious stuff too.

Catch Me if you Can by Frank W. Abagnale

This book is written by con man Frank Abagnale and is the story of the frauds he perpetrated.  He started out impersonating a pilot (and this seems to have been his favourite scam) and used the guise to garner trust for passing bad cheques.  He also pretended to be a doctor and worked in a hospital and was paid for a whole year.  He then passed the bar and worked as a lawyer for nine months, without ever even finishing high school.

I was amazed at how easy it was for Frank (who used several different aliases) to go about stealing money from several banks, hotels and businesses just by passing bad cheques.  I know this wouldn’t be nearly as easy to do today (mostly because most places don’t even take cheques anymore, let alone cash them).  I was also amazed at how long he was able to con these people out of their money, using the same alias.

The book was a really fascinating read and what made it all the more interesting was how intelligent and creative Frank was.  I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys a good story.  It’s not just for lovers of non-fiction, that’s for sure.  I would give it an 8/10.

Other reviews:

• books i done read

If I missed your review, leave a link in the comments.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

I was just walking through the bookstore looking for something to read when I saw this book.  I knew I had read a ton of reviews for it, so I decided to pick it up.  When I got home, I found it was on my TBR list twice!  Good thing I bought it.

David, who is twelve, loses his mother to an unnamed disease and shortly afterward his father remarries and has a new baby.  This leads to David and his father moving to a new house in the country.  David loves to read and Rose (his new step-mother) gives him a room covered in bookshelves that are full of books that once belonged to her uncle.  David, who is having a hard time adjusting to all the new changes in his life, spends a lot of time in his room, reading his books.  Eventually, David finds himself in a new world, where his favourite stories have become a reality, but with odd twists to the traditional tales.

David must find a way back into his own world, but in order to do this he must face his fears and do some growing up.  As David travels through this other world, searching for the way home, he finds he has a role to play in many of these twisted fairy tales.

I really enjoyed this book, but I found I was left wanting more.  I wished the Connolly had taken the story a little farther.  I’m not really sure in what way so I’m afraid I can’t explain it better than that (sorry!).  I really liked David as a character though.  He was an extremely believable 12 year old.  He was smart, but not too smart.  He was brave, but not too brave.  And he was noble, but not too noble.  Sometimes, I read books and I find the perfectness of the characters just a little too unbelievable.

I also enjoyed some of the other characters in the novel.  There were scary parts and funny parts and touching parts.  And I really liked Connolly’s writing style.  It really fit with the fairy tale theme of the book.  It was an easy, lilting prose, just as we usually read in fairy tales.

I would give this book an 8/10.

Other reviews:

• Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books
• Random Wonder
• Stephanie’s Written Word
• Stuff as Dreams as Made on
• Things Mean A Lot

Did I miss yours?  Leave a link in the comments.

I’ve done this before, but this list is slightly different than the last one and it’s always fun to see where I come in.  So, the BBC says that most people will only have read 6 out of the 99 books listed:

The ones I’ve read are bold (and marked with an X), tbr are blue.  I’ve read 50 of the 99.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (X)

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (X)

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (X)

4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (X)

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (X)

6. The Bible (most of it)

7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (X)

8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (X)

9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (X)

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (X)

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (X)

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ()

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (X)

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare ()

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (X)

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (X)

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk ()

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger ()

19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (X)

20. Middlemarch – George Eliot ()

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (X)>

22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (tbr)

23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens ()

24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy ()

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (X)

26. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (tbr)

27. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (X)

28. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (X)

29. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (X)

30. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (X)

31. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (X)

32. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (X)

33. Emma – Jane Austen (X)

34. Persuasion – Jane Austen (X)

35. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (X)

36. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein (X)

37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres ()

38. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (X)

39. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (X)

40. Animal Farm – George Orwell (X)

41. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (X)

42. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (started this one several times)

43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving ()

44. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (X)

45. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (X)

46. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy ()

47. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood ()

48. Lord of the Flies – William Golding (X)

49. Atonement – Ian McEwan (X)

50. Life of Pi – Yann Martel (X)

51. Dune – Frank Herbert ()

52. Cold Comfort Farm ()

53. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (X)

54. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ()

55. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon ()

56. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens ()

57. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley ()

58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon (X)

59. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)

60. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck ()

61. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov ()

62. The Secret History – Donna Tartt ()

63. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (X)

64. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas ()

65. On The Road – Jack Kerouac ()

66. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy ()

67. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (X)

68. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ()

69. Moby Dick – Herman Melville ()

70. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (X)

71. Dracula – Bram Stoker ()

72. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett ()

73. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (X)

74. Ulysses – James Joyce ()

75. The Inferno – Dante ()

76. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome ()

77. Germinal – Emile Zola ()

78. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray ()

79. Possession – AS Byatt ()

80. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (X)

81. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell ()

82. The Color Purple – Alice Walker ()

83. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro ()

84. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert ()

85. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (X)

86. Charlotte’s Web – EB White (X)

87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (X)

88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (tbr)

89. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton ()

90. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad ()

91. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)

92. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks ()

93. Watership Down – Richard Adams ()

94. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole ()

95. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute ()

96. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas ()

97. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (X)

98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (X)

99 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (X)

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Read for: What’s in a Name Challenge – book with a medical condition in the title (this might be stretching it a little, but someone else has already used this for this category so SUE ME!)

Wow.  I don’t even know where to start with this one…  This book is horrifyingly good, let me see if I can explain.

Sometime in the future, North American has now become Panem, a country divided into the Capitol – the haves, and 12 Districts – the have-nots.  Every year the Capitol puts on the Hunger Games, where 2 children, aged 12-18, from each District are chosen to fight to the death in the arena.  The last man (or woman) standing brings fame and fortune to their district for the coming year.

Katniss, from District 12 (one of the poorer districts) volunteers herself for the Hunger Games when her 12 year old sister’s name is drawn.  Katniss actually has a lot of practical skills that may be useful to her in the games.  Peeta, the boy that is chosen from District 12, a baker’s son, once helped Katniss when she was starving to death, so there is of course a little history between them.

I don’t really want to say much else about the plot because it would require giving away too much about the story.  The book is divided into three parts and the entire first part of the book is about the reaping (chosing the names of the children that will participate), and preparing the children for the games.  The second and third part are about the actual games and what happenes afterward.  The ending is satisfying, but also leaves a lot of loose ends that left me dying to read the next book (which comes out September 1, 2009 – can’t wait!).

I almost forgoet!  To add to the drama of the Games, the entire thing is televised,including each gory death, so everyone at home is watching, like some sick reality TV show.  Of course, Katniss and the other contestants have some acting to do to try and garner sympathy so their sponsors might send them food or medicine or weapons or whatever they might be in need of.

So, when I first started reading this I almost put it down again, because I normally don’t enjoy novels about a dystopian future.  Somehow they are just depressing.  But, then the story drew me in.  Katniss was a very compelling character, but the reaping was what really got me.  It was kind of like watching a train wreck, I just couldn’t pull myself away it was so awful!  And by then, I was totally involved in the story and was able to forget about the dystopian future thing and just enjoy the story.

There is a love story in the book that actually becomes a major part of the plot and Katniss spends almost the entire book being entirely oblivious to the fact.  Some have compared her to Bella Swan in her obliviousness but I actually found Katniss to be a much more believable and likeable character than Bella.

The Hunger Games was extremely entertaining and I really could not put it down.  I will be buying the next book the day it goes on sale, which is called Catching Fire and will be released on Sept. 1.

The Hunger Games gets a 10/10 from me!

Other Reviews:

• A Comfy Chair and a Good Book
• Bart’s Bookshelf
• Becky’s Book Reviews
• Book Nut
• books i done read
• Dreadlock Girl
• Farm Lane Book Blogs
• It’s All About Books
• Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’?
• Random Wonder
• Stephanie’s Written Word
• The Book Nest
• The Well Read Child

Did I miss yours?  Please link in the comments.