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Now Reading: Suzanne Collins – Catching Fire (The Hunger Games Pt 2)
After the speed in which I read the first book in this series, I can’t wait to get started on this. I might have to slow down a bit though or it’ll all be over too quickly! After the end of the last book, I really have no idea what will happen in this one. My friend Abi mentioned something about Gale, so maybe he will have more involvement in this book?With it being Mother’s Day tomorrow (eek – should probably go and buy a card or something!), I probably won’t have as much time to read this one as I did the first one. Hopefully the weather will be nice and I can take my mum out somewhere. 🙂
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Review: Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games
I’m kind of ashamed to say I devoured this book in less than a day. I now know why all the reviews I’ve read say that you just can’t put it down once you’ve started it. I’m going to try not to spoil the story too much in case you haven’t read it yet and you’re planning to do so – I’ve already persuaded my dad and brother to give it a try.The book is aimed at teenagers, so it’s pretty easy reading, and the actually fighting scenes in the book are not that graphic, although the premise of the book is quite still quite shocking. Basically, 24 teenagers are picked at random and sent into an ‘arena’ in a battle to be the last one left alive.
Some of the teenagers have been training for this for a long time, others are just too young, like little Rue who is only 12 years old. The main character Katniss is only 16 years old but you discover through the book that she’s quite worldly wise and has done a lot to protect her family, including the scary task of taking the place of her sister in the games.
As this book is the first part in a trilogy, I expected Katniss to live through to the end, but there are plenty of moments that leave you wondering what will happen, and the end was definitely unexpected. I’m a little unsure after finishing the book where the next two books are going to go, but we’ll soon find out.
A definite 5/5 rating, if only because I just couldn’t stop reading!
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Now Reading: Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games
I don’t really know what this book is about, but I’ve seen a LOT of blog posts about it when I’ve been browsing WordPress book-related blogs. There’s a film coming out soon, so I want to read the books before the film comes out so that I can decide whether I want to see the film or not (I always have to read the book before watching the film).My friend Abi also recommended this book and she’s usually got very good taste, so I’m sure I won’t be disappointed!
On a related note, take a look at this shirt she got me:
[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/louiser89/status/180394036388040705 align=’center’]If you knew me in high school, you’d know why this is so awesome!
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Review: Mitch Albom – The Five People You Meet in Heaven
I’ve just finished this book and it was fantastic! It was quite a sad book, but one that definitely made you think.The book is about 83 year old Eddie, who works on Ruby Pier, a seaside fairground. One of the rides malfunctions and comes crashing to the ground – he dies when he tries to push a young girl out of the way, and spends the whole book worrying that he hasn’t saved her.
When Eddie gets to Heaven, he realises that it’s not what he thought it would be. Instead, he meets five people who will help to explain his life and things that happened in it, as well as his death and the reason for it.
The first person he meets is someone that he doesn’t think he knows, but he recognises him to be someone from the ‘Freak show’ at the Pier when he was a child. Eddie is shocked when this man tells him that Eddie killed him. He explains that he didn’t kill him directly, but inadvertently when his ball rolls into the road, setting a chain of events going which ends up in the man dying. This man is the source of one of my favourite quotes from the book, :
Strangers, are just family you have yet to come to know
I loved this, and the meaning of the entire first part of the book, it makes you think quite closely about the effect you have on other people, and the consequences that your actions can have.
Throughout the book, Eddie also meets his Captain from when he was at war in the Philippines, a woman called Ruby (after whom the Pier was named), his wife Marguerite, and a young girl called Tala, who was killed in a fire started by Eddie when he was in the Philippines, whose eyes he thought he saw all those years ago and have haunted him since.
Out of all five people, I think the part of the book that was most touching was when he met his wife again – she died of cancer when she was 47, and Eddie lived the rest of his life alone in the house they shared together. My favourite quote from the book though comes from Ruby, when she is talking to him about his Dad:
Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
That’s so true, and something that we all get wrong at times – we could all learn from this!
I really loved this book, I thought it was quite an unusual idea to start with, but it was really well written and you really start to feel for Eddie as the book goes on, to the point where you just don’t want it to end.
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Now Reading: Mitch Albom – The Five People You Meet in Heaven
This is the second of the books that my cousin Hannah lent me. After the disappointment of my last book, I’m hoping that I’ll enjoy this one more, and can use it to get back on track on my reading challenge.It sounds like a very touching book; an 83 year old man dies, and when he gets to heaven he realises that it’s not like the Garden of Eden, but a place where your life is explained to you by five people who were in it.
I can’t wait to start reading this!
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Review: Jonathan Coe – The Accidental Woman
I realised after a few pages that I wasn’t going to enjoy this book, but I persevered anyway, because I don’t like to give up without giving a book a fair chance. I do wish I’d left it though, as I just didn’t like the book at all.My first problem was that it seemed like the writer was trying to be too clever. There were so many sentences that I found myself reading multiple times just to figure out what he was trying to say. Sometimes there were sentences with so many commas that it just didn’t flow properly and took away from the telling of the story.
I also felt that the narrator got in the way too. We never find out who it is, but he has this way of telling things like he is aware of the reader and like its a conversation. He frequently references other chapters in the book too, which I found very off-putting.
“Did I not say, at the beginning of the chapter, that it was a Tuesday, and that there was something particularly interesting about Maria’s thoughts, as she walked home from work?
When I read a book I like to become completely lost in the story, and sentences like this just made it very hard for me to do so.
As for the story, it just didn’t capture my imagination, and I frequently found myself a bit bored, realising I’d read a few pages without taking anything in and having to go back and read it again. Now this could just be me missing the whole point, but I just didn’t get along with this book at all.
I’ve got two other books by Jonathan Coe to read so I hope they are better, but I’ll be leaving them for a while before I read them.
If you’ve read this book, let me know what you think!
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Now Reading: Jonathan Coe – The Accidental Woman
I’m not really sure what this book is about, it was part of a set of 3 books for £4 that I bought from the Book People in a recent order. When I read the descriptions online, it looked like a good book, but I’ve just seen that the average rating on Goodreads is less than 3 out of 5. Hopefully I’ll enjoy it more than that! The little review on the front is from Nick Hornby (one of my favourite authors), and says ‘Probably the best English novelist of his generation’. That’s pretty different from the Goodreads reviews, so I guess I’ll make up my own mind.If you’ve read it, let me know what you thought!
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Review: Dirk Hayhurst – Out of My League
It’s been a while since I posted a review, not been feeling great the last few days so had a break from the laptop. But this book was awesome! I kind of knew what to expect from the book after reading Hayhurst’s first book (The Bullpen Gospels), and I most definitely wasn’t disappointed.This book was just as funny as the first book, it had me laughing out loud quite a few times! Lines like this were just what I expected:
Hitters are stupid, if they weren’t, they’d be pitchers.
The book is refreshingly honest, and gives you a great insight into what life is like for a baseball player, and a better understanding of just how big a difference there is between the lifestyle of the minor leagues and major leagues.
I felt like this book was a lot more personal than the first one, and contained a lot more about his relationship with his girlfriend/fiancee/wife Bonnie. He lets you in on a lot of events in their relationship – the proposal, the wedding, and even a huge argument they had shortly before the wedding after he had pitched a bad game. I liked that this was included, he wasn’t afraid to include the bad parts of himself as well as the good.
The book ends just as he has been claimed off waivers by the Blue Jays, setting up very nicely for book number 3. I have a feeling it’s going to be longer than I would like before it comes out though!
I’d recommend this book to any baseball fan, and also anyone who just wants a good laugh. If you’ve read this book and enjoyed it, you should definitely check out The Bullpen Gospels too. You should also follow him on twitter – @thegarfoose, he’s just about to start playing in the Italian baseball league which should make for some interesting tweets.
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Now Reading: Dirk Hayhurst – Out of My League
I’ve been waiting for this book since I pre-ordered it in October, so I’m very glad that it finally arrived, especially when I started seeing a lot of tweets about people in America reading the book when I still had 2 weeks left until it would be dispatched.It will be the second book I have read by Dirk Hayhurst, although you may also know him as @thegarfoose on Twitter. His first (The Bullpen Gospels) was fantastic, I remember laughing a LOT when I read it, so I hope this one will be just as good. If it’s anything like the first one, I’ll probably be finished with it by tonight, I just couldn’t put it down.
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Review: Daniel Tammet – Born on a Blue Day
I want to give a big thank you to Hannah for lending me this book because it was fantastic, one of the most interesting and well written biographies I have read in a long time.The book is about Daniel Tammet, a man with Savant Syndrome and a condition called synaesthesia, which makes him see numbers as colours, shapes and textures, enabling him to do extraordinary sums in his head.
I’m sure we’ve all heard about people with Savant Syndrome in the past, you’ve probably seen Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman or watched a documentary on TV. But this book was completely different as it was written by Daniel and contained his thoughts and feelings, not someone else speculating what is happening in his head. It’s unusual for someone with this rare form of Aspergers to be able to communicate so effectively for themselves, and you find out through the book just how that came about. For example, he even travelled on his own to Lithuania to live for a year teaching English. While he was there he also learnt to speak Lithuanian, one of ten(!) languages that he can speak. He learnt to speak Icelandic in 7 days, conducting a live interview on Icelandic TV at the end of the week.
As well as finding out about his extraordinary ability for learning languages, you also find out a lot about his love of numbers, and how he experiences them. To him, each number up to 10,000 has it’s own shape, colour and feeling (e.g. the number 9 is large and towering). When he does calculations, he sees the results in his head as a composite of the numbers involved. Throughout the book, Daniel draws out examples of what he means by his descriptions, including a picture of the number on each chapter’s title page.
Here’s an example of what he sees when he multiplies 53 x 131. The shape on each side is the shape of each number, and the shape in the middle is the shape of the result. All this happens subconsciously, which is why he can do these sums so quickly – how incredible is that?!
There was a documentary about him on Channel 5 a few years ago, which I think I am going to have to find and watch. You hear about his experience of filming in the book, but I would love to watch it too. He also wrote a second book called Embracing the Wide Sky, which I will have to read. A definite 5 star book, if only because of how incredible this man is!
Louise Douglas
(I've got no) Shelf Control…
Louise Douglas 