My Thoughts on John Green, The Fault in Our Stars - A Vlog

I recorded this lots of times, and just ended up embarrassingly gushing and saying some weird stuff at the end. I knew I should have scripted.   My puggie is in it though:)



Book Info:

Title: The Fault in Our Stars

Author: John Green
Publisher: Dutton
Date: 2012
Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Contemporary

313 pages.
Where I got it: Bought it
Challenges:None

Quote that is "perfect," but might be slightly spoilerific: "I missed the future [...] I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again."

If I've convinced you to buy it, you can do so here (through my affiliate links):

3 Mini-Reviews: The Non-fiction Audiobook Edition

1. The Social Animal by David Brooks:  I really wanted to read this book, which is a narrative about a couple, spanning from childhood through old age, also incorporating observations on the nature of human behavior and some general social science stuff.  I liked it at the beginning, and in the places where Brooks would focus in on a topic and explore it for a while were often engaging (I would be more specific, but I waited a bit too long to review this one).  The narrative structure didn't work for me.  It didn't read as literary enough, and detracted from the seriousness of the work as long form non-fiction.  So, it just wasn't enough of one thing or the other to totally work for me.




2. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand:  Wow.  Seriously, this was easily the best audiobook I've listened to in quite sometime.  The story is moving, and harrowing, and often unbelievable in its intensity, and Hillenbrand is a fantastic storyteller.  The book is the survival story of Louis Zamperini, Olympic runner and WWII POW. I learned a lot from the book, not just about Zamperini, but about the Japanese during WWII. I got a history lesson while feeling like I was reading the most compelling of stories.  When I first read Hillenbrand, it was Seabiscuit, which I really had no interest in and still really enjoyed reading, and I knew then that she was very very talented.  This book continues to prove that.


3. Spook by Mary Roach:  I like Stiff  so so much that it makes me really sad to say that I didn't really like Spook.  There were parts that I did find interesting, but the topic didn't really work for me.  The topic is scientific explorations of the afterlife, but there wasn't enough science (or even pseudoscience) in it for me.  The narration also kind of annoyed me on this one.  The reader did a lot of accents that I found distracting, so that didn't help.  I definitely am not done with Mary Roach though, who I still think is fabulous, and I had heard from other sources that this was the least successful of her books.  Definitely read Stiff though, because cadavers are super interesting:)

**If you are interested in purchasing any of these books through my affiliate account, click on the cover image to buy them at Powell's.

Kindle Deals

Here are the highlights (for me anyway) of the
100 Kindle Books under $3.99 this month:



I totally picked up and wanted to buy Creepiosity, but talked myself out of it. I bought it this month.

**These are affiliate links; if you click on them and buy something, I will receive a small commission to help support The Scarlet Letter.

Literary Blog Hop: My Style

It has been awhile since I've participated in the Literary Blog Hop at The Blue Bookcase.  I'm not sure why, because it is one of my favorite bookish thingies on the internet.

The question for this month is:

How do you find time to read, what's your reading style and where do you think reading literature should rank in society's priorities? 

Finding time: I don't make as much time to read as I should or could.  I'm a very quick reader, and I take a book with me everywhere I go.  I read every night before bed for a little bit.  I read in waiting rooms and during my lunch.  I read in the bathtub.  Sometimes I come home from work in the late afternoon and spend a few hours reading on my couch, or lay around reading all day on a Saturday.  I go to coffee shops and read on the weekends.  I read e-books on the treadmill at the gym.  Basically, I squeeze it in, in little pockets around my schedule.  And I try to read instead of other doing things, like watching TV or mindlessly looking at stuff on the internet.  Often, I fail at balancing that, and spend hours reading Tumblrs. Sometimes that is what I feel like doing though.

 

Reading style: I used to annotate a lot; now I don't.  Sometimes I take notes, and sometimes I stick in a some post-it notes to mark passages.  I don't keep books after I've read them as often as I used to.  I read much faster than I did as a student.  Now that I'm not studying Literature, I think I'm a much more casual reader, although my brain still works the same way, so I'm always analyzing.

 

Reading and society: I think reading and literacy should be a higher priority in most people's lives.  I'm an English teacher, so I make a living believing and encouraging that.  Reading encourages critical thinking, especially when we read broadly.  It also helps to develop writing skills and other communication skills.  That's important.  That said, I understand that we live in a world filled with distractions, and that literacy is broader than words on a page.  So, although I believe that there is much to be learned from reading literature, there are other ways to develop literacy skills as well, and there are great non-fiction books/popular books/websites/films/publications out there that are worth our time as well.

Top Ten Tuesday: Beautiful Things

This week Top Ten Tuesday is straightforward, and visual, so here they are, Ten Beautiful Covers:

What sorts of covers do you like?

My Thoughts on S. J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep

 

"This morning I went into the kitchen. My life, I thought, is built on quicksand.  It shifts from one day to the next.  Things I think I know are wrong, things I am certain of, facts about my life, myself, belong to years ago. All the history I have reads like fiction."

I blew right through S.J. Watson's thriller, because it was incredibly readable.  I wanted to know what was going to  happen next, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew.  And it made me think about how thrillers work.  Thrillers don't work if the reader has no idea what is going to happen next.  We always ruminate on, and write reviews about, the big plot reveal, or the "twist," but the real art is in the building up to that, which the writer must do while walking a fine tight rope.  It is easy to make it too obvious, the foreshadowing too heavy, and then the reader knows all along what is going to happen.  On the other has, if the reader is shocked by the climax, and she can't trace back the steps that lead to it, the story becomes unbelievable and weakly plotted.  Watson's book is neither of those things; he firmly walks the tightrope.

To summarize the plot of the book as much as I can without giving anything away,  the narrator, Christine, wakes up everyday having no idea who she is.  She has a rare form of amnesia that effects both long term and short term memory.  On the advice of a new doctor she has been seeing, she is keeping a journal, and from it, she is learning many of her own secrets.

I read quite a few reviews before writing my own, and now I can't get them out of my head.  The book has a lot in common with some popular films - both comic and dramatic.  It also has elements that make it its own.  There wasn't really anything that stood out to me as not working about the book, which is a great compliment.  Like I said, I thought I could guess the ending, but there was still enough twist to leave me feeling satisfied.  It would say that it is a great "airplane read" - perfect for making the time fly by.

Title: Before I Go To Sleep

Author: S.J. Watson
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date: 2011
Genre: Thriller, Fiction

358 pages.
Where I got it: From the publisher, through TLC Book Tours (Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour)
Challenges:None


If I convinced you to buy the book for your next long distance trip, please consider purchasing it through one of my affiliate links:

Top Ten Tuesday: Soundtrack of my Life

The Broke and the Bookish has such a good topic this week for Top Ten Tuesday, that I am pretty intimidated by it.  The topic is:  Books I'd Give a Theme Song To.  I love books (obviously) and I also really really love music; however, I'm not sure how good I am going to be at pairing them.

But, I'm totally going to try...  I'm basically connecting these either for really obvious reasons, or because I think the song captures something ineffable about the book.  Here is my playlist:

Here are the books the songs connect to.  I'll let you ponder the connection:

1. Nabokov, Lolita
2.  Sartori, Head Code
3.  Burnett, The Secret Garden
4.  Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
5. Ellis, American Psycho
6  Orwell, 1984
7.  Palahniuk, Survivor
8. DeLillo, The Body Artist
9. Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
10. McCarthy, The Road

My Thoughts on Jennifer Haigh's, Faith

From the first line of Jennifer Haigh's wonderful novel Faith -- "Here is a story my mother has never told me" -- I was in it. The novel is Art McGann's story, told by his sister Sheila, and so it is her story as well.  It is also the story of the whole McGann family and of the Irish Catholic community in Boston, beginning with a chapter about her mother in her youth that seems strangely detached from the rest of the story...until it doesn't.  And, finally, it is a story about the Catholic Church, specifically, and faith in general.  Art is a Catholic priest and the only one of his siblings from his mother's first marriage.  He has been accused of molesting a young boy in his congregation, and his sister Sheila doesn't know whether or not to believe the accusation. She can't entirely have faith that he didn't do it.

And so Sheila tries to come to a conclusion through telling her story, which is a story about her family's secrets and her own shortcomings.  Art's story is a mystery, and Haigh writes it that way.  As Sheila struggles to come to her conclusions, she pieces together the story of her family like a detective.  I loved this point of view.  Sheila is an unreliable narrator, which I always love, and I deeply appreciated the layers that having the story told by a third party created.  This could easily have become a novel that seem overfocused on making a statement about an "issue," and, don't get me wrong, the book addresses important issues; but this book is so much more than a statement about something that we've seen on the news.  The book is really good and I highly recommend it; it's one of my favorite reads so far this year.

**I read this book for TLC Book Tours, and you can read the rest of the reviews on the tour HERE

Title: Faith

Author: Jennifer Haigh
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date: 2011
Genre: Literary Fiction

318 pages.
Where I got it: From the publisher, through TLC Book Tours
Challenges:None

If I convinced you to read this book, and you want to buy it, consider clicking on my affiliate links:

Top Ten Tuesday: Along with the photo albums....

from sodahead.com

The Broke and the Bookish are hosting Top Ten Tuesday today, as they do every Tuesday. This week's topic is: Top Ten Books you would save if your house were abducted by aliens or another natural disaster.

Here's mine in no particular order:

10. Don DeLillo, White Noise: Not only is this my favorite book of all time, but it is also the book I've read the most times, so it is filled with marginalia. I bought a new copy one semester that I was teaching it because I had changed editions, but I still had to use the old one.

9. Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf:  This one has an inscription from my husband in it from when we were dating.  I embarrassingly still haven't read the book, but the copy is meaningful to me.

8. My Bible:  It was my mom's when she was a kid and it is leather bound and beautiful.

7.My Penguin Classics Works of Charles Dickens:  They are beautiful book objects, and I wouldn't mind rereading some of them either.

6. I have a children's book that my parents had made for me when I was a kid.  The main character is me and it is a scratch and sniff book.  It isn't too smelly anymore, but I would still want to save it from the aliens.

5.David Sedaris, Naked:  I'm not super attached to this book, but it is one of the first signed copies of a book from an author that I just thought was super awesome.  A friend working in a bookstore had it signed for me.

4. Michael Moore, Dude Where's My Country:  Again, not because of the content of the book, but because I have memories attached to seeing him read and then having my copy signed with my dad.

3. My Norton and Heath Anthologies of British and American Lit:  These are my beat up college copies with tons of tape flags and notes.  When I became a teacher and realized that I could get these for free, I was a little flabbergasted.  I wouldn't want to replace the old ones though.

2. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot:  I have a signed first edition, and it is the one that I think will grow most in value of the collection that I've saved.  And I haven't read it and really want to, so I would take it for that reason as well.

1. Kafka, The Metamorphosis:  I have a copy of this that I bought in Prague and that I feel a little sentimentally attached to.

My Thoughts on Steve Himmer, The Bee-Loud Glade

The Bee-Loud Glade begins with a man and his lame job.  He's a blogger- just kidding - I mean, he is, but it's not like that.  He works for a company that manufactures artificial plants, and he is hired to blog about the product under the guise of many different customers.  He doesn't do much, and eventually his employer figures it out.  And then he is without job, until a very strange opportunity comes his way: the opportunity to be a hermit for hire in a very rich man's very beautiful garden.

Reading the first pages of this book, I knew I was going to  like it.  And I really did.  It's pretty early to say, but I could see it being a favorite of the year.  Himmer's approach to addressing concerns about the drudgery of work, and disconnection with the environment feel so entirely fresh (even though it does have a folk story or allegorical quality that other reviewers have pointed out).  I haven't read a book like this one before.  The voice of the narrator is spot on, and his evolution in the garden feels authentic.  The themes in the book are also the ones that I really like to read about.  There is a whole lot in here about artificiality and illusion, and how the search for the authentic is impossible.  Finch, the narrator, must wade through so many layers of illusion in his life to find what is meaningful experience: fake plants, fake bloggers, a fake garden filled with surveillance, etc.  And it is only as he goes blind that he begins to reach the core of experience that he is seeking.

Although the book could have been nothing but pages of contemplation on the issues that I bring up above (and I probably would have still liked it), it isn't that.  The book is well-plotted.  I didn't want to stop reading it, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next.  I liked Finch, and I felt with him as he passed through trials and tribulations on his path to his own personal enlightenment, which, like I said, is nothing like anything you might read in a self-help book.  Highly recommended.

Title: The Bee-Loud Glade

Author: Steve Himmer
Publisher: Atticus Books
Date: 2011
Genre: Fiction

224 pages.
Where I got it: From the publisher in exchange for my honest review, through Net Galley
Challenges:None

If I convinced you to read this book, and you want to buy it, consider clicking on my affiliate links:

The Kindle Edition is also a pretty good deal at $7.69, so here: