Showing posts with label john green. Show all posts
Showing posts with label john green. Show all posts

The Book Club| Paper Towns

 It has been such a long time since I last picked up a book to read for pleasure and not for studying purposes, so to ease my self back into my previous reading habits over the next month or so of exams I am sticking to relatively easy reads. Basically not Lolita or anything by Kahled Hosseini. Naturally I went for a John Green book, having read both the Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns seemed like a great place to start.
 Despite loving John Green as both an author and as a human being, I was not anticipating this book to be as good as either of the ones I had read previously. But by the end of nearly 6 hours of reading that had all changed, this rivals Looking for Alaska for the top spot of my favourite John Green books. This is a gorgeous story about obsessions, society and hope. It made me dream of all the things I want to do, where I want to go and how I want to live my life. Are all the barriers that we perceive to be real actually there or can we just walk straight on through just like Quentin and Margo Roth Spiegelman?

For the test of a whether a book is good or not is if I keep thinking about the characters after I finish reading, or inbetween reading stints like they are real people that I know and have known for year. I am aware that I don't live in Florida but Quentin does and so did I for a week or so, all I could think about was what happened to them after the end of the book, so just like a good post-modernist play I left with more questions than I had answers. I like that in a book, something that makes you think and reconsider your own life choices. Paper Towns did that for me, along with taking me away from the daily grind of revision and work to somewhere else to explore someone else's life and mind.
So thank you John Green for this book, I am sure I will read it again this summer when I am sat inside on a rainy day with nothing else to do. Like Harry Potter this is book I will come back to again and again. Have a gold star, a virtual hug and a cup of tea or coffee depending on your preference.

XO, Miriam

The Book Club: The Yellow Birds of Alaska

The Book Club: The Yellow Birds of Alaska

2 "books" with one stone... awful pun I know. Anyway, time to catch you all up with my reading habits, so this week the staring books are: Looking For Alaska by John Green (but you all knew that), and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.

Looking For Alaska:
John Green has done it again, and produced one of the most heart wrenching stories I have ever read... I read it in one evening so about 3hrs, I just couldn't put it down. You want to know what happens before, and what happens after the incident. Pudge is the sort of character that I would be happy to be in life, although I somehow doubt I will be, he feels like a real person to me. The day after I read this I found myself worrying about him and the others despite knowing he isn't real.

The Yellow Birds:
Not as addictive, but just as good. I found it both informative and the perfect answer to "What was it like over there?". I don't think anyone else from the armed forces could have produced such a emotional yet detached response to the war in Iraq.
The marching cadence quoted before the book starts is where the novel gets it's name, and it is hardly surprising given the nature of this book, full of promises broken and unbroken you begin to see why soldiers are treated like heroes when they come back, yet they are always modest. Powers wrote my book of the summer, read on the way back from London, my final holiday before the homework started again in the final panic before college.

If you have read either of these books let me know what you thought in the comments, if you haven't read one or both of them ASAP!

xoxo Miriam

The Book Club: The Fault In Our Stars

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Rating: 9/10

The synopsis (blurb):

Despite the tumour-shrinking medical miracle that has brought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.

My views: 

"The Fault In Our Stars" is the New York Times best-seller for a reason, there is no fairytale ending but a emotional roller-coaster of life and death that brought me and many others to tears.  I became emotionally attached to Augustus, mainly because not only can I see many of the same traits in him as I do in myself (minus the cancer). If I am honest Hazel irritated me a bit, feel free to disagree with me though. 

Warning do not read this in public as you will cry

 

xo xo Miriam 

 

 

p.s. Next week is The Little Coffee Shop in Kabul by Deborah Rodriguez 

The Book Club: The Help

I decided on this book as it was a break from a romance drama novel section I have been stuck in for quite sometime. The Help by Kathryn Stockett was the perfect remedy! It is a overwhelmingly emotional and thrilling tale about black maids in Southern U.S.A and the challenges they faced both at work and at home.

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I basically fell in love with the three characters that narrate the story, they all have downfalls yet they pull through and create lives for themselves despite the hardships and situations they face. You cannot necessarily relate to any of the character's situations but you want to know that everything works out the way it should... but that I will not tell you...

Just so you have an idea of the plot here is the blurb:

Enter a vanished world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962.
Where black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver...


There's Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.


Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman fins the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell...


Rating: 8/10


Other comment:


This enticing read that was given to me by my Mother and her book club ironically, keeps your attention and as you flick the pages you realise just how real this is, and that is was set just 50ish years ago in a place where there should be equal rights, not racism ingrained into the culture! There is no way I can review this without giving away the whole plot so can everyone just read this now, so I can discuss it with someone! If you have read it, comment your thoughts below please, I do reply honest!


xoxo Miriam

P.S. Next read is The Fault In Our Stars by John Green (because everyone I know has been pestering me to read it!)
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