I'll Give You The Sun By Jandy Nelson
 

                                         

     Honestly, the only reason I got this book was because the cover looked unique... yeah. I judged a book by it's cover. This is a dichotomous book because it is told through the perspectives of  two twins; Noah and Jude. They used to be best friends and would tell each other everything. But somewhere along the way, they lost each other. (I know what happened but, I wont reveal it) The book jumps between their perspectives and time periods too, which is a bit confusing at first. It's like a puzzle, you are constantly piecing together a bigger picture. They have their half of the story but what they don't realize is that if they could somehow just tell each other their story, they can fix their dispute. Even when they are mad at each other, they secretly make sure the other one is okay. 

      This book has a lot of inappropriate words at the beginning around pages 1-20 or maybe 25, but then the strong language dials down. This book is extremely detailed about the surrounding, what the characters are doing, and the dialogue is well fitting to the characters. Besides these great qualities this book has, the only complaint I would have is the chapters are incredibly long. Maybe 25- 30 pages each. And I personally like books with smaller chapters because it gives me a sense of accomplishment and it's a nice place to put the book down. In this book I have to stop in the middle of the chapter which I don't like. But overall this book is a great read for both girls and guys and should be an intriguing journey for the reader. 

     This time, I thought that I'd try something different and try to reflect on a poem. So when I was watching TV, I came across a guy reciting poem and I decided to reflect off that poem. The poem is called, Dont Go Gentle Into That Good Night. At first I could really think of what Dylam Thomas, the writer, was trying to communicate. But after reading it a couple times, I think I was able to narrow down on a few main points.  The complete poem is attached to a hyperlink with the picture up at the top; so if you would like to read the entire poem you can find it there. 

     I thought that the writer was trying to say that you shouldn't die and leave this world without a fight. The old men/ women shouldn't simply accept death but rather they should resist it. I got to this conclusion from the first two stanzas. 

"Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night."

     Here in the first line, the writer suggests that you shouldn't just give in to the concept of dying. Just to clarify, by 'resisting death,' I mean living life to the fullest and not leaving this world without leaving some sort of mark; because what good of living here if you don't leave something people can remember you by.

     And in the final stanza, the poem gets deeply personal for the writer as he connects this theme to his father who is going blind. Which, I, think is the inspiration for the writer to include "Rage, Rage against the dying of the light." The dying of the light could by symbolism for his father going blind and he can slowly, no longer see light. 

     I think I'm somewhere in the ballpark with my reflection, but if you have another interpretation of this poem, feel free to leave it down in the comments. :)

     

MockingJay Part 1 Vs. MockingJay (Book) 

In my last blog I wrote about the book MockingJay and if you read it, the review wasn't good. But I felt that the movie was good. So I decided to make a little list of what was different between the movie and the book.

1) In the movie, you see Katniss start out in District 13, and eventually she visits her 'home' District 12.  But in the book, all of this wasn't included, the book simply started off in District 12 with Katniss shocked about the leftovers. I personally liked the movie version of this better because this was a build up to her decision in becoming the MockinJay. 

2) In the book I think Katniss interact a little less than they do in the movie. And they also don't trust each other as much in the book as they do in the movie. Additionally, in the movie, Katniss's demands were a little different than in the book. 

3) In the book, the rescue mission feels a bit choppy and you dont get to 'see' or feel what happens completely. But in the movie they did a good job on showing the mission. I liked how the movie included this scene because it adds a lot of suspense and is one of the major conflicts. 

These were just some of the things I noticed when reading the book and watching the movie. I just listed a couple differences obviously because the second part of the movie hasn't hit the theaters yet.

P. S.  Is it just me or do you like the song Jennifer Lawrence sung in the movie called 'The Hanging Tree"?

"The Odds Are Never In our Favor" 

I recently saw the movie MockingJay Part 1 and i thought it was a piece of art. So i thought to myself, Why not read the book? I've read Hunger Games and Catching Fire, but i decided that i wasn't going to read the third. This was because of the responses i heard about the book from my friends. They said "Don't read the book" and " It's sooo boring". But I read it anyway.

I regret it...

The book (in my opinion) just drags on, and has very minimal dialogue. There are pages and pages of description which gets tiring very fast. Now I'm not saying the book is a bad one, all I'm saying is that the book is tiring to read. I feel like the series has gone downhill. Hunger Games was exciting and grew curiosity. Then Catching Fire came out. It seemed a bit repetitive with another game. And i felt that it moved a bit slower. And MockingJay had a pace that I didn't enjoy. But if we were to put that aside and just focus on the story, then this book is great. The story has a lot of unexpected parts, and the ending was a shocker!

"There Will Be Blood"

"There Will Be Blood"

     I am going to do another post about the Blood of Olympus because I just wanted to share some other info regarding this book.

     I started reading this book on Saturday last week and finished it on Friday.  I'd say this was the fastest I've ever read a 500 page book. There were 2 main reasons for this:
1) This book was a fantastic read and it a bit poignant during the last 100 pages because...

 * SPOILER ALERT* Leo dies. He was one of my favorite characters during the course of book and I just didn't want him to die. But I guess it was alright because he didn't actually die.*

2) My Friend got this book on the Wednesday before the Saturday I got it and he said that we are going to have a race. A race on who can finish the book before the other. It wasn't really fair because by the time I got the book, he was already on 250. I started to read for an hour or an an hour and a half, everyday. Just sitting on the couch, with all electronics away, so I don't get distracted. By Wednesday, the both of us were on 300! I couldn't believe I caught up. He thought I was lying so he asked he around 10 questions, and after I got them all right, I thought Now... It's WAR!

BLAH BLAH, I'll jump to the part I WON! On Friday, I finished the book at exactly 7:02 pm. And I texted him that. He replies, "We never shook on it." And a couple of other excuses like, "My dad made me do SAT practice everyday so I didn't get time to read." Buuuttttt, I don't care, because I WON!

The Blood Of Olympus

THE BLOOD OF OLYMPUS

  

      Last week I started reading the book The Blood of Olympus, by Rick Riordan. It is  kind of hard to explain what this book is about because this is the 5th and last book in the series, so to understand this book, you will have to go through books 1-4. But if you are a mythology 'fan' then you might be able to get it.

      

      The book is about Jason, Percy, Hazel, Frank, Piper, Anabeth, Nico, Reyna and their Satyr coach, going on a journey to save the world. Gaea, the goddess of Earth( She makes up all of Earth) is waking and she wants to consume the entire world and wipe out all humans, gods and demi-gods in the process. But she has sent out messengers that give false information to the Gods, she tells them that if they join her, she will spare their lives and let them live. This is just a lie though, her real intentions are to kill every single thing on Earth. Now, if you have read these books, you will know that the Roman and Greek sides of all of the Gods and the camps are fighting, so to make peace, Reyna, Nico and Coach transport the Athena statue that was stolen by the Roman, and they plan to return it to the Greek Camp. 

      While this is happening, the rest of the crew, travels to Sparta and fights the messengers of Gaea. Unfortunately, they awaken Gaea during this process. So, the gods are fighting each other, the two camps are about to go to war, and the statue has still not been delivered as a symbol of treaty. Above all of this, Gaea is a god and you need a demi-god and a god to kill another god. But here's the problem, the gods aren't allowed to help the demi-gods. If this wasn't enough, Gaea is rising but the crew in Sparta has to help fight, but their ship is nearly destroyed, which means they can't get there! 

Over all this books is an AMAZING read, I would definitely suggest all of you to read the book, but don't read it before you read the previous books. There are numerous cliff hangers in this books and you will not want to put this books down!   

"To Be Or Not To Be..."

     Last week I finished Hamlet! Although it wasn't a very long book, it sure was a tedious one. I have read many other books that were incredibly long, for example the Heroes of Olympus series, but this book took a long time to read and comprehend as I went along. 

SPOILER ALERT***

     The book gets incredibly boring and slow during the middle. This book is about a Prince of Denmark who later finds out that his uncle was the murderer of his father. In the middle; as I mentioned already was boring. The book really side-tracked and didn't come back onto the topic of  vengeance until around ACT 4.

     In the middle of the book, what occurred was, Hamlet was sad because of an unknown reason. Which was thought to be because of his rejection by Ophelia. But later one could infer that the root of his sorrow was the death of his father. So just as a was to get back at his uncle and to reveal his secret in front of everybody, Hamlet came up with a unique idea. Later in the week, a play was to take place to amuse the King, Queen and all of Denmark. Instead of showing what was to be shown, he asked the actors to change the play and show his story instead.  When they did this, it really got to the King. He started sweating and stormed out embarrassed. He was in a very agitated mood for the rest of the book.

     I won't describe the entire story, so I will just skip to the ending... i.e. the good part! The king and the Prince of Norway (he comes in later because Ophelia had committed suicide and he blamed Hamlet for his daughter's death) and they poison Hamlets drink. He senses it and they duel. Hamlet kills his Uncle, and the Prince of Norway! But unfortunately his mother had also died. She drank Hamlet's poisoned drink unknowingly. Here's the sad part... Hamlet dies too. :-(

     Over all this book was an incredible read. You just have to give it a chance and be open-minded to reading a different/unique piece of text. I would give this book 4.5 stars out 5.