"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.

Hamlet

   

       I recently started reading a book published by William Shakespeare; called, Hamlet. This will be the second book I've read written by William Shakespeare.  The first one was, A Mid-Summer Nights Dream. Why I wanted to read this book is because, we are going to read, Romeo and Juliet sometime down the year, so I wanted to have some kind of experience with his books. I also wanted to read this book because there is a movie coming out which is an adaption  of the play Hamlet. I was pretty interested in the movie after watching the trailer, so I decided to read this book before I watch the movie.


      As of yet, I am still reading the book. I am pretty close to completing the book, and by my next post I will be done for sure. So far I have read up to Act 3. The story starts off with, two guards standing at the entrance of a castle in Denmark, in which Prince Hamlet, the Queen (Hamlet's mother) and King Claudius. Hamlet is the nephew of King Claudius, his real father died in a war. Which was later revealed to be partially true. He had died in a war, but his brother (Claudius) had killed him. The two guards see the ghost of the late King and inform Hamlet. He later confronts to the ghost and promises to the ghost that he will seek revenge and kill King Claudius. Meanwhile, in a parallel plot, Hamlet is in love with Ophelia, daughter of Polonius (Lord Chamberlain). But Polonius disapproves of this love. This is what happened pretty much, over the course of the 3 Acts.

 At first, when I just started reading thus book, it was a bit confusing. I was reading on my bed I understood only a select number of things. But as I kept reading, I'm not sure how or why... but it got easier. I was understanding a lot more words; and although I still don't understand it work-for-word, I can piece together what I do get, and come up with a fairly accurate idea of what is going on.