“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of magic”
-Carl Sagan
STACK. I need more closet place (and time, of course!). I’ve recently added to this stack my UK version of Black Heart by Holly Black, The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen, and Eat Your Peas by Cheryl Karpen. :)
You might smack me with all the redundant intro’s but—I’m still sorry for all the sparse updates! A flurry of (non-work and work-related) events are taking over my life lately and they are eager to pull me away from my online havens. Not from my books, though! To join my other babies (which I know were silently whimpering for the lengthy week of ‘abandonment’ I just did to them) are these:
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Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk. I think I need a dose of Palahniuk’s trademark mind-squeeze-inducing stories, I terribly miss it. :) I think this one’s about a serial killer.
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Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. My first of Ellis, lots of people are shooing me away from this for some reason—and it’s not that it’s a badly written book. Anyhoo, I decided to try it. USA Today said it’s The Catcher in the Rye of the MTV generation—we’ll see about that. From Amazon: Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980’s, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope.
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Divergent by Veronica Roth. Finally.
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Numbers by Rachel Ward. I like the premise of this book, even if (or especially because?) it sounded a lot like Death Note. After her mom’s death, the girl protagonist can see the dates predicting deaths of people with brute accuracy—when she looks them in the eye.
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Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver. Sequel to the dystopian love story Delirium. Hope it’s better than the first book!
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The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. This is going to be my first MJ novel. I bet it would be nothing like her awesome shorts! It’s a thriller set in London, full of humor, suspense…and ghosts. :)
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Cinder by Marissa Meyer. Everybody knows I love fairytale reimaginings. Meyer offers the world one of her own, with a cyborg Cinderella in the forefront. How. Can. I. Say. No. To. This?! I hope Cinderella is not a damsel in distress in this one. :D
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The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. Ah, I love time-bending tales. Two youngsters could mysteriously see their future—spouses, careers, status updates—in Facebook, at a time when Facebook was not even invented yet. “As they grapple with the ups and downs of what their lives hold, they’re forced to confront what they’re doing right—and wrong—in the present.” Sounds promising. :)
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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Been hearing a lot of good things about this book! Chris Schluep’s blurb says, “Erin Morgenstern’s dark, enchanting debut takes us to the black and white tents of Le Cirque des Reves, a circus that arrives without warning, simply appearing when yesterday it was not there. Young Celia and Marco have been cast into a rivalry at The Night Circus, one arranged long ago by powers they do not fully understand. Over time, their lives become more intricately enmeshed in a dance of love, joy, deceit, heartbreak, and magic.”
Anyone who’ve read these? Thoughts?
New Pages of ‘The Little Prince’ Discovered in Paris
For all of us who spent our childhoods discovering new worlds with Antoine de Saint-Exupery‘s Little Prince, there’s a little more to be uncovered yet. According to an APreport, draft pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince “that may shed new, political insight on the classic book” have been discovered in a private collection in Paris, and are set to go up for auction next week.
“The first page contains a piece of text that’s partly retained in chapter 19 of the published work,” AP reports. “But the second leaf of the work is completely original. The little prince arrives on Earth and meets the first person on the planet, a completely new character, who’s described as an ‘ambassador of the human spirit.’ This ‘ambassador’ is almost too busy to speak to his inquisitive interlocutor, saying he’s looking, in vain, for a missing six-letter word. The meaning of this is not immediately clear.”
A closeup of the pages. Photo credit: Remy de la Mauviniere
However, according to 20th century manuscript expert (and “Saint-Exupery enthusiast”) Olivier Devers, “He was a dreamer, he dealt with the war by floating up and dreaming. The six-letter word the ‘ambassador’ is looking for but can’t find has a humanist meaning. If you look at the context, you see that the word he can’t find is ‘guerre,’ (or ‘war’). It’s even more powerful because he doesn’t say it.”
[via Moby Lives, Flavorwire]
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
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| — | Hellen Keller |
FANDOM ON FIRE V.01: Hunger Games Goodies
I’m dying to post my thoughts on Gary Ross’ big screen translation of The Hunger Games right now, but the odds of me not getting fired when I do that are not in my favor. Haha! Can’t leak! I wrote a full-page review for it in our magazine GALA, which will be out in bookstores, coffee shops, convenience stores, etc. on April 1. (Please do grab a copy! It’s an events magazine and we cover everything from festivals and fun runs to album launches and movie openings.)
Anyway, I think I can find a way around this little dilemma. I can post things that I didn’t include in the review, like book vs. film nitpicks, favorite moments, and things I’m looking forward to in Catching Fire. You know, the usual things regular Tumblristas know. *wiggles eyebrows*
In a non-review related HG news in Airizverse…I got new goodies!
- The Hunger Games Companion. Here’s a book to stand cheek by jowl my other favorite The Hunger Games meta-essay compilation of some sort, Lea Wilson’s The Girl Who Was on Fire. While I fangirl THG like it’s my day job, I still love in-depth discussions that go beyond the usual “shipping” stuff. I love metas. I’m about 90% sure I’m going to like this.
- The Hunger Games Tribute Guide. There’s nothing particularly new in this book, but it’s a must-have for all THG fans. It includes colored photos and quotes from the movie and a few detailed information about all the districts. I would have appreciated this more if I bought this before I saw the film, I think. But as I said, it’s a treat for any THG fan who wanted to have anything and everything about the film and the book.
- The Hunger Games soundtrack. It’s The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond, featuring tracks by Taylor Swift, The Decemberists, The Secret Sisters, Arcade Fire, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and many more. The songs were written and produced exclusively for the album.
Any miser’s going to shake his head and say “You could have just downloaded the songs.” Yes, I could have, but like the usual books/ebooks stuff, I think there’s nothing like a physical copy of it. It’s not solely mine, though; my friend paid half the price, even if she only wanted to rip the songs from it. :p
More Hunger Games post in the future! Happy blogging and may the odds be ever in your favor! ;)
You know there’s still lots of awesome left in the world if people give you awards for being the nerdtastic bookworm that you are. I received P10,000.00 (cash and GCs) & a cellphone from National Book Store, The Philippine Star, and Globe telecom for my essay-review for Paolo Giodano’s book, The Solitude of Prime Numbers! :)
More of the My Favorite Book (Year 11) awards here.
Title: Stargirl
Author: Jerry Spinelli
Genre: Contemporary, Young Adult, Romance
My Rating: ★★★★
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Picture your life—and everyone else’s around you—as a vast, boiling desert, occasionally littered with cacti and yuccas. For you, blandness is normality. You’re all content on playing chameleon, melting against the nondescript walls of conformity, swaddling yourselves with the safety of not being singled out. You’re a bundle, you’re a “we,” and you like everything to stay that way.
But glitches occur, no matter how perfectly shielded you think your system is. It may scare you one minute and enchant you the next, but when you realize it’s jeopardizing your perfect routines, you’re going to despise it. You’ll get the urge to banish it. It’s a rare event, but no worries—it’s only a normal stimulus of most people in your place.
This is the story of Susan “Stargirl” Caraway, the ‘glitch’ that cartwheeled her way into the “normal” lives of Mica High School students…and into the heart of sixteen-year-old Leo Borlock. With her floor-length skirts, pet rat, and a ukelele strapped to her back, she faces each day with a bounce in her step and a grin on her freckle-dusted face, not minding what everyone else will think of her.
I’d like to refer to Stargirl as a rebel, even if she only loosely fits in the category. Among my roster of female fictional revolutionaries, she—ironically—is the most normal. She’s not rising up against a cruel or corrupt government in a post-apocalyptic setting, nor is she preparing to serve cold dishes of revenge to those who did her wrong. She’s just being herself. It’s stereotype she’s ramming against. It’s no secret that in a world that forces you to be someone else, being yourself is perhaps one of the hardest battles you can ever fight. Not to Stargirl, though: she doesn’t even need to lift a finger to win it. She is not afraid to be unique…that is, before she fell in love. Leo is a typical MHS kid, and while he loves Stargirl so much, he doesn’t want to be turned into a social pariah because of their relationship. So he works to transform Stargirl into a normal girl, oblivious to what it will do to her.
However, Stargirl as a character is a tad too Mary Sue-ish (too Pollyannaish?), and because we haven’t seen her ‘side’ of the story, it’s easy to judge she’s a shallow, flat character. Perhaps that’s why Spinelli spun a sequel to mold her more? I’m not really sure. While I think the portrayal of the main female protagonist is decent, she needs more development.
Spinelli have spun a simple tale that will without a doubt resonate with every teenage heart that will encounter it. I marvel at the characterization of Leo, at how human he seems to be instead of being just another one-dimensional knight-in-shining-armor figure that pops up frequently in most of today’s young adult novels. He doesn’t recklessly rush to rescue his ‘princess’ when she’s in trouble; in fact, he even runs away from the scene, afraid of the prickly eyes and thoughts of the people around him. He is an ordinary boy torn between having to choose between the approval of the society and the happiness of being with the girl he loves. I understood his insecurities and behavior; I tasted his fears, and in the several nights he spent thinking on his moonlit sheets, it’s almost as if I caught a glimpse of everything he’s dreading. Sometimes I dislike him; sometimes I feel the urge to give him a sucker punch for not doing what he thinks is right “because the others think it’s wrong.” He’s like a bandwagon-riding, pesky little brother to me most of the time. I don’t know if it will make sense to you, but I began liking him because he so…unlikable.
The world-building is not precisely first-rate, but the setting greatly adds to the symbolism department of the novel. The desert stands for the collective “we” of MHS. Then there are “enchanted places” beyond the sand dunes and saguaros—places that are always there but you can never locate with your naked eye, places that represent someone like Stargirl. More than once, a character explicates how Stargirl is closer to what we all should be, and that something is inside us already. We just need to get in touch with it by using our hearts as our compasses.
The plot only takes a backseat here, since the enigmatic Stargirl steers the wheel of the story. There are a couple of twists and turns, but nothing that can imprint an indelible memory in my head. There are poignant scenes, hilarious scenes, and a mixture of both, but what really struck a chord with me are the times of ruminations and the conversations between Archie and Leo. :)
A magnificent portrayal of the celebration of nonconformity, Stargirl is one of the few books that are so plain on the surface but is beautifully labyrinthine when you delve deeper into it. Four stars for a great read! I can’t wait to get my hands on Love, Stargirl.
