Book 24: Hithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
By Douglas Adams
Pan Brooks
1979
Rating:
4.5
Review. Thanks Amazon.com!
Don't panic! Here are words of praise for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
"It's science fiction and it's extremely funny...inspired lunacy that leaves hardly a science fiction cliche alive."
Washington Post
"The feckless protagonist, Arthur Dent, is reminiscent of Vonnegut heroes, and his travels afford a wild satire of present institutions."
Chicago Tribune
"Very simply, the book is one of the funniest SF spoofs ever written, with hyperbolic ideas folding in on themselves."
School Library Journal
"As parody, it's marvelous: It contains just about every science fiction cliche you can think of. As humor, it's, well, hysterical."
From the Hardcover edition. -- Review
What Do I Think?
*Recent blogs will be terrible, just so you know.*
This has been my favorite book in along time. Not only was it very, very funny, it also made me think. It made me tink about how self-absorbed we are and how self-centered and egotystical we actually are on Earth. Maybe there is something else out there. Maybe we are just one giant experiment. Maybe it's all just to find the Question to the Ultimate Answer. Who knows? I bet someone does.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Book 23: Looking For Alaska
Book 23: Looking For Alaska
By John Green
Dutton Books
2005
Rating:
3
From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up - Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter's adolescence has been one long nonevent - no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps," he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school's rich preppies. Chip's best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love. She is literate, articulate, and beautiful, and she exhibits a reckless combination of adventurous and self-destructive behavior. She and Chip teach Miles to drink, smoke, and plot elaborate pranks. Alaska's story unfolds in all-night bull sessions, and the depth of her unhappiness becomes obvious. Green's dialogue is crisp, especially between Miles and Chip. His descriptions and Miles's inner monologues can be philosophically dense, but are well within the comprehension of sensitive teen readers. The chapters of the novel are headed by a number of days "before" and "after" what readers surmise is Alaska's suicide (I can't stand spoilers). These placeholders sustain the mood of possibility and foreboding, and the story moves methodically to its ambiguous climax. The language and sexual situations are aptly and realistically drawn, but sophisticated in nature. Miles's narration is alive with sweet, self-deprecating humor, and his obvious struggle to tell the story truthfully adds to his believability. Like Phineas in John Knowles's A Separate Peace(S & S, 1960), Green draws Alaska so lovingly, in self-loathing darkness as well as energetic light, that readers mourn her loss along with her friends. - Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
What Do I Think?
Come on. John Green? Obviously I enjoy this book a lot. This is the second time I read this book. It was honestly better the second time. Being a sixteen-year-old kid with absolutey no friends who has had these same events (or, similar to which) happen, quite recently, actually. The event actually happened while I was reading this, and yeah, I'm crying while typing this. Mhm. Pansy. Well, not really, once you read the book, you'll understand. Forgive me since these past couple of reviews have been suck? It's been a tough.... while.
By John Green
Dutton Books
2005
Rating:
3
From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up - Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter's adolescence has been one long nonevent - no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps," he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school's rich preppies. Chip's best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love. She is literate, articulate, and beautiful, and she exhibits a reckless combination of adventurous and self-destructive behavior. She and Chip teach Miles to drink, smoke, and plot elaborate pranks. Alaska's story unfolds in all-night bull sessions, and the depth of her unhappiness becomes obvious. Green's dialogue is crisp, especially between Miles and Chip. His descriptions and Miles's inner monologues can be philosophically dense, but are well within the comprehension of sensitive teen readers. The chapters of the novel are headed by a number of days "before" and "after" what readers surmise is Alaska's suicide (I can't stand spoilers). These placeholders sustain the mood of possibility and foreboding, and the story moves methodically to its ambiguous climax. The language and sexual situations are aptly and realistically drawn, but sophisticated in nature. Miles's narration is alive with sweet, self-deprecating humor, and his obvious struggle to tell the story truthfully adds to his believability. Like Phineas in John Knowles's A Separate Peace(S & S, 1960), Green draws Alaska so lovingly, in self-loathing darkness as well as energetic light, that readers mourn her loss along with her friends. - Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
What Do I Think?
Come on. John Green? Obviously I enjoy this book a lot. This is the second time I read this book. It was honestly better the second time. Being a sixteen-year-old kid with absolutey no friends who has had these same events (or, similar to which) happen, quite recently, actually. The event actually happened while I was reading this, and yeah, I'm crying while typing this. Mhm. Pansy. Well, not really, once you read the book, you'll understand. Forgive me since these past couple of reviews have been suck? It's been a tough.... while.
Book 22: The Sandman: The Dream Hunters
Book 22: The Sandman: the Dream Hunters
By Neil Gailman and Yoshitaka Amano
Vertigo
1999
Rating:
3
From Library Journal
Gaiman's enormously successful Sandman monthly comic book (1989-96), which won eight Eisner awards in a row for comic book excellence, has been collected in a series of equally successful graphic novels. This book, representing Gaiman's first Sandman story in three years, retells Japanese folk tale "The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming." The central characters are the Fox and the Monk, and the Sandman only plays a peripheral role. The book isn't really a graphic novel, as there are roughly 60 pages of typed prose and 60 pages of illustrations. It is an illustrated novel that remains true to both the Japanese tale and the motifs that made the Sandman series so popular. The illustrations are reminiscent of Japanese brush work and gently push the text along. Not the best first Sandman purchase for any library, this book is a necessary purchase if your patrons are Sandman readers, or if your world folk tales collection needs strengthening--Stephen Weiner, Maynard P.L., MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
What Do I think?
This 'novella', graphic novel, or whatever you choose to call it made me think. It made me think about how dreams can capture real life, and how they can alter reality if you let them. Recomended for anyone with a days time and looking for a folk tale to make you think.
By Neil Gailman and Yoshitaka Amano
Vertigo
1999
Rating:
3
From Library Journal
Gaiman's enormously successful Sandman monthly comic book (1989-96), which won eight Eisner awards in a row for comic book excellence, has been collected in a series of equally successful graphic novels. This book, representing Gaiman's first Sandman story in three years, retells Japanese folk tale "The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming." The central characters are the Fox and the Monk, and the Sandman only plays a peripheral role. The book isn't really a graphic novel, as there are roughly 60 pages of typed prose and 60 pages of illustrations. It is an illustrated novel that remains true to both the Japanese tale and the motifs that made the Sandman series so popular. The illustrations are reminiscent of Japanese brush work and gently push the text along. Not the best first Sandman purchase for any library, this book is a necessary purchase if your patrons are Sandman readers, or if your world folk tales collection needs strengthening--Stephen Weiner, Maynard P.L., MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
What Do I think?
This 'novella', graphic novel, or whatever you choose to call it made me think. It made me think about how dreams can capture real life, and how they can alter reality if you let them. Recomended for anyone with a days time and looking for a folk tale to make you think.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Book 21: Night
Book 21: Night
By Elie Wiseal.
Mark Turkov
1960
Rating:
3
Amazon.com Review
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.
What do I think?
Just a pre-note: Yeah, it's a memoir so there should be some kind of different way to evaluate it, but there isn't. Not this time around. All right, it's about the Holocaust and what appen to Elie, so I can't really strike the story, but I can judge how it was written.
It could have been written better. This book does make you think, but it also makes you think how to textually good book. Gramically correct and not trailing off into other stories, I mean.
It wasn't staright forward 'this is what happened and this is how I'm going to tell it.' It kind of skipped from one thing to another a lot of the time, which was troublesome.
By Elie Wiseal.
Mark Turkov
1960
Rating:
3
Amazon.com Review
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.
What do I think?
Just a pre-note: Yeah, it's a memoir so there should be some kind of different way to evaluate it, but there isn't. Not this time around. All right, it's about the Holocaust and what appen to Elie, so I can't really strike the story, but I can judge how it was written.
It could have been written better. This book does make you think, but it also makes you think how to textually good book. Gramically correct and not trailing off into other stories, I mean.
It wasn't staright forward 'this is what happened and this is how I'm going to tell it.' It kind of skipped from one thing to another a lot of the time, which was troublesome.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Book 20: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Book 20: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
By Max Brooks
Crown Publishers
2006
Rating:
4
From Booklist
"The Crisis" nearly wiped out humanity. Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and author of The Zombie Survival Guide, 2003) has taken it upon himself to document the "first hand" experiences and testimonies of those lucky to survive 10 years after the fictitious zombie war. Like a horror fan's version of Studs Terkel's The Good War (1984), the "historical account" format gives Brooks room to explore the zombie plague from numerous different views and characters. In a deadpan voice, Brooks exhaustively details zombie incidents from isolated attacks to full-scale military combat: "what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't!" With the exception of a weak BAT-21 story in the second act, the "interviews" and personal accounts capture the universal fear of the collapse of society--a living nightmare in which anyone can become a mindless, insatiable predator at a moment's notice. Alas, Brad Pitt's production company has purchased the film rights to the book--while it does have a chronological element, it's more similar to a collection of short stories: it would make for an excellent 24-style TV series or an animated serial. Regardless, horror fans won't be disappointed: like George Romero's Dead trilogy, World War Z is another milestone in the zombie mythos. Carlos Orellana
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
What do I think?
I've been told to read this multiple times by so many different people. Skeptic of it's contents, I began to read. By the second chapter, I couldn't put it down (yeah, it actually took me weeks to read). It was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. Brooks is an excellent zombie writter.
By Max Brooks
Crown Publishers
2006
Rating:
4
From Booklist
"The Crisis" nearly wiped out humanity. Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and author of The Zombie Survival Guide, 2003) has taken it upon himself to document the "first hand" experiences and testimonies of those lucky to survive 10 years after the fictitious zombie war. Like a horror fan's version of Studs Terkel's The Good War (1984), the "historical account" format gives Brooks room to explore the zombie plague from numerous different views and characters. In a deadpan voice, Brooks exhaustively details zombie incidents from isolated attacks to full-scale military combat: "what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't!" With the exception of a weak BAT-21 story in the second act, the "interviews" and personal accounts capture the universal fear of the collapse of society--a living nightmare in which anyone can become a mindless, insatiable predator at a moment's notice. Alas, Brad Pitt's production company has purchased the film rights to the book--while it does have a chronological element, it's more similar to a collection of short stories: it would make for an excellent 24-style TV series or an animated serial. Regardless, horror fans won't be disappointed: like George Romero's Dead trilogy, World War Z is another milestone in the zombie mythos. Carlos Orellana
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
What do I think?
I've been told to read this multiple times by so many different people. Skeptic of it's contents, I began to read. By the second chapter, I couldn't put it down (yeah, it actually took me weeks to read). It was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. Brooks is an excellent zombie writter.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Book 19: An Abundance of Katherine's
Book 19: An Abundance of Katherine's.
By John Green
Dutton
2006
Rating:
3.5
From Booklist
Green follows his Printz-winning Looking for Alaska (2005) with another sharp, intelligent story, this one full of mathematical problems, historical references, word puzzles, and footnotes. Colin Singleton believes he is a washed-up child prodigy. A graduating valedictorian with a talent for creating anagrams, he fears he'll never do anything to classify him as a genius. To make matters worse, he has just been dumped by his most recent girlfriend (all of them have been named Katherine), and he's inconsolable. What better time for a road trip! He and his buddy Hassan load up the gray Olds (Satan's Hearse) and leave Chicago. They make it as far as Gutshot, Tennessee, where they stop to tour the gravesite of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and meet a girl who isn't named Katherine. It's this girl, Lindsey, who helps Colin work on a mathematical theorem to predict the duration of romantic relationships. The laugh-out-loud humor ranges from delightfully sophomoric to subtly intellectual, and the boys' sarcastic repartee will help readers navigate the slower parts of the story, which involve local history interviews. The idea behind the book is that everyone's story counts, and what Colin's contributes to the world, no matter how small it may seem to him, will, indeed, matter. An appendix explaining the complex math is "fantastic," or as the anagrammatically inclined Green might have it, it's enough to make "cats faint." Cindy Dobrez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
What I think.
This is my second time reading this book. It's better the second time around. I contected with Colin Singleton and was fixed on his story. I aplaude Green for writing yet another great book.
By John Green
Dutton
2006
Rating:
3.5
From Booklist
Green follows his Printz-winning Looking for Alaska (2005) with another sharp, intelligent story, this one full of mathematical problems, historical references, word puzzles, and footnotes. Colin Singleton believes he is a washed-up child prodigy. A graduating valedictorian with a talent for creating anagrams, he fears he'll never do anything to classify him as a genius. To make matters worse, he has just been dumped by his most recent girlfriend (all of them have been named Katherine), and he's inconsolable. What better time for a road trip! He and his buddy Hassan load up the gray Olds (Satan's Hearse) and leave Chicago. They make it as far as Gutshot, Tennessee, where they stop to tour the gravesite of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and meet a girl who isn't named Katherine. It's this girl, Lindsey, who helps Colin work on a mathematical theorem to predict the duration of romantic relationships. The laugh-out-loud humor ranges from delightfully sophomoric to subtly intellectual, and the boys' sarcastic repartee will help readers navigate the slower parts of the story, which involve local history interviews. The idea behind the book is that everyone's story counts, and what Colin's contributes to the world, no matter how small it may seem to him, will, indeed, matter. An appendix explaining the complex math is "fantastic," or as the anagrammatically inclined Green might have it, it's enough to make "cats faint." Cindy Dobrez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
What I think.
This is my second time reading this book. It's better the second time around. I contected with Colin Singleton and was fixed on his story. I aplaude Green for writing yet another great book.
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