Booked

I have always loved the dystopian genre. I think what the author writes reflects how they view our world and what they think will come of it. Books like these have always captivated me as they transport my imagination into a potential version of the world I see today. This month I read Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials and it led me to question how I believe the world will change in the future. Personally, I believe that unless the majority/ the entire human race changes our way of living we are going to destroy our earth. With that being said I also believe that our earth is on an undefined time limit, meaning that sooner or later our earth will end/ it won't exist anymore whether that is due to climate change and pollution or some other unidentified threat. In the maze runner there was a disease outbreak which eventually led to an apocalypse like world where there was a dictatorship and a rebellion. This view of how our world could unfold made me think about how human actions speci...

      I recently saw a blog post about rereading books, and how enjoyable it can be. This idea is one that I share, and I often reread books that I have enjoyed in the past. I decided after reading that blog post that it was about time I read the Harry Potter series again. I have read this series too many times to count, but almost all of them were in a very short span of time, when I was much younger. Did the magical experience still hold up?     It did. I found myself staying up late night after night reading, and instead of playing videogames in my free time, my nose was stuffed deep into the world of Harry Potter. Just ten minutes ago I finished reading the final book in the series, and I felt very accomplished indeed. This is one series that will never get old for me.      One thing that I found interesting as I was reading was comparing and contrasting my experience of the book now vs. then. When I first read Harry Potter, there was a lot ab...

Why didn't Armando Dippet assassinate Hitler?  I touch on that one later. In other news,      I love urban fantasy. It's great! You can expore the infinite possibilites of magic in the familiar framework of our world. And that's really fun, because magic is fun.      But, if you're some variety of masochist and regularly read what I spew out, you'll know that I put a lot of stock into worldbuilding. And unfortunately, urban fantasy is really, really hard to worldbuild convincingly.      The most important factor in urban fantasy worldbuilding is the question of "how public is the magic?" (in the rest of this blog post, I'll be using "magic" as a catch-all term for fantastical elements in urban fantasy. Sometimes urban fantasy takes the Men in Black route where the magic is actually aliens or something similarly sci-fi, but it has essentially the same impact)      The publicity of magic is rarely a sliding scale; it's almo...

     Ghostwriters are authors who write works that are credited to someone else. The work itself could be a novel, song, or movie. This week, I'm gonna take a look at some interesting cases of alleged ghostwriters you may not know about. Keep in mind that the point of being a ghostwriter is to not be known, so a lot of ghostwriting cases can be made up of rumors.  James Bond      Ian Flemming's famous series was most likely written by himself. The one book people suspect may have been ghostwritten is The man in the Golden Gun . It had been published after his death. Apparently, Flemming had written all the novel but wasn't entirely happy with it. After his death, the publisher sent the book to Kingsley Amis to look over. The publisher says that Amis did not add anything to the book. Of course, rumors spread about how Amis did make changes, perhaps adding to the book or entirely rewriting it. Like most ghostwriting cases, we don't know the tru...

 Last month I was captivated by Aesop's fables short stories mixed with life lessons. Because of how much I enjoyed the reading I decided to finish the book this month and I wanted to share with you some of the fables that stuck out to me. THE FOX IN THE WELL An unlucky Fox having fallen into a well was able, by dint of great effort, to keep his head barely above water. While he was there struggling, and sticking his claws into the side of the well, a wolf came by and looked in. "What my dear brother," said he, with concerned concern, " can it really be you that I see down there? How cold you must feel! How long have you been in? How did you fall in? I am so pained to see you. Do tell me about it!" " The end of the rope would be of more use to me than all your pity," answered the fox. "Just help me to set my foot once more on solid ground, and you shall have the whole story." saying well is good, but doing well is better -PG. 91  This is one ...

     Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.       Every Day is a book about a being named "A", who is cursed. Every day, A wakes up in a different person's body, and has to live their life for them. The person that A wakes up in can be tall or short, fat or thin, boy or girl, as long as they are around the age of A, and in the same part of the world. Because of this curse, A learns firsthand how it feels to have abusive parents, or be morbidly obese, or even blind. A learns all about other people's lives, but never anything about how to live "his" own. I say "his" because I think of A as a him since I usually identify with the main character when I read books, but really A is genderfluid.     As the book progresses, A finds love when he wakes up in the body of a bad boyfriend named Justin. The girl Justin is dating, Rhiannon, tries to be kind to Justin, and cares about him a lot, even tho...

     Oh boy, a catchy title that makes a massive generalization.       What I'm about to talk about probably isn't the worst trope in fantasy. But it's definitely one of the weirdest, especially in contemporary literature.      For some reason, fantasy authors just LOVE monarchies.      I don't get it. Pretty much every fantasy book that I've read (that involves succession or just a king, which is most of them) implicitly supports monarchies. Sure, they have the evil king Mazgarazoth, iron-fisted tyrant of the grim lands of Scary Sadness. But, opposing the vile blackguard is the good king John, who rules his lands with a soft hand and loves his subjects. He also somehow maintains the economy even though he takes pity and lets peasants not pay taxes, and also, quite luckily, is descended from a long line of similarly paragon rulers, and his son is virtuous and angelic, and will grow into a good king.      (If...

     Recently, I watched the movie News of the World by director Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks. It intrigued me as a story, and I looked into whether it was based on a true story. The film is actually an adaptation of the 2016 novel News of the World by Paulette Jiles. Upon further googling, I found out that the book's characters and events are loosely based on multiple other real people and their stories.     The first inspiration for it was the book The Captured , about the author, Scott Zesch's ancestor Adolph Korn. Korn was captured by Apaches when he was 10, and was traded to Comanches. He adapted to their lifestyle and trained fighting against US soldiers and settlers. He was forcibly returned to white society but never adapted back to it.       Another inspiration to the book was Kiowa Dutch. Jiles recalled how she would search for photographs of Comanche or Kiowa captives. One photo she found was of Kiowa Dutch "a mysterious ...

 This month I read Aesop's fables which is essentially a book filled with short stories/ fables with a moral of the story written at the end of the fable. Aesop fables is an unconventional reading choice but I still feel like it's really fun if you wanted to just add a little bit of diversity in your reading selection.  One of my all time favorite fables was/is the ants and the grasshopper:  A Grasshopper that had merrily sung all summer was almost perishing with hunger in the winter. So she went to some Ants that lived near, and asked them to lend her a little food they had put by. "You shall certainly be paid before this time of year comes again," said she. "What did you do all the summer?" asked they. "Why, all day long and all night long I sang, if you please," answered the grasshopper. "Oh you sang, did you?" said the Ants. "Now, then you can dance."  Provide today for the future. I really enjoyed this fable because I int...

     I noticed very recently that I needed to write a blog post this week, and to my dismay I had nothing to write about. I thought about different concepts such as discussing why popular video game "Among Us" is referenced so often, but nothing really interested me. Then, I thought about short stories. These take little time to read and still can be as immersing as a full-length book. My parents love short stories, so there were plenty around the house. One book that drew my eye was a book of short stories by Roald Dahl, which was called, "The Best of Roald Dahl". One of these stories, called "The Sound Machine", was very entertaining, and I would like to share it with you.     T his story is about an eccentric man named Klausner, who is working on a machine to detect sound out of the range of human ears. The sounds that humans can't hear are the sounds he wants to listen to, and he wants to know who or what is making them. This sound machine is descr...

Harry Potter's worldbuilding makes absolutely no sense. Why doesn't Hogwarts help the outside world? Why do they use one of the slowest birds to transport their mail? Why are they giving 11-year-olds weapons that can do anything from light stray fires to instantly kill people? Wouldn't that be considered highly illegal in a place like England, a country with pretty strict gun control? These kinds of simple questions tear down the worldbuilding and reveal it as the charlatan act that it is, right? The worldbuilding doesn't make logical sense, so it's objectively bad, right? Right? No. (You already knew the answer to that question, you read the title) If you're reading this, I'll assume that you've already read the Harry Potter books, because they're the Harry Potter books. If you haven't, even better! Let's run with that latter assumption. You may have never read the books, or watched the movies, but you've still almost certainly heard of ...

 Arsène Lupin is a french fictional character who not many outside of France know. If you are french, however, you have most likely heard of him the same way we have heard about James Bond or Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes specifically is compared to Lupin a lot, however, they have one large difference. Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries, he is a detective, but Arsène Lupin is on the other side of the law, he is a gentleman burglar.     Arsène Lupin was introduced in a series of short stories in the Magazine "Je Sais Tout" in 1905 by the author Maurice Leblanc. Leblanc continued with his character and wrote many more books. In the next 36 years, he wrote 17 novels and 39 novellas about Lupin. He even wrote an additional 4 stage-plays about Lupin. Getting back to the Sherlock Holmes comparison, Holmes was featured in some of the Lupin installments (in some installments he was named "Herlock Sholmes" because of legal battles with Arthur Conan Doyle). Leblanc only stop...

This is a fanfic based off of Dave Pelzers, A Child Called It , The Lost Boy, and A Man Named Dave. These books are true stories based off of Pelzer's traumatic childhood. I decided to take the father character and create a fictional storyline based on his life  after he left Dave’s mother. This story isn’t told in the fathers perspective but is told from the perspective of the victim similar to Pelzer's books. In Pelzer's books the father is described as being a weak, frequently drunk father, who rarely stands up to Catherine Roerva Pelzer, his wife(the abuser in Pelzer's books) In my story because Stephen( the father) had no power in his previous marriage it leads to him seeking that validation and  becoming the abuser in his new marriage continuing the cycle of abuse he attempted to leave in his past. Abilene-  I remember the day I realized my life wasn’t perfect. The happy life my parents pretended to live began to fade. It was like a wallpaper peeling off of a wa...

     I was looking for a good read recently, and my mom recommended a series called "The Keepers", because it was written by a colleague of hers, Ted Sanders. This series is about a group of people known as Keepers, who have powers because of the magical instruments, called Tanu, that they possess. They face off against the Riven, who are corrupted and evil versions of long limbed, humanoid creatures called Altari, makers of the Tanu. These Riven have the intent of taking all Tanu from humankind, claiming that they belong only to their species. It is a series aimed at teenagers and it is a coming of age story. I suggest you read it if you haven't, because it really is a treat.     Anyways, I was burning through the series, and was hoping for something more to read once I was done. Out of the blue (thanks mom), Ted emailed me with a extra chapter from book one, which was cut during the writing process. Now this was exciting. The author of the series I was ea...

     Blog post comments are important. They're a fairly significant portion of our grade, and as such we write approximately one every week. With these stakes, you don't want to mess it up. As such, I, the alpha-level intellectual who is never wrong and is happily willing to inform the inferior mortals of my mystical techniques, will now inform the inferior mortals of my mystical techniques.      Now, here's an important thing to remember: Reading the blog post is not necessary to comment. It's really a waste of time that you could spend playing video games or something. Instead, read the title. Next, consider the following question: Have I read this book?      This is very important to know, as it will dictate how the rest of your comment will go. Speaking of the rest of your comment, let's talk about the rest of your comment. (That was a smooth segue, wasn't it?)     The first sentence of your comment will usually either a) agree ...

Fiction makes up the content of many books for us now, but it was not always like that. For a long time, books were thought of as always being truthful. Most people only saw books in a church, like the Bible. Monks would study books about science and philosophy. So it is no surprise that books were assumed to be telling the truth. When reading fiction, one would usually come into it knowing the book is not genuine. People did not have that mental agreement back then. Books could be fictional in those times, but people may not have always known. There were many fictional tales about Alexander. According to those tales, he could fly in an airplane or go underwater in a glass barrel submarine. These stories were popular in the Middle Ages. They got rewritten so many times, that at some point people realized they are fiction. The first real fiction book may have been King Arthur. Prior books may be fictional, but most people use fiction as when both reader and author know the book is not r...

Horror is one of my all time favorite genres to read, write, watch, and talk about. The main question I always find myself asking is what makes horror so scary to people. In my personal experience I have never found horror to scare me, killer in the woods; I wouldn't be in the woods. Supernatural entities; they don't exist. So I  always wondered why people were so afraid of an either easily avoidable situation or an impossible scenario. Then it occurred to me that people's fears lie within the unknown. What we cannot explain nor understand scares us. We fear things like the dark because we cannot see what lies in the shadows. Movies like It, Us, Truth or Dare, Clown, Paranormal Activity, and Before I Wake are all classified as horror movies. I have seen them all and the main thing I think that the writers and directors capitalized on is people's fear of the unknown. Clown is the perfect example of a movie that leaves your skin crawling solely because of the lack of know...

 The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green, is a well written and captivating book. It follows the story of a teenage girl named Hazel. Years ago she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and she is already past her life expectancy. She has been spending her days sitting at home and watching bad tv, having been taken out of school several years ago. She attends a cancer support group from time to time, where she meets a boy named Augustus Waters. Pretty quickly they fall in love, and experience the ups and downs of life together. This book is great. It's funny, and I think it does a surprisingly good job at portraying the mind of a teenager. It's a good romance novel, and it does a great job at making you feel sympathy for cancer patients, but that isn't all its about, either. It's also a tragedy. It teaches a lesson that a lot happens in life that isn't fair. Suffering is inevitable, a part of life, a side effect. Not everything goes to plan, either, so when you find somethi...

    Just so I set the right expectations, remember that this is not a review of the Ranger's Apprentice series and its companion series, The Brotherband Chronicles. There is already an excellent review of by Grace To on Book Bloggers in the Chat; read that if you're looking for quality content. Rather, this post is a look at the bizarre worldbuilding lurking below the surface of Ranger's Apprentice, from the point of view of someone who picks apart poor worldbuilding for fun. Part 1: The bad      Throughout books three through seven, the worldbuilding is what most would consider low-effort, distilled, subpar, culture-appropriating garbage. Essentially, each nation is composed of the most basic stereotypes of a given ethnic group. Flanagan doesn't even try to hide this. Skandia? Hey, that sounds kind of like Scandinavia, which makes sense. Skandia is basically all viking myths compressed into a small, icy package. All Skandian men are massive, musclebound bootle...

 Before anything else, I want to say that this book is not light at all. It depicts gruesome and graphic scenes, and it is very dark. I will also talk about some scenes in the book including the ending, so a spoiler warning should be said too. All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul Bäumer, a German soldier who enlisted in World War One at 20 years old, and his group. The novel was published in 1929 and written by Erich Maria Remarque, who served in the war himself. It features strong themes of how the war has destroyed each one of the soldiers. The novel is not perfectly written, which I would not expect of a translated book from 90 years ago. However, it amazes me how it can be so descriptive. There are paragraphs where it only talks about the details of a forest going by while on a train.  The main characters are not heroes. They don't even think of themselves as heroes; they only fight for their lives. One of the strongest scenes in the whole book points this out. I w...