Booked

     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...

    It's 1934 the dust bowl and Billie Jo is just trying to survive. Out of the dust is an award winning lyrical novel that tells the tale of 14 year old Billie Joe. Billie Jo is from Oklahoma during the dust bowl years throughout this sorrowful story Billie Jo must learn to navigate through her life even though everything she loves has slowly been ripped out of her life one by one.     Billie Jo's life was as normal as it could get when you're a 14 year old girl living in the dust bowl. Billie Jo shared a passion for playing the piano with her mother; and she loved her daddy like there was no tomorrow. But within the blink of an eye Billie Joe's seemingly normal life goes up in flames. Her mother is gone and the one thing she shared with her is nothing but a painful memory. Billie Jo's father is nothing but a shell of the man he once was, a living memory of the past. Billie Jo must learn to live with the physical and mental pain she has been subj...