Review #15 - Richard III by William Shakespeare

Sanne posted a video with Rosianna about 10 Shakespeare plays you should read:

Richard III
A Midsummer Night's Dream (read 2008)
Othello
Much Ado About Nothing
King Lear
The Taming of the Shrew
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Twelfth Night (read 2011)
The Tempest (read 2012)

I decided to start at the top of the list with Richard III. This is the first Shakespeare I've read out of school and I really liked it.

I loved the characters Richard and Elizabeth. Richard is such a brilliant villain and I loved Queen Elizabeth for her love and overall sass. Like literally, she's amazing. The plot involving Queen Elizabeth's sons is the part of history that I know well involving Richard III due to frequent childhood trips to the Tower of London. I just loved how positively she was portrayed and how strong she was, which could have been due to her namesake on the throne at the time.

Shakespeare is famous among school children because no one can understand any of the play but I did with Richard III which was absolutely fantastic. The writing was clear yet it still was as gorgeous as Shakespeare always is.

I had a little confusion at the beginning because I couldn't work out when Richard was going to appear and oh that Glocester seems like a douche oh wait they're the same person. Read a character summary beforehand.

This was the first Shakespeare I've read where I understood why Shakespeare is the most popular author of all time. I would really recommend it.

I gave it four stars.

Review #14 - Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

Where can I start with Me and Earl and the Dying Girl? Should I start with the fact it's the most overhyped teen novel, possibly ever? Or maybe that it compromised pace for humour? Or the fact that it makes you feel ugly inside when you finish?

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is about a guy, Greg, his best friend Earl (they make films together) and Rachel, his ex from elementary school, who has cancer.

Ok, we'll start with the positive. Some bits were funny and the narrative was bearable (damned by faint praise). I did laugh out loud at parts and that is high praise indeed. I never laugh out loud at fiction in general (TV, books etc) with the exception of tots tv. So the narrative could be funny.

The cover is gorgeous. It feels amazing and it is just really pretty. If you want to buy this book it should just do it for the cover.

My main complaint is that I didn't like Greg at all as a hero or even antihero. He blamed people all the time for his own shortcomings and problems, especially Rachel. I also found he was incredibly selfish, and no, I won't accept that "that is just how teenagers are" stuff because we're not at all. I didn't warm to him at all.

I found that the narrative was good at first, however it slowly became forced and laboured. It just became tedious and repetitive. It just wasn't entertaining like a book should be.

It was also very morbid for a book about cancer when it should be uplifting or sad like TFIOS but this didn't feel as real as TFIOS. It just felt depressing and morbid.

I gave this one star.

Review #13 - The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg

 The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg is a graphic novel centred around one man in a mixture of myths and legends.

This is probably one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.

Each picture is a lino print in these really beautiful rich dark colours with some reds and yellows. If you don't like graphic novels get this book just so it looks good on your coffee table. You never get bored of looking at it, only more and more amazed at how pretty it is. All the words are in the artist's/author's handwriting. It's just gorgeous.

The book has one main plot with many little stories woven into it, much like a season of Veronica Mars ("yes, Veronica Mars has taken over my life" she writes while listening to the Season 1 Soundtrack). Each story can be one page spread to six or seven page spreads with pages being one piece of art to a comic-book-format (both shown in the photos above).

There's a really beautiful mixing of myths, including famous Christian ones (Noah and the Whale) to ones no one has ever heard of before. I loved the twists that the author had put on them. It was just really gorgeous.

I book leaves you with a warm, glowy feeling and do you really need anything else from a book? It's pretty, it belongs on a coffee table, it's a nice mix of old and new, it has a good plot and it leaves you feeling good.

I gave this 5 stars. This is definitely a good starter to graphic novels.

Buy it here (also I get 5% commission so pretty please?)

Review #12 - The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

I've sat here for about a week and a half with writers block for this review. I didn't want to fail my challenge of reviewing every book this year and therefore, sort of, stopped reading. 

I've been struggling to write this review because I really liked it because it was a page turner mostly but I have a lot of criticisms with the book and I couldn't review it sounding positive. So you have been forewarned. I really liked it. Now I'm going to tear it to shreds.

Ok I pinched the blurb off goodreads. I'm just not good at marketing.

Meet Don Tillman.

Don is getting married.

He just doesn't know who to yet.

But he has designed a very detailed questionnaire to help him find the perfect woman.

One thing he already knows, though, is that it's not Rosie.

Absolutely, completely, definitely not.

Don Tillman is a socially challenged genetics professor who's decided the time has come to find a wife. His questionnaire is intended to weed out anyone who's unsuitable. The trouble is, Don has rather high standards and doesn't really do flexible so, despite lots of takers, he's not having much success in identifying The One.

When Rosie Jarman comes to his office, Don assumes it's to apply for the Wife Project - and duly discounts her on the grounds she smokes, drinks, doesn't eat meat, and is incapable of punctuality. However, Rosie has no interest in becoming Mrs Tillman and is actually there to enlist Don's assistance in a professional capacity: to help her find her biological father.

Sometimes, though, you don't find love: love finds you...

The narrative annoyed me. The lead was hinted at having Aspergers but I didn't warm to his tedious narrative like I warmed to the beautiful narrative of The Curious Incident by Mark Haddon. I didn't feel Don had any personality and lacked something that makes a character whole. He was academically prejudiced and was self-centred.

As a general rule, I avoid any book with the word "hilarious" on the back. This book was "hilarious." I found the humour wasn't funny. In Simsion's defense, I believe comedy relies on timing and you can not get that in books without clever punctuation. It was just very slapstick and sort of 12-year-old-boy-humour, which I feel like I've outgrown (nb. overheard 12 year old boys on bus: "would you rather have a bus full of money or a wife?").

The ending was very mishmashed and this was my main criticism of this book. It felt very rushed and not possible. I didn't really like it after this big build up it just left me feeling like I'd been robbed.

In the book's defence, even though Don is a terrible character, Rosie is fantastic. Also there are scene's in New York which are just beautiful.

I gave this four stars.

Today is for...

This is a blog response to the amazing Rosianna Halse Rojas.

• Actually catching the train that gets you in on time
• Getting to eat a fake-bacon sandwich on the train
• Walking three miles
• Painting your nails metallic red
• Watching the lego movie
• Blogging
• Tidying and organising and feeling productive
• Reading books about your train journey
• Stroking your tfios poster
• Wearing too much sparkly eyeshadow
• Understanding maths for the first time in forever
• Referencing Frozen
• Listening to Taylor Swift (inevitably) and Radical Face and Sara Bareilles and the Frozen Soundtrack and Mulan
• Singing Animal by Neon Trees in your house for house singing
• Coming last in house singing
• Watching more and more Rosianna
• Organising that mass of lego and stationary on your desk
• Hoping your head of year doesn't mind you've decided to wear a bright orange jacket to school
• Organising your make up into clear perspex drawers
• Having a clear out of your clothes
• Not caring that your hair has gone super curly because rain
• Changing into your comfiest clothes that still make you productive
• Making up a Seasons of Love version named "The Pug of Love"
• Writing with your new super positive pen
• Trying to decide where you want to apply for work experience
• Doing your physio
• Planning which flowers to buy when you go to Columbia Road

Happy Valentine's Day.

Stacking the Shelves #1

I feel like I'm only writing reviews. Don't get me wrong, writing reviews is something I really enjoy (even if I do have writers block with the Rosie Project) but I feel like we need more variation. I especially feel this as I don't carry my slr as much due to my bad back so I don't post much photography. I like books though. I may do a fashion post soon, yay or nay?

Anyway I like buying books. I have a book haul.

Stacking the shelves is a blogging meme from Tynga's Reviews which I stole from Lauren Hannah. I've uploaded all the photos to my flickr and I'm pretty darn proud of them.

Book Depository

Looking For Alaska by John Green (embarrassingly this is my second copy)
Me, Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton

£2 Bookstore
Nil Nil by Don Paterson

Waterstones Trip

Eve & Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

Waterstones Gift Card (I have been in spasm for two weeks and my mum gave me a Waterstones gift card and I bought some extravagant books and it was awesome)

Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg
Anatomy for Dummies

WH Smiths Paddington (incidentally two different trips but the same bookshop)

Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time by Dominic Utton
Wonderland Issue February/March (it's a book. Really. It's huge.)

Review #10 - Enron by Lucy Prebble

Enron is the famous story of the company Enron's collapse. I didn't even know this existed until by friend Aimee pressed it into my hand so we could have fun train literary discussions.

The plot was really interesting. I'm normally not a fan of "true stories" because I often end up uninterested by them but woah was this good. The dialouge and imagery really helped with this, as well as the choppy sentences as Enron started to collapse.

One image in particular I loved. Raptors are used to demonstrate the other companies in Enron.  The only thing is I didn't know if the author meant the eagle or the dinosaur. I read it thinking of it as the dinosaur but eagle seems to make more sense because of eagles representing the American Dream. The Raptors were good visual representatives of what was happening. How do I love thee metaphors? Let me count the ways.

I feel like Sofia Coppella's The Bling Ring was influenced by this play, in the dialouge and the way the story feels. However The Bling Ring is much more extravagant than this play.

There was one scene (scene two) that seemed to have no real input into the plot of the play. I did find out that it was about the relationships between two of the characters but it could have been done more tastefully.

In the theatre there is an expression called "breaking the fourth wall" (I learned this from scrubs videos on YouTube). Enron did it all the time, characters addressed the audience. I didn't like this. Perhaps it's to do with the fact in school plays I was always always a narrator (seriously I've been a tree, skeleton, viking, roman and a sheep narrator on different occasions) and this felt like the play was being narrated. I also felt it was a lazy way to explain what was going on.

Overall I'd give this four stars but also I'd put it on "books to read before you die" because of its relevance to politics and culture.

Review #11 - How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

How I Live Now is in every Waterstones in the country on those little tables selling the best of teen fiction in three different editions. Waterstones, I trusted you. You betrayed that trust.

How I Live Now is a book about World War III. An American teenage girl, Daisy, goes to England and gets stuck there for the war. It's basically her story.

I did not like this book.

It was boring and lengthy. It had the typical characteristic of a Meg Rosoff novel of being quite short but it feels like it goes on forever. The beginning was good, the end was rushed and how the middle dragged on. The plot was stretched out when really the basic premise wasn't that good anyway.

Now there is something very famous about this book that I had an issue with (semi-spoiler ahead). Daisy falls in love with her cousin. It is not cute. It is not a good love plot. It is incestuous and weird and you have practically the same dna stop. Eugh why would you write a love story between cousins. There is a stigma there but that is because you have the same DNA.

The book was gory. Horribly so. That was definitely a negative. I know war is awful but seriously Meg Rosoff could have just made up a complicated metaphor you did not need to try and shock me. It just took away from the book that I already didn't like.

I hated Daisy as a character. She was annoying and spoilt and delusioned. I felt like she was an image of a teenage thrust upon my by a woman without teenagers. I felt like she was a child in a teenagers body but with anger and hormones. "But isn't that what a teenager is?" No. We are far more complicated than a 2D drawing. We are not Daisy. Her anger was annoying and I just ended up with
no compassion for her.

*trigger warning* (spoilers) Daisy has an eating disorder throughout the book. I found this far too subtle and again, overly two dimentional. She should have been more frequent with the references or
open. Ok trigger over.

Overall it was two stars. Almost one.

January 2014 Wrap Up

Books I've Read This Month:
1. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (★★★★☆)

Because wherever you may be, you need a Muppets Christmas Carol Gif.

2.  It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini (★★★★★)
3. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins (★★★★★)
4. Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony (★★☆☆☆)
5. This Is What Happy Looks Like by Jennifer E. Smith (★★☆☆☆)
6. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (★★★★★)
7. Eve & Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate (★★★☆☆)
8. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde (★★★☆☆)
9. The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan (★★★☆☆)
10. Enron by Lucy Prebble (★★★★☆)
11. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff  (★★☆☆☆)
12. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (★★★★☆)

London Count: 2

Blog posts:
2013
It's Kind of a Funny Story
Goodbye Youtube
Why do I blog?
Sophie, no one cares.
My Bloggiversary

Book related posts:
2013 Reading Challenge
Review: A Geek's Guide to Dating by Eric Smith
New Years Resolution #6
Review #1 - A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Review #3 - Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
Bout of Books Challenge
Review #2 - It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
Should I buy a kindle? (aka the one with the maths)
Review #4 - Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral (aka the one with the Lindsay Lohan movie gifs)
Review #5 - This Is What Happy Looks Like by Jennifer E Smith
My Ultimate To Buy/TBR list
Access to stories
Review #6 - When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
Review #7 - Eve and Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate
Review #8 - The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde

1. I want to do well academically On track for my medicine grades *parties*
2. I want to get interviews for medicine  (n/a)
3. I want to start writing a novel  YES YES FINALLY HAPPENING
4. I want to get well enough to go to South Africa with Biology. MY CONSULTANT SAYS I CAN GO
5. I want to write more. Definitely. I write so much
6. I want to write more reviews. Doing well so far :)
7. I want to blog more consistently Need a couple more reviews but doing well
8. I want to do more for my future. W/E finding is starting to get off the ground
9. I want to take more photos.  Not going well.
10. I want to keep my room tidy. Better than expected . Struggling at the moment due to back issues, but it's not a bomb site.
11. I want to be more productive.  Much better. Like I've minimised procrastinating by a lot.
12. I want to stop being terrified of growing up. Not going well. My bio teacher gave me this speech about how "we're pressured to grow up" and all I wanted to say was "I'm the girl that plays Disney Infinity instead of partying." 

It's actually quite tiring being a nerd.

Review #9 - The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

This is going to be a short review because I don't have that much to say. On a completely unrelated topic, I need to write notes while reading.

This is a book who's love story is written as dictionary entries. It goes through their relationship this way.

I am a huge David Levithan fan, just putting it out there in advance. I actually saw him at Cheltenham last October and it was awesome. I loved Every Day and just DAVID LEVITHAN FAN CLUB.

So I read this book with anticipation. I'd heard it was his best work to date, it was clever, it was 

funny.

It was just above average.

So this book is a less artsy version of Why We Broke Up apart from it focused on the relationship itself. The narrative hops about,  which I suppose is because it's done alphabetically. A clever and very Levithanesque thing about this book as it never defines the genders or sexualities of the characters.  You make it fit you.

I struggled a bit with some of the definitions as the words were just not in my vocabulary.  I felt like that took away from the experience. Also the characters were quite distant. This caused me to not get emotionally involved with the characters, which is a shame as it would have brought a new level to the book which it lacked. It felt shallow.

Overall it was a three star book.

I would recommend this if you liked Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler or Every Seventh Wave by Daniel Glattauer.