Return From The Reading Slump

For whoever is reading this: sorry I haven't posted in so long! Allow me to apologize using this hilarious SNL clip:

I don't know what season this was from but it just keeps cracking me up! Vegetarian chili and guacamolito sauce, my god! How do they come up with this stuff?

But yeah, I've been in a sort of reading slump. It's been partly because of school restarting (which means having that homework load) and partly because of swim season starting, yay!!! I now have my daily dose of chlorine perfume and my arms are aching from churning the water ALL READY and it's only been a week. This season is even more special because two of my best friends, Adrie and Thomas, joined too. WE'RE ALL ON JV TOGETHER! Which means we spend that much more time together being reckless teenagers!

And even though I feel so much better seeing my friends daily at the personal hell known as school and I'm SO much happier back in my swimming groove, I just haven't been able to read lately because the book I was reading (and thankfully just finished) was SOOOOOO LOOOOOONG.

Enter Stephen King's Wizard and Glass, the 4th installment in the Dark Tower series out of 7. Isn't that depressing? I'm only halfway done.

Don't get me wrong, I love this series. It's just that this particular book seemed to be really DENSE. It started off well, returning to Roland the gunslinger, his friends Eddie from New York, Susannah, and Jake the kid, plus their talking weasel-dog thing, Oy. They were trapped on a moody monorail that they had to outriddle (I know, how does King come up with these things?).

But then it turns out half the book is a return to Roland's past to detail how he started his quest for the tower from the ashes of his first love, which sounds breathtaking but a lot of it just got to be too much for me to follow. It just got a bit depressing!

Fortunately the book picked up again with a good ending even though it was a bit bland. There are also some tie-ins to The Wizard of Oz which I thought was REALLY cool; I love when authors use allusions as allegories, if that makes sense.

I also just borrowed a book from Adrie since we just had this huge killer sleepover with TONS OF SUGAR! It's called, I Am Neurotic by Lianna Kong.

And boy is it hilarious.

It's a collection of confessions, basically; confessions of random people who have odd idiosyncracies and weird habits that make them neurotic. The funny part is as you're reading this book, you find yourself thinking, HOLY CRAP I DO THAT!!! Like the dude who liked his toilet paper to roll from the top. I SO have that problem, only I don't obsess about it like he does.

Then there are the ones you read and you go, How do they live? There are people who have to have twelve chocolate chips in each cookie, people who punch shower curtains to make sure there's nobody hiding in the shower waiting to get them, even people who can only eat the middle of foods... like sandwiches, for instance.

So this book was entertaining (and a quick read, took me less than an hour) and I recommend buying it... or hiding out in your local bookstore and just reading it there.

Well, time to go get out a new book to celebrate the full recovery from my reader's slump. Maybe I'll read outside... then I must pack my swim bag for a double practice day tomorrow. Yay, right? If this keeps up, I may not be posting as often as I have been for the past month, but I'll try REALLY hard. Promise.

"Today is the first day I am not dead."

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is ow I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to. When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.
~The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

How cool would it be if we all lived this way? Just threw caution to the wind and lived each day as if it was a new gift that could never be taken for granted? I think we'd all be a lot happier. We all know that's not how it goes, but maybe this should be my New Year's Resolution. Or one of them, besides eating less processed foods (failed) and buying no new books (still got that one).

This book is from the point of view of a dog. Just putting that out there. Now normally this can be a little odd because dogs don't think like people do, but this one pretty much does. His name is Enzo, and he understands human life. And whatever he doesn't understand, he explains with the wonder and patience of an outside trying to learn.

Another warning: this book is horribly sad. There are some bad people in this book, and they do bad things, and Enzo the dog is witness to them all. That's what so sad; this innocent dog has to watch his owner go through such turmoil, and by the end of the book even though it's supposed to be happy, you're still crying.

Still, an amazing, amazing book (I can't emphasize that enough) and I thank my friend Sean for making me want to read it.

The DOOM and GLOOM Post

Okay, here comes all the downer stuff to make up for that super-happy gushy post. Let's start with this depressing but amazing book I read.

The Hollow People by Brian Keaney is definitely one I'm loaning to my friends. It starts off in a weird reality: in a world where dreams and free-thinking are all but forbidden, Dante is a kitchen boy at the asylum, the lowest of the low.

He has never known love because he didn't know his parents and nobody cares for him; his mother was a patient at the asylum who killed herself (or so Dante was told). He is given the unwanted jobs such as cleaning up the cells or taking prisoners their food. Life is pretty blah until he meets Bea, a girl dreading her coming-of-age ceremony who also thinks outside the box.

Together with the freaky new prisoner, Ezekiel, they discover and rebel against their oppression. A phenomenally great book.

I can't even say why it's so amazing, it just is. The writing, how it's so realistic even though nothing like this has ever happened... maybe that's another reason I love it so much, the idea is so fresh. It's kind of like The Giver (another of my favorites) only DARKER, if you can imagine that.

Now another video game addiction: BIOSHOCK! This game is gory as heck, really creepy (so don't start off playing at like midnight, like I did), and totally twisted, but I am in love.

This game has an AMAZING setting: the underwater city of Rapture, where everything has gone to the Splicers (zombie-like creatures that would just LOVE a human sandwich). The atmosphere takes your breath away, with creepy corridors and rundown buildings, with little tidbits from the sixties, since that's the time period.

I want to post a better screenshot on here, but unfortunately it's all too violent. So if you want to see more, go look it up or buy it yourself, at your own risk. Because as much as I highly recommend this game, it's not for the intestinally weak. This is the same reason I couldn't post the video promo. =)

This is also my first shooter game, meaning it's first person. It's a little hard to get used to, but I don't mind it as much as I thought I would... just the screen is really dark on some parts so you have to adjust the brightness a lot at first until you're used to it, and it's also a little unnerving to not be able to see someone coming up behind you. I got clubbed so many times because of that. Fortunately, I have a wrench and a pistol, and nothing can stop me in this game.

My Rainbows and Butterflies Post

It's only fitting that this post should be written in PINK. The reason for the title is everything in this post is happy (or at least, comparatively happy when you look at my next post).

Starting off, SONIC! We got an XBox360 for Christmas and one of the games was Sonic the Hedgehog.

When I was little, I would play this game on our old Sega Genesis for HOURS. So I was a little wary of a new Sonic game; would it blow my mind or would I be sadly disappointed? But I didn't have to worry, for it is AMAZING!

The graphics are cool, the storyline's pretty good (and it corresponds with the characters in the original games), and it's actually pretty challenging. More than once I have spent a day completely stumped trying to figure out how the heck to beat certain levels.

Unfortunately, the game is the same as the old Sonic in that it doesn't let you save very much. On the classic Sonic, you couldn't save AT ALL, and if you were lucky you could get a Continue option to start off at the last zone you started. Your best hope was to rack up lives.

In this game, you have to be in a town (not on a mission or specific level) to save, but if you go straight from a mission to a boss, it does give you a save option, which is way more than you get in the first game. Still, it sucks to play whole levels over because you got stuck and quit.

Subject change: do you remember the Bumpus hounds from "A Christmas Story"? The ones who ate that dang Christmas turkey? Well they're in this book! Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories by Jean Shepherd. This classic comedian brings us more anecdotes of growing up, most of these from his late childhood to teenage years.

This book was much enjoyed. The stories were hilarious and many will relate to his nostalgic experiences, especially the dreaded prom night. There were times where I found myself smiling and laughing at things I had done out of this book too, and then there were other times where I was cringing as I read about the poor kid asking out a girl from "the good side of town" to a movie at the dinky run-down theater. That was the night he realized what social barriers were.

My favorite had to be the Bumpus story, involving those pesky Bumpus hounds. His descriptions of their horrid neighbors is so stereotypical yet so insanely unbelievable that you can't help but laugh. It almost reminded me of Cletus from The Simpsons.

Get the picture?

It's Winter Break and I'm Not Allowed Out. What Else Do I Have To Do?

So I read. I'm at home this whole week doing nothing except reading, running with my dog, watching random movies (ZOMBIELAND!) playing Sims, playing Drake's Fortune, and playing Sonic. Speaking of video games, I should play more today.

But I finally finished Pride and Prejudice on my Kindle! This is the cover I found on wikipedia.org... I kind of like the old look. Of course on my Kindle the only thing that looks old about it is the language.

I'm really starting to like Jane Austen. She was like the Meg Cabot of her time: gossipy, seemingly vapid, but actually writing with the strong intention of telling a great story always kept in mind. She definitely knows how to employ the whole satire aspect, poking fun at upper-class snobbery that people like the Bennets have to live through.

And the Bennet parents in this CRACK ME UP. The mom is just SO COMPLETELY INSANE! Her ambition in life is to have all her daughters marry well, to people with high titles, and she is simply frivolous. The way her husband deals with her is by rolling his eyes and trying to come to compromises between the frivolity of living an aristocratic life and his way of reason, but there are times when he puts his foot down. Luckily, his daughter Elizabeth, the protagonist, takes after her father and not her mother as much.

The one part I didn't like: Mr. Darcy. He was too much of a downer in the first parts of the book. Lydia entertained me though, as did Miss Catherine de Bourgh in all her snootiness.

Second book:

The World's Worsts, organized and compounded by Les Krantz and Sue Sveum.

This book was so flippin' ENTERTAINING! I found the worst lawsuits, worst celebrity marriages (Drew Barrymore was listed TWICE in that category), worst deaths, EVERYTHING! There were things I never needed to know that I now know and am much happier for knowing.

Like how America doesn't have enough hospital beds for its population and how Titanic was a really bad idea (although I already was catching on to that one. But if it wasn't built, then Jack and Rose would never have met!)

I highly recommend this book if you like randomly uselessly awesome knowledge. Weird looks from your friends guaranteed.

I also read an E. L. Konigsberg book, The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World. This book is actually a companion to her other book, Outcasts at 19 Schuyler Place, my favorite book by her, so I was excited to read it.

What I didn't realize about her style of writing until now is, it really isn't middle-grade fiction like they say it is! This book was FILLED with allusions from older works of art and literature and references to events that happened WAY before the kids supposed to be reading this book were even born. Some of the jokes were even over MY head sometimes, but if you pay attention, you find she has a subtle amount of humor.

Of course, I always love a good obscure treasure hunt. And while this isn't a treasure hunt in the traditional sense, something lost is definitely found, discovered, and deciphered.

Well, I'm off to go hog the TV to play video games... maybe that will distract me from the fact that my best friend is having a party down the street and I CAN'T GO. Thanks, parental control. Nah, maybe I'll hole up in my room with a book. Sounds comfier.

Sims + Music = LOOOOOOVE

Let me tell you a story, young ones, about the person (whoever the heck this genius was) who decided Sims needed a soundtrack. A person who thought of this and then said, "Hey, why do THAT when I could possibly create MUSIC VIDEOS using SIMS?"

For those who don't know, Sims is the addicting video game that is modeled after real life. Meaning, you make a person (a Sim) who lives a life with a house and a family and you choose everything. Kind of like WE live, huh?

Can you believe someone actually made money off a video game based on LIFE?

Can you believe it's so POPULAR?

Moving on.

Somebody came up with the idea of making music videos with Sims, because you can videotape your live gameplay if you play on PC (which I do. Everyday). So here are a couple of GREAT ones I found.



Gotta admit, it takes talent.



Ah, Katy Perry... even she got SIMMED. It's like being Sweded. (Please tell me you've seen that movie...)



Just a warning, this one's really sad... but it's my favorite My Chemical Romance song.



But this will cheer you up! Metallica circa 1985 IN SIMS!!! This is possibly the best use of Sims I have ever had the honor to witness. *starts headbanging*



HOLY CRUD. Okay, this is amazing. Michael Jackson got SIMMED. How is that even possible?



Okay, I'm really astounded (or is it flabbergasted?) by just how many Sims music videos there are. This is insanity. I'm going to log off before I explode from the amazingness. Goodnight.

KABOOM! Book Post.

Yeah, I've been a way for a while. Between vacations and partying and stuff, I haven't had time to post. But that's okay because now I've got a whole STACK of books to talk about! Awesome, right? Or tedious. Depends on whether you're the reader or the blogger.

1. 13 Ghostly Tales by Freya Littledale. It's actually a compilation of tales, and the "author" actually edited. Plus this book was written in 1959. YEAH, IT'S 50 YEARS OLD. Which means... my copy is pretty beat up.

As you can see from this picture, there's no covers. It's merely a stack of paper bound together by what remains of the cover, that strip down the middle. I remember reading this book when I was 6 and it had a pink cover that was barely hanging on, and I vaguely remember the cover falling off (but not being the one who caused it), but I don't remember where it went.

And also, this book HAS NO END. That's the only scary part; in truth, the stories are meant to scare kindergarteners. Which explains why I first read it when I was seven. But yeah, it gets up to page 90, in the middle of the last story, and BOOM! no ending. I was ticked. I think this book, just for not ending, wins the award of Second Most Messed Up Book In This Post. (The first wins by a long shot.)

2. Night's Child by Cate Tiernan. FINALLY, I finished the Sweep series! It's been three years but I finally finished them all. And the ending was really good, I was surprised.

Of course, I thought I was going to HATE the book when, in the PROLOGUE, they killed off one of my favorite characters. But the book takes place in Ireland with the main character, who is 18 in all the previous books, is a mother herself and her daughter is discovering their secret past.

Fortunately this book redeemed itself at the end. Great ending in all fields, so I loved it. And the author's knowledge of Wicca (the concept the book is based around) is really thorough, and it adds to the reality of the book. Of course, I'm no Wiccan expert, so she could be lying through her teeth, but the series feels really true. Good book. =)

3. No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman. I've had my eye on this one since like 8th grade (the library TA days... good times) and I finally checked it out and read it! It's definitely a kids' book, and a bit farfetched seeing as all this drama (literally DRAMA, the book takes place around a school play) is happening in middle school. I don't know about your middle school, but we didn't have football teams, full-scale drama productions, and backstabbing boyfriend-grabbers at good ol' WSMS. (Sure, we had fights, and the occasional bomb threat, but that was all hushed up. I'm talking DRAMA.)

The book starts with this kid who tells the truth, even if it hurts, because his dad lied to his mom so he kind of makes up for it in a perverse, psychological way. He gets suspended from football because he won't lie in his book report; he lets the teacher know how much the book sucks. (In the book he reported on, the dog died, hence the title.) So he gets sentenced to detention helping the drama department put on a play instead of football.

This, of course, causes of feud of GLOBAL MIDDLE SCHOOL PROPORTIONS between the drama geeks and the football players. It gets intense. It also shows you how caught up we kids get in our own little problems.

Julia Roberts also makes a cameo in this book, just letting you know. The head drama geek in this book, Rachel (ironically like Rachel from Glee, to a tee) writes to Julia Roberts for advice. Yeah. They're that kind of middle schoolers.

4. Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have by Allen Zadoff.
This book was really touching, just it sucks because in the end not much has changed in his life. It isn't one of those books where the fat kid loses the weight; rather, the author kind of focuses on another aspect, self-confidence. Andy figures out where his place in life is, and while not a lot changes on the outside, his whole outlook changes on the inside.

And while this book cracked me up, it had a lot of sad scenes where I was cringing for this poor kid. Still really good... not NEARLY bad enough to merit the Most Messed Up Book In This Post award.

The best friend, Eytan (funky name), is AWESOME. Best character in the book. He's hilarious, he's witty, he's scrawny and nerdy, he's my kind of character. Think Ben from Paper Towns. Gotta love characters like that!

Now on to the grand finale.

5. Burned by Ellen Hopkins.


THIS is the book that wins the title of Most Messed Up Book in this Post. It's also Most Unique, because it's one of those books written completely in narrative poetry. Now I read Crank and Glass and they were both like that too, and I really like the style. It really adds to the story and I don't know if I'd enjoy the book as much otherwise.

The problem is, THIS STORY IS MESSED UP. This girl, Pattyn (named for a general) Von Stratton, is Mormon and her dad's INSANE. He goes nuts on the whole "woman's role" thing and gets drunk every night, wreaking havoc on Pattyn's mother, her sisters, and herself. So Pattyn becomes a rebel, starts dating non-Mormon guys, and gets herself kicked out of her house... to her amazing aunt's house!

Aunt J. is everything she hoped for, a lady who believes in freedom and choice and independence, everything Pattyn's been denied thus far. And for a while, everything's good. Then things get-- that's right-- MESSED UP.

I'm not going to elaborate on the plot, just let me say that after I was finished with this book, I was collapsed on my bed, drowning in tears, wailing "WHY did I read this stupid book if it was going to END that way?" GOD it was so sad. Just a warning. AMAZING book, but it's heartbreaking. Trust me, it takes a lot to make me cry over a book. It takes a death of Harry Potter proportions. =)

And that's my reading from... December 26th to now. Of course, I'm STILL trying to finish Pride and Prejudice on my Kindle, but I'll talk about that later. Enough posting for now.