Little libraries are so damn cute! The books inside are usually kind of eh, but I still love them and whenever I see one, I stop to take a picture. These pictures have been accumulating on my phone for quite a while now, so I thought I'd share them with y'all. You're welcome! Unless you had your heart set on reading a nice book review. In that case, sorry? Spotted at Harvard University We found a Book of Mormon at this one. I think this was by Prospect Park? Admirably tidy. My bookshelves don't look this nice. Awww, they painted it - Carly
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Is this post relevant to this season? No. But do I care? Again, no. Below you will find a list of personality types and books that might make good gifts for each. I don't pretend to address all or even most of the personality types on Earth with this list, and I can't guarantee that the recipient of your gift will enjoy the books that I recommend, but hey, I'm trying. NERD: This one's easy - wrap up a science fiction classic! I suggest Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card, or The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The His Dark Materials trilogy is great too, although it's more fantasy than science fiction. That Person Who Loves Inspirational Quotes: A Chicken Soup for the Soul book is definitely a safe bet here. Traveler: 1000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz is perfect for someone who is constantly planning their gap ye...
Book + Feet The title of this book may sound vaguely familiar to you, even if you're pretty sure you haven't read it, and that's probably because its companion, Ender's Game , was recently turned into a mediocre movie. Neither book is anywhere near mediocre, however. Science fiction gets a bad rep because it is often described as cheesy and solely for geeks, but Orson Scott Card's novels are good stories by any standards. Sure, they play into some stereotypes of the genre: both books are set in the future, at an outer space Battle School where children are trained to be soldiers in an impending war with a hostile alien race. But all of this is merely a backdrop for Card to work out the answers to his questions about war, mercy, selflessness, community, humanity, success, and genius. Ender's Shadow is written from the perspective of Bean, previously an enigmatic secondary character in Ender's Game, which wa...
The summer has officially begun! And not because classes are finally, finally over. No. The summer has begun because my co-blogger Grace and I went to our annual library sale this weekend! This tradition, in which I force Grace to take me to her country house (which was built in the 1700s'!) so we can go to the Stone Ridge Library sale, is quite central to our friendship and, furthermore, provides me with a security net of books that I can dip into at any time for the rest of the year. It's MUUUCH cheaper than going to Barnes and Nobles every time I finish a book, that's all I can say. So this is a list of what I picked up this year! 1. From Rockaway by Jill Eisenstadt - Rockaway is my beach! I spend pretty much all summer there, so I had to read this. 2. Handbook of Short Story Writing: Volume II , edited by Je...
So, I have been a very happy camper in English class this month because we have just started the POETRY UNIT!!!! Yay!! And what makes a sophomore English poetry unit so wonderful is that we don't even have to write poems for it. Now, you might think that I would be upset by such a restriction, but actually I couldn't be happier with it. After all, high school is full of kids who are full of feelings and lacking in experience. What I'm trying to say is that a poetry-WRITING unit would have resulted in a slew of terrible, TMI-inducing poems. (I must say that none of the above sarcasm means that I am exempt from the crummy-teenage-poetry-writing crew of America. I just, you know, keep my poems in a file where no one will ever see them :P) But all of that aside, we were asked to pick a poem to memorize for this unit, and I chose "February" by Margaret Atwood. And thus I became aware of the wonde...
Hello!!! I'm feeling very cheerful tonight, because a few hours ago I went to an event called LIT Crawl and had a wonderful time. And since it was a literary event, I thought I'd share it with you-all. LIT Crawl is an event that takes place once a month in Brooklyn. It is like a pub crawl in that many businesses (including bars) take part in it, but that is where the similarity ends, because instead of offering discounted alcohol, these businesses host free (!!) literary events all night long (or at least from 5:00 to 8:00 pm). These events occur in three shifts so that people can fit in three different events in one night. The events change from month to month, but they vary pretty widely. For example, tonight I went to a performance art/poetry reading in a laundromat, in which the two performers danced on top of washing machines and discussed the voyeuristic and weirdly personal ...
What an excellent question, people! Magical realism is a type of fiction that goes along like any average realistic/historical novel until suddenly the character starts talking to her mother's ghost or bursts into flames at the sight of her one true love. This kind of book has scenes of magic that highlight the book's themes and heighten the drama of the story, without completely turning it into a work of fantasy. I started reading a magical realism memoir recently and it's reminded me of how much I love the genre, so here is a list of my favorites! Just to give you an idea of how many Post-Its I need to keep up with Woman Warrior 1. Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston- This book is the inspiration for this post. The writer interspersed stories from her life with stories from her family past, Chinese legends, warped oral histories, and allegories. It's super confusing and trippy, but with...
My personal kind of beat-up copy I read this book for the first time a few years ago in middle school, when I got it as a birthday present from an adult who had heard I liked to write stories. At that time I was in this phase where I believed that the more adjectives and the bigger words I used, the more authoritative I sounded. So when William Zinsser popped out and started telling me to Simplify, simplify, simply, my first impulse was to slam the book shut. But soon I saw the value of his advice, and that is how On Writing Well changed my life and my perspective on writing. What really convinced me to listen to him was how well he wrote. Zinsser has this awe-inspiringly simple voice when he writes. Reading his book was like sitting in an English class. It was like listening to a soft-spoken but amicable relative talk. True to his own teachings, there was not a single unnec...
I read books indiscriminately. I am just as happy reading Beowulf, a crusty old Scandinavian epic poem, as I am reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. So I'm not a snob who only reads first-edition classics bound in leather or anything like that. But I do have one requirement when it comes to the books I read and recommend, and that is that they be good . And I do see a problem emerging in one of YA's most popular new genres, the teen dystopian novel, and that is that many of these books are not good. The dystopia craze started, I believe, with the success of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (a book that I very much adore) . It's hard to make it as a writer, so when people saw how well her parable of futuristic teen angst and bloodshed did, they understandably thought Aha! Here is the formula for success!! And ten seconds later, the front display tables of every Barnes a...
I've been a ferocious reader for over ten years now (exactly eleven in two months!!), and in my time as such I have learned a great deal about books besides the fact that they transport you to mystical places and are NOT MEANT TO BE READ ON TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICES. No, there is much more to books than that, my friends. For example, they have many excellent uses outside that may be less obvious to a person who does not tote a book about with her wherever she goes. Here are a few examples. All these lovely books have lots of potential uses, so don't just let them sit around gathering dust! 1. They can be weaponized. There is nothing unethical about this. I am a small and innocuous/innocent-looking fifteen-year-old girl. I am not a master of martial arts or kickboxing or even old-fashioned girl street-fighting. I need to be able to defend myself, dammit!!! So whenever someone gets too close, I whip out th...
HAHA can you plz forgive me for the pun I could not help myself. So I love books, but I also love off-kilter clothing, and when the clothes are book inspired then I am a very happy person indeed. These are my suggestions. 1. A ring with the seven dwarves on it. The movie would not have been complete without a Grouchy to counteract Snow White's Sweet'n Low sweetness. Find it at: Rings and Tings 2. A Watership Down sweater. And guess what??!! They've got shirts and sweatshirts for The Metamorphosis, The Great Gatsby, A Wrinkle in Time, Fahrenheit 451, Alice in Wonderland, and pretty much all my favorite old books. Also they sell bags and jewelry and other stuff of similar themes. Look at this lovely thing! The trees make the shape of a rabbit!!! Find it at: Out of Print Clothing 3. This is literally called the Storybook Illustrator Dress - all the details are in SKETCHY...
So, recently I was doing a spot of (mandatory) community service for my gym teacher when I experienced a rare instance of karmic payoff. Me and a bunch of other temporary bond-slaves were unloading this huge file cabinet onto the gym floor, sorting everything from Dance Revolution DVDs to pamphlets on Your First Visit to the Ob-Gyn! into neat piles, when I uncovered quite by chance a crumbling copy of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Elated, I carried it around for the remainder of the period until my teacher took pity on me and offered to let me borrow it. It's falling apart before my very eyes I swear... I fell in love with this book the moment I heard its title quite a while ago - Naked Lunch ? What the hell kind of weird awesome twisted name is that? I am only now realizing how twisted it really is. The book is a compilation of notes that Burroughs took while under the sick influence of heroin. ...
Rick Riordan is a very famous YA writer who has written two series about modern teenagers with one mortal parent and one parent who happens to be a Greek god. (It happens.) They go on adventures, save the world, train at their godly summer camps (they exist), and blow up ancient monsters. This has been the general and very enjoyable gist of all of Riordan's YA books up until "The House of Hades." This newest installment in "The Heroes of Olympus" series is told from the perspective of 7 demigods on a quest to stop the evil goddess Gaia from taking over the world and to save two of their friends from dying in the Greek hell of Tartarus. It was a very action-packed story, of course, but it was different from its predecessors in that it had more of a conscience. For example, the two heroes who were banished to Tartarus, Percy and Annabeth, are at one point forced to fight a mob of demons who force them to feel the curses of every enemy and person whom ...
Quite by accident, last Thursday I was lucky enough to see two movie adaptations in theaters. The first was a last-minute plan to see one of my friends from middle school again - we both love the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, so we saw the new Sea of Monsters movie. Later that day I learned that several of my friends were going to see City of Bones at this crappy little theater on Queens Boulevard, so I ended up going to the movies with them too :) It was a marvelous, mindless movie-watching sort of day. Yes I just alliterized. Yes I just invented the verb form of 'alliteration.' Anyway. Movie review #1. The book The Sea of Monsters is the second book of a YA series following the adventures of Percy Jackson and his friends, who live in modern-day New York City but are the magical offspring of Ancient Greek gods and humans. The beginning was very promisi...
I have some terrible, terrible news, everyone: my blogging partner Grace is away at sleepaway camp, where she will be deprived of Wifi, cell service and electricity (?) for the whole summer. This means that, despite my crippling loneliness, the job of keeping this blog going will fall to me and only me for the next two and a half months. I am very much afraid. But don't worry! We can make this work. In honor of my current desolate state of mind my first post of the summer is going to be a list of great books about heroes who travel in time and space - a very lonely occupation, I've heard. 1. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: I am currently reading this crazy collection of 5 novels and enjoying every minute. The book follows the adventures of a group of hitchhikers of various species as they make their across the galaxy saving planet...
Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan Today after school I met up with a friend, changed into a homemade flapper dress,cloche, and Art Deco earrings, and headed to the cinema at Union Square 14th street to see - what else? - the Great Gatsby. I had been looking forward to this moment for a long time, ever since I put down my copy of the book over a month ago. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a real American classic, and I think everyone interested in seeing the movie should read it first. It's about this dreamy, almost foolishly optimistic young man who calls himself Gatsby and the crazy things he does out of love for Daisy Buchanan, his teenage sweetheart, who is now married to a powerful but unfaithful heir. One of the most striking things about it, besides the amazing portrayal of this crazy time in history, is how brutally honest and relatable the story is even after all these years. Gatsby's perennial and...
When a girl begins to run low on bat mitzvah money or retirement savings, what's the first thing she worries about? Not how she is going to pay the mortgage or finance her online shopping, no; she wonders where her books are going to be coming from. And with good reason, too. Ninety-five percent of bookworms perish miserably within 48 hours of finishing their last book and being unable to afford another. How can we end these senseless deaths and avoid meeting the same fate ourselves? By sourcing reading material from the venues listed below, of course. 1. Second-Hand Stores: It may take a while to dig past the crappy mysteries and romance novels slightly creepy covers, but once you do, you may find some really great books, some for under a dollar each! 2. Library Sales: A library sale is when a library wants to get r...