Allegiant

Semester 2, blog post 1

This blog post may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

Practically everyone has heard of the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth. Her series has received much attention, especially after the making of the first movie (directed by Neil Burger).

This series is set in a futuristic, dystopian city located in modern-day Chicago. The individuals in the city are divided into five factions, with each one placing emphasis on a different personality trait. These factions consist of: Dauntless (the brave), Abnegation (the selfless), Erudite (the intelligent), Candor (the honest), and Amity (the peaceful).

Once reaching adulthood, the inhabitants of the city are given a test that determines which faction they are to be put in.

Most people only belong to one faction. But Tris is a special case. She is determined to be Divergent, the name for the small number of people who could potentially belong in two or more factions. Their society considers Divergents to be dangerous due to the fact that they are harder to control and have different thought processes, meaning that Tris has to pretend she belongs to only one faction in order to not be killed.

As you can clearly see, something is severely wrong with this society. And Tris – along with a group of friends/other Divergents – is among those who can right that wrong.

Well, that's just a little background information on the plot of this trilogy.

You can find more information on Roth's Tumblr here. Her blog recently moved though; you can find the previous one linked here. You can also find a Wikipedia article about her here.

And now, back to my blogging prompt response.

Recently, I finished the third and last book in this series, titled Allegiant.

Contrary to popular opinion, I felt that this book was a great way to conclude the series. A lot of people have complained about the ending – mainly the death of the main character, Tris Prior – saying that it "ruined" the "otherwise amazing" trilogy. However, I find Tris' death as a way for the author to sort of amplify her characterization. (Does that makes sense? Haha.)

In the previous books, Roth had always portrayed Tris as a stubborn, selfless, and courageous character. So, the fact that she would sacrifice her own life in the name of something that she found valuable – which is, in this case, self-identity – is not actually that surprising. She died so that others would never again be stripped of their identities, or confined to certain personality traits.

Anyway, that was just my opinion on an author's choice that others have deemed unnecessary. So, since there is nothing else of importance for me to say, I shall now take my leave.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.

The Death Cure

Semester 1, blog post 5

This blog post may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

The Death Cure is the third book in James Dashner's The Maze Runner Trilogy. I read the first two novels a few years ago, and I've since regretted not reading the third one.

The Maze Runner Trilogy is a set of dystopian novels in which the bleak future of humankind is caused by a disease known as The Flare. The main character, Thomas, and his friends must try to find a cure for this deadly illness.

However, I don't think any of that is actually relevant to the topic of this post, as it's going to be about the author. I know, so exciting right?

(I'm doing this mostly because I'm lazy and I haven't really had an opportunity to start the book...heh heh heh...)

Dashner is a self-proclaimed book addict. On his website, he says that he loves to "read, watch movies and (good) TV shows, snow ski, and read." In addition to The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials, the first two installments in this bestselling trilogy, Dashner has written numerous other series. These include The Infinity Ring Series, The 13th Reality Series, and The Jimmy Fincher Series.

And now...another video! (Wow there's been quite a few of these in recent blog posts haven't there?) In this one, James Dashner talks about his books – The Death Cure in particular.

Click here to visit Dashner's website and learn about him and the books he has written. You can also click here for a Wikipedia article on him.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Semester 1, blog post 4

This blog post may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

Reading Lolita in Tehran was the book of choice for our second memoir. It chronicles the period of time in which the author, Azar Nafisi, spent living in Iran. As this memoir is set in the 1970's in Tehran, during the Iranian Revolution, it could be expected to be intriguing. Right?

Wrong.

Why? Well, there's quite a few reasons, but I'll try to keep it short. I suppose the problem is with the plot of the book. It doesn't ever grab or hold the reader's attention. And the fact that I have the attention span of a fly doesn't really help either... Whatever, it's not like my opinion is all that important for this particular blog post. XD

Anyway, to summarize: the book is about a group of women who meet weekly to read and discuss Western (and thereby illegal) literature. And that's pretty much all they do. Basically, reading these banned books and recognizing the messages they reveal is their form of protest.
So. An important central idea within this memoir would undoubtedly be education. (I made the font size bigger because I can okay?) And an important realization to go with this central idea would be that education is necessary to earn and/or protect your rights. Due to the fact that Azar's culture

"denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent – namely ideology" (25),

Iranian citizens (especially women) like Azar were made to follow numerous unreasonable, even absurd, regulations. However, Azar and a group of her university students read banned Western literature to learn how other cultures and societies operate. Then, they begin rebelling against the Iranian Regime in subtle yet meaningful ways. As Nafisi says,

"...we took every opportunity to flaunt our insubordination: by showing a little hair from under our scarves, insinuating a little color into the drab uniformity of our appearances, growing our nails, falling in love and listening to forbidden music," (25).

Click here to read an article about the life of an average Iranian woman before and after the Iranian Revolution. This article explains how, before the Iranian Revolution, women were oppressed. They had very limited rights and had to follow extremely strict rules. After the revolution though, women were allowed to vote. They could go into career fields that were normally restricted to men. They didn't have to cover every part of their body other than their eyes, and they could actually talk to males or laugh out loud. All these restrictions that had once hindered their pursuit of happiness were no more after the Iranian Revolution. (This article is the actual text-to-society connection part of this blog post I guess.)

Here's a YouTube video of the author speaking about the girls who were in her forbidden literature class/group discussions. She's native to Iran, so her accent may be a little heavy, but you can still understand her fairly well.

As you can tell, Azar Nafisi is a very wise, humorous woman. Hopefully you got some insight on the details of her life in Iran from the video.

Click here to visit Nafisi's website.

Click here for a Wikipedia article on Nafisi.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.

The Color of Water

Semester 1, blog post 3

This blog post may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

The 1900's in particular were a time of severe racial tension. Civil rights movements, coupled with violent backlashes, caused this time period to be both dangerous and intriguing to live in.

The two intertwined stores of author James McBride and his mother Ruth Shilsky, during this time of racial extremes, are detailed in the New York Times Bestseller The Color of Water.

The cover is kind of plain but whatever. Here's a picture of it nonetheless.

The Color of Water has quite a few meaningful themes. Of these, one that really stood out to me is: No matter what color skin one has, they are still a human being and God still loves them with the same intensity. This theme is portrayed countless times throughout the story, like when Ruth says, "God is the color of water," (51). Hence the book title (heh). The theme is also present when Ruth tells James,

"I bet you never heard the joke about the teacher and the beans, Mommy says...The teacher says to the class, 'Tell us about different kinds of beans.'

"The first little boy says, 'There's pinto beans.'

"'Correct,' says the teacher.

"Another boy raises his hand. 'There's lima beans.'

"'Very good,' says the teacher. "Then a little girl in the back raises her hand and says, 'We're all human beans!'" (92-93).

Anyway. The theme. No one deserves to be treated differently because they have a different skin color. Whether it was James for being colored in a nation that was then dominated by whites, or Ruth for being the only white person in a black neighborhood, this theme plays a major role in Ruth's and James' separate (a few decades apart) yet overlapping journeys of self-discovery and family.

To learn more about McBride and his books, click here. To view a Wikipedia article about him, click here.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.

The Bone Clocks

Semester 1, blog post 2

This blog post may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

A book I've started recently is The Bone Clocks, written by David Mitchell. The novel, set in the 1980's, is about a fifteen-year-old girl named Holly, who has run away from home. Possessed by a strong "psychic ability," she is contacted by strange voices, dubbed by her as "the radio people." Because of her strange skill, Holly has caught the attention of many groups – both friends and enemies. Her attempts to unravel the mysteries that have now taken over her life are chronicled by this novel.

I don't have much of an opinion on the book as of right now, considering I'm on, like, page two (I'm being completely serious here). So, for this post, I'm going to be talking about the author.

David Mitchell is an accomplished writer who has written a number of bestselling novels, including Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, and Cloud Atlas. When asked when he first knew he wanted to be a writer, Mitchell replied, "There was no single epiphany, but I recall a few early flashes. When I was ten I would be transported by certain books—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, Susan Cooper’s fantasy novels, Isaac Asimov—and burn to do to readers what had just been done to me. Sometimes that burning prompted me to start writing, though I never got more than a few pages down. A few years later I would indulge in a visual fantasy that involved imagining my name on the jacket of a book—usually Faber and Faber—and I’d feel a whoosh inside my rib cage."

If you want to learn more about Mitchell or his books, you can find his site here. You can also find a Wikipedia article on him here.

And to conclude, here's a video of David Mitchell answering fan questions...

Basically in the video you get to see which parts of the author's life are used as inspiration in his novels. Watch the video; you probably won't expect him to say some of the things he does.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.

If I Stay

Semester 1, blog post 1

This review may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

The last book I read was If I Stay by Gayle Forman.

Let me say beforehand, though, that I've never been an avid reader of realistic fiction. But after watching the movie, (yeah I know, I watched the movie first, oh the horror...) I became curious about the novel it was based off of, leading me to pick up the book.

And honestly, I didn't enjoy it as much as I had expected to. Don't take this the wrong way; the book wasn't bad or anything. Actually, in my opinion, it was rather average. Shall I explain why? (No? Well too bad; I'll explain it to you guys anyway.)

Basically, in the beginning of the book, the main character, Mia, is introduced (duh) as talented young cellist. Also in the beginning of the book, Mia and her family get into a severe car accident while they're driving in the snow. (Totally didn't see that coming.)

The rest of her family – her mom, dad, and younger brother – is killed in the accident, (which we later learn) while Mia's soul is left trapped between life and death. And so her soul consciously wanders the urgent care facility, where the hospital staff are hard at work trying to save her.

Now, this may sound like an interesting way to start off a book. And it is.

On the other hand, though, as Mia is faced with the challenging decision of choosing whether to stay or to let go, (aha, so that's where the title comes from) the author takes her readers into a large number of flashbacks of events in Mia's life leading up to the car accident. These events mostly consist of memories of Mia with her family, her grandfather, her best friend Kim, and her boyfriend Adam.

Meanwhile, Mia's friends and living family members visit her in turn, offering caring words and shedding tears. Mia's soul would stand or sit by, listening. These scenes were truly quite touching.

The parts of that story that I didn't enjoy were the flashbacks. I mean, yeah, they were a well-executed way to express Mia's internal conflict (as in, should she continue living or not?) A quote that definitely supports this internal conflict is "I now realize that dying is easy. Living is hard," (146). But I thought that they slowed the plot of the story down too much. Moreover, I didn't feel like they were an active way to engage the reader in the story. (So basically, the book is boring.)

This novel is - if you still can't tell by this point - targeted mostly towards the young adult audience. I would imagine that it appeals to a variety of people. You might like this book if you enjoy literature that harbors any or all of the following constituents:

• Romance
• Decision-making
• Realistic fiction (genre)
• First person point of view
• Around 300-ish pages in length

So promptly, (brace yourself for a super long sentence here) before I finally conclude this review, I suppose that you – being the loyal, unwavering reader that you are – are currently being plagued by the question of whether or not our beloved Mia lives.

See, I can read minds.

Anyway, Gayle Forman reveals Mia's choice to the reader at the very end of the novel. And Mia's aforementioned choice was to *dramatic pause accompanied by drumroll* (highlight to view): Find out yourself. You didn't really think I would tell you, right? (Although I bet you could guess the answer anyway...) (^_^)

Okay, I think I'm getting a bit off topic here. My point is, this book can't necessarily be defined as plain old "good" or "bad." It is a New York Times bestseller, after all. Did I feel that it deserved to be one, though? Not really, I suppose. (What I'm trying to say here is that the book is overrated, okay?)

Judging from the fast-paced beginning, the plot should have been exciting and thought-provoking. However, Mia's constant reliving of her past made it a tedious read at times. Nonetheless, I would still recommend this book to anyone looking for a unique, emotionally moving piece of literature.

If you'd like to learn more about this particular book, or Forman's books in general, you can find her website here. You can also find a Wikipedia website about her here.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.