YAY! NEW BOOKS!

So i got paid today so I went out and bought some new books, An Abundance of Katherines by John Green (as promised) and a book about Ethiopia: The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Unthink has only 30 pages left, then onto the story of Che Guevara which is already started.

Expect to see my review of it this weekend before I pass it on to my friend for her to read.

Keep posted.

Horace

Paper people in the paper towns

Happy Easter Monday,

I just finished reading Paper Towns by John Green, literally about a half hour ago and while it's still fresh in my mind I wanna share it with you while I listen to Eins Zwei Polizei by MO-DO. First I have a little complaint about John Green's novels: I fly through them WAY too fast. I literally bought Paper Towns before lunch on Friday and here I am Monday evening, finished.

Now this is a totally minor complaint because the stories are so interesting that I stay glued and deeply desire to find out what happens. In reviewing this book I'm going spoil a bit but I think it's necessary, so deal.

Paper Towns by John Green is yet another great novel by John Green. It was so interesting I stayed glued to it in such a way that I think I may have discovered an interest in mystery novels, which this novel largely is as Quentin Jacobsen pieces together the hints left behind my Margo Roth Spiegelman. Basically Quentin and Margo have a epic night then she vanishes and he becomes an investigator trying to track her down. Hope that doesn't spoil much.

I had just finished reading Looking For Alaska (also JG) when I had started Paper Towns, and if you've read LFA, you'll understand why the moment she disappeared I thought she was dead. That might spoil a bit too... opinion time.

Overall I think it's the best John Geen novel I've read yet and I'm excited to read An Abundance Of Katherines, but I have to wait until payday (and maybe after I finish other books on my shelf) before I can buy the next novel.

If you read any of John Green's novels, especially if you like mysteries, read Paper Towns.

-Horace

Looking For Alaska

So I just finished reading my second John Green book so far, a little jewel called Looking For Alaska. I do mean jewel when I say it, this novel got great at about the second chapter which hasn't happened often to me and it was quite a roller coaster although the last bit seemed to be coasting down off the event at the book's midpoint. I can't really tell you too much about Looking For Alaska without spoiling it for you but that event right in the middle [roughly] of the novel is such a kicker that you can't believe it to be true even when the book ends and it totally was.

The kicker in this novel was so strong that now that I am reading Paper Towns by John Green I'm expecting it to happen again even though it's another story entirely.

John Green bases some of his books on settings in his real life, and Culver Creek is one of those. I know from watching John Green's youtube channel that it is based on the boarding school he went to and the pranking he did. Knowing that it's hard to figure out where reality ends and fiction begins in this book.

Overall Looking For Alaska is one of my must reads, great book, better than Will Grayson Will Grayson which was my first review on this page. I highly recommend it.



-Horace

New purchases

Hey, so I went out to the mall today because I wanted another John Green novel and also because I wanted some beef pad sew. So I hit up Cole's Bookstore in the mall and bought Paper Towns by John Green and The Story of Che Guevara by Lucia Alvarez de Toledo.

Having just finished reading Looking For Alaska by John Green I was really in the mood for more John Green, even though it's teen fiction and I haven't been a teen for seven years. Anyways I've had Paper Towns for about four hours now and I'm already five chapters into it. At this rate my review of Paper Towns is likely to come out before my review of Looking for Alaska. I think my professional side may prevent that from happening though. :P

Anyways, stay tuned for Looking For Alaska this weekend, and maybe Paper Towns next weekend.


-Horace

Wine Bar Theory, a shorty

So I just read David Gilbertson's Wine Bar Theory, a short book on Gilbertson's philosphy of how to

 

go about business in order to succeed. This book is very easy to read, the words are very large and very bold and there's no complicated thinking in it. There's really not a whole lot of anything in the book itself. There are a lot of cartoon images placed as metaphors of the ideas put forth in the chapters. There are also many quotes from inspirational people within the book's pages, typicaly on red pages. The layout of the book basically just tells you a rule of Wine Bar Theory then goes into a little detail about how to go about following this rule.

 

Wine Bar Theory is written in such a way that it is specifically talking about businesses, corporations and such. I feel that if you ponder over the rules in its pages you will be able to adapt them to other facets of your life aswell in order to improve yourself.

 

Overall this book makes for good light literature, I recommend it as bathroom literature so that you can savour it for more than an hour.

 

---Horace

The Catcher in the Pie

Hey welcome back to the Z13 book club, this week I just finished reading The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, a classic of english literature. For the purpose of this post I'm just going to refer to the book as Catcher.

I'm sure many of you out there have already read Catcher, in high school most likely, or seen John Green's videos on it on Youtube, but this is my first time ever reading it. I find it useful to read an old book every so often.

So the novel Catcher follows this teen boy name Holden Caulfield and is narrated from him remembering the events a year later. Holden recounts how at the age of sixteen, just before christmas vacation, he is flunking out of his school and instead of sticking around to the end of the semester, leaves a few days early and goes home to New York. Holden doesn't get along with people too well, and keeps trying to get people to listen to him, but nobody does until the end. In the novel Holden basically bums around new york for a weekend, asking some very peculiar questions, but if you pay attention there is deeper meaning than what lies on the surface.

Catcher reads like a book much bigger than it is. In the edition I read the chapters simply started immediately after the previous one ended and if you're like me that is annoying because when I stop reading I stop before the beginning of the first new paragraph on that page, which not only mean I could stop a paragraph into a chapter, but sometimes a paragraph could span three pages, Salinger wasn't the most artful with the paragraph.

I found Catcher started a bit too slow, it was hard to keep interested in the beginning while he was still at his boarding school or when he had first arrived in New York, but leater, maybe the last 75 pages, kept me glued to the book in a way that I had to finish it before I moved on to something else.

I recommend Catcher to anyone out there who likes fiction. It is a good read but also a good way to see how some of your favorite writers were inspired (like John Green) and the character of Holden Caulfield may even remind you of someone you know.

Enjoy


　

P.S.

Here is a link to John Green's Crash Course episode on Catcher (1 of 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R66eQLLOins&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtOeEc9ME62zTfqc0h6Pe8vb
　

-Horace

Coming soon

Hey just wanna give an update of what I'm reading and what you can expect to see on this blog in the future.

Planning to buy Looking for Alaska by John Green and The Book Theif by Markus Zusak, if I do get another John Green book you can expect to see it soon since they're usually easy reading, also there's a new book out by Michael Lewis I may look into.

Here's a list of what I have on the go right now which one could expect to see in a blog here:

-Laurence in Arabia (not solely the story of Laurence of arabia)
-Speeches that changed the world
-Catcher in the rye by JD Salinger
-Field of Dishonor (book 4 of David Weber's Honor Harrington series)
-Social Physics by Alex Pentland
-Happy Cities

That's what's on the horizon right this minute, likely candidates are Catcher or Alaska

Stay Tuned :)

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, wherefore art thou Will Grayson?

Hey for my first post on my new blog I'm gonna tell you about the novel Will Grayson Will Grayson (or WGWG for short) which I have recently read and will be coming out in a vlog at somepoint done by my friend Rush Softly.

 
It was a pretty good read, it's 310 pages that I finished in two days, and on the second day I also moved on and started another book. Of course it helps that it's teen fiction so being 26 and an avid reader it wasn't too daunting to get through. Also the way the dialogue is printed it takes up a lot of room on the page without a lot of content. That being said it was still a good read and has inspired me to read more by John Green.

WGWG is unlike many books that I have read because it discusses sexual orientation in teenagers and homosexuality is a common theme throughout, which shocked me a bit in the beginning because a lot of what I read is either fact based or science fiction. Nobody worries about their sexual orientation when three-armed aliens are shooting at you.

To give a little overview without revealing too much about the book, WGWG follows two teen boys, can you guess their names? That's right they're C'thulu--er, I mean Will Grayson. One Will is trying to hide in the shadows and not be noticed, the other is uber emo-goth-ish and not yet openly gay, although he's super open with a boy online who he has never met. The two Wills meet up in chicago one night and their lives intertwine in interesting ways. The writing is noticeably different between the Wills, straight Will has proper grammar with the occasional John Green combi-word such as 'insomuch.' Gay Will's narrative has no capital letters in it at all except once which is in such an insignificat spot I think it was a typo. The novel changes perspective every chapter between the Will Graysons back and forth, which is a neat piece. This alternating view point really makes the book even parts John Green and David Levithan.

Overall the book was an excellent read, kept me into it, and worth the purchase. Tune into youtube this summer for a vlog book-report about it.