The Heartbreakers

The Heartbreakers by Ali Novak is the first book that I read through NetGalley. It was the first of the books I requested to be approved by the publisher and I was really excited to start reading. I have to say I was not disappointed.

The book is about an 18-year-old girl called Stella, who is one of three siblings. Two girls and a boy, who just happen to be triplets. Her identical twin sister, Cara, has been fighting cancer for a number of years and her health is deteriorating as they come up to their 18th birthday.

Stella and her brother, Drew, think it would be a brilliant idea to take a road trip and get Cara’s favourite band, The Heartbreakers, to sign a CD for her, despite the fact that they both despise the famous boyband.

Image sourced from here.

Trying Something New

I recently discovered a website called NetGalley. The site is aimed at publishers and ‘professional readers’. Now I’ve never considered myself a ‘professional’ reader before, despite the fact that I’ve loved reading for as long as I can remember. However, according to NetGalley, anyone who likes to, ‘review and recommend books online, in print, for your bookstore, library patrons, blog readers, or classroom’ is considered a ‘professional reader’. I found this extremely cool and am definitely planning on adding it to my list of skills/achievements on Facebook.

Take a trip to the Scottish highlands

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon was published 25 years ago, before I was even born, but has recently become popular again due to a new hit TV show based on the book. Outlander was the first in a series of 8 books, the most recent of which was published in 2014.

As usual, I could not bear the thought of watching the on screen version before reading the book, and so I delved into it despite my heavy workload. This was before my exams at the end of last year and I didn’t manage to get more than halfway before studying had to take preference. Plus the show (which I had managed to keep ahead of while reading) hit a mid-season break, which meant that I had a few months to get around to finishing the book before the show started off again.

I then forgot about the book until spotting articles all over my Facebook timeline proclaiming that the midseason break of Outlander the TV show was over. I couldn’t believe that I had put down such a brilliant book for so long and immediately dug it out again. It took me less than 2 days to finish, even with lectures to attend.

So what makes this book so brilliant? There are a lot of contributing factors – timetravel, a female heroine, a hot Scottish bloke…and quite a lot of sex.

Image sourced from http://roberthuntstudio.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/Robert_Hunt_illustration_gabaldon.jpg

Better than Lord of the Rings

I’m about to make a bold statement.

Last year, in my English 3 class, we had an elective called British Modern Fantasy, and in it we studied The Lord of the Rings saga (it’s not a trilogy). I loved it of course; it is pretty difficult not to love Tolkien. However, there is a certain similar set of books which I personally think are better than The Lord of the Rings.

The books I’m talking about are the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. The first book is called Eragon  and I read it for the first time when I was about 12-years-old. The series grew to be extremely popular among young adults as the second (Eldest) and third (Brisingr) books were released. There was a three year wait between each book, which meant that by the time the final book (Inheritance) was released I was almost 18, and I have to say that I was in no way patient in each of those three year gaps.

I had such conviction during the Christmas holidays that I was going to sit down and read every book on my list that I had been wanting to read but had not gotten around to. This failed miserably. I spotted Eragon on my bookshelf one day towards the end of the holiday and I couldn’t restrain myself from plucking it off the shelf and starting to read it. Before I knew it, I was just as engrossed in the series as I had been back in high school. I sat and read them at every spare moment. I sped through them at a pace that alarmed even me, especially since the entire cycle consists of about 2 779 pages. I realised with only 4 days to go in my holiday that I still had the whole of Inheritance to read. I knew that I couldn’t take it back to Rhodes with me because 860 pages was a few too many to fit into my carryon bag. Let’s just say I may not have spent as much time with my family as I should have in those last few days. (I did manage to finish it, in case you were wondering).

Not your average mystery novel

Christmas is always my favorite time of the year because it means I can add to my book collection without subtracting from my bank account. This year one of the books high up on my Christmas list was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. To be honest, I had never heard of this book until all of the hurrah about the highly rated movie appeared on my Facebook page. I knew that I couldn’t go see the movie until I had read the book, so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

I spent Christmas with family in Cape Town and we were very busy most of the time, but I did eventually have a chance to sit down and start this book. I settled on a super comfortable couch on the verandah of my aunt’s house. It had a perfect view of both mountains and forest, which was absolutely beautiful. However, I was soon too engrossed in the book to even consider glancing at the stunning scenery around me.

I was drawn into the world of Nick and Amy Dunne and their seemingly perfect marriage. A marriage that is shattered on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary when Amy suddenly disappears. I want to really talk about this book so I think this is going to be more of an opinion piece than a review, and it is going to contain a hell of a lot of *SPOILERS*.

Image taken from:
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/37400000/Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn-gone-girl-37441442-1181-1810.jpg

Nothing like a good tearjerker

This holiday I have finally been able to sit down and read some of the books that have been on my list this year. I came down with the flu about a month ago (terrible timing since we were visiting out of town family) and took the opportunity to cajole my mom into buying me a book on the way home from the doctor. I’m not sure why, but I thought it would be a good idea to buy the most depressing book in the shop.

That afternoon I lay outside in the Durban sea breeze and read If I Stay by Gayle Forman. The book isn’t long but it succeeded in making me cry numerous times within the few hours that it took me to read it.

The story is about a 17-year-old girl called Mia who is taking a casual drive with her family on a snow day when they get into a serious car accident. She finds herself in a coma and can see and hear everything that is going on around her (she sort of floats around after everyone like a ghost) but cannot communicate. She soon realises that she has to make the seemingly impossible choice between staying and rejoining her boyfriend Adam and loving grandparents or letting go and joining her parents and brother on the other side (wherever that may be).

Image taken from http://pgteenspace.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/forman1.jpg.

An old gem

The best thing about being home for the holidays is that I get to dig through my bookshelf and find some books that I want to reread. I’ve currently got a pile of five books sitting on my bedside table, just waiting for me to read them again after the neglect they have been subjected to over the last few years.

The first book on the pile was Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, which I sat and read yesterday for probably the third time. When I picked it up off the bookshelf a folded up piece of exam paper fell out and I picked it up in confusion. It was a page of notes for a speech that I made in high school about the book. It reminded me how much of an impact the book had on me the last time I read it, and it did not fail in having the same impact on me again.

I realised last night that the book was written in 1992, a year before I was born. This was unbelievable considering how relevant I found it to my own life experiences.

It is a beautiful coming of age story about a girl called Josephine Alibrandi, an Australian girl from an Italian family, who lives with her mother in Sydney. Throughout the book, Josie meets her father, finds love and deals with death. The reader gets to watch her mature as she goes through her final year of school.

Paper Towns

I have been taking advantage of finally having some spare time this holiday and I sat down to read Paper Towns by John Green. I have been wanting to read more of his books since I read both Looking for Alaska and The Fault In Our Stars. I was quite hesitant when I started this book, because (not surprisingly) I had expectations of being left with tears streaming down my face and no sense of fulfilment.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was not left with a soul-crushing sadness, but rather a sense of anticlimax. I thought the book was beautifully written (as are all of Green’s other books) and I was captivated from beginning to end.

I enjoyed the character of Quentin at the beginning of the book. He is a shy, somewhat nerdy, young man. He is well-adjusted (thanks to his therapist parents) and he knows what he wants to do with his life. He has good friends and good grades. The only wrench in the works is Margo Roth Spiegelman. Margo has been Quentin’s neighbour since they were two-years-old and he has been in love with her for most of his life. Margo is wild, beautiful, and full of mystery and adventure. She is a member of the popular crowd (and Quentin is definitely not) until one day she catches her boyfriend cheating on her with her friend. That night, she knocks on Quentin’s window and takes him on an all-night adventure of revenge and some vaguely illegal activities. The next morning she is gone. She ran away, taking her car and leaving only a few small clues for Quentin to use to figure out where she may have gone.

Guaranteed laughter – my favourite kind

When I was 12 years old, I came across a book that would soon become the book I turned to everytime I needed to smile after a hard day or week. No matter how many times I read this book, I laughed until I was crying. The book is called Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison. It is the first in a series of 10 books that were released between 1999 and 2009. I have every single one of them, and I still read them almost every year.

I thought a bit of a throwback would be appropriate today because I am officially on the brink of adulthood. Today is my last day of being 20 years old and I thought the best way to celebrate would be a trip into my childhood. I have memories of sitting in my grade 7 classroom, reading this book after I had finished an exam and was waiting for the rest of the class to finish. After about 10 minutes I had to put the book away because I was snort laughing and disturbing the poor kids trying to concentrate on their exam.

When I was 15 or 16, I was reading them in class again and my constant laughing peaked the interest of my friends. I lent the book to various people in my grade and I love the idea of  my (now quite worn) copy going from backpack to backpack and spreading it’s humour to those around me. By the end of high school, I had dog-eared the pages that made me laugh the most, so I could prepare myself for them whilst reading. Although, to be honest, I knew most of the book by heart at that point.

It had been a while since I had last read it, but I just got home after my third year of university and the first thing I wanted to do was read this book again. It has so many happy memories for me, and as usual, it didn’t fail in making me giggle uncontrollably. I know that I will be carrying this book with me wherever my life takes me, because no matter what may happen, I know it will always cheer me up.

Writing a bad review!

If you type “badly written book review” into Google, one of the first things that comes up is Fifty Shade of Grey, simply because Google picked up key words. Such as ‘badly written book‘.

I feel that doing a review on a book that I strongly disliked would be a change of pace that might be good for me. Plus it is part of my ‘Reading Like A Writer‘ assignment to write about the work of others that I find ‘abysmal’ and this is definitely more relevant than what I mentioned in last week’s post.

When the Fifty Shades books first came out, I made it my mission in life to read them. My theory was that I couldn’t say terrible things about them unless I read them and could prove how terrible they were. And they really were awful. This may not be completely relevant to my copyediting career dreams, but I must say that if I were E.L. James’ copyeditor I would have done something to make these books less of a train smash.

I read the first book in the trilogy (which I borrowed from a friend because there was no way I was spending money on those books) while I was travelling overseas to London and New York in July of 2012. I soon found myself ashamed to take out the book on the plane or on any bus or train (or anywhere public at all really). This was not because I didn’t want people to judge me for reading a book that is so openly raunchy; it was because almost every second person at the airport, or on any public transport wherever I went, seemed to have the book open in front of them. The idea of conforming to what every other person across the world seemed to be doing horrified me. However, I convinced myself that I had to get through it or I couldn’t openly judge it, so I settled for reading it at the hotel, where no one could see me.