Old Reviews (3): South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami and the Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi

REVIEW #1

Title:South of the Border, West of the Sun

Author:Haruki Murakami

Rating:

Recommended? ABSOLUTELY; maybe not to someone who only reads young adult, but other than that I would say, if you like to read, you'll like this.

What I Have To Say: I love Murakami's writing style and the way he always manages to turn a slightly boring character that one would rarely ever think about into something fascinating and almost always strange. This book isn't any exception to that, and I loved it for everything it was, and there was nothing missing from it. It's just so hard, though, not to compare it to everything else I have ever read by him, and because of that, I just can't give it the five stars it perhaps deserves.

Summary:In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets.
N.B.The GoodReads summary goes on, but I thought it should end there.

REVIEW #2

Title:the Spiderwick Chronicles

Author:Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi

Rating: 1/2

Recommended?For very young readers or parents that don't mind reading to their children about magic and scary creatures

What I Have to Say:These books are for someone way younger than me. Each of them takes about a half hour to read, and I didn't read them all together, which I definitely should have. Maybe then I would have liked them more. As it as, I was kind of bored and spent the whole time wishing there were less of them and that they were over. I wouldn't have finished had I not been a little bit curious. And I wouldn't have been curious had there not been so many mystical creatures. So I guess it was okay. It was just,. . .VERY young. Even for me.

Summary: It all started with a mysterious letter left at a tiny bookstore for authors Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. Its closing lines: "We just want people to know about this. The stuff that has happened to us could happen to anyone." Little could they imagine the remarkable adventure that awaited them as they followed Jared, Simon, and Mallory Grace and a strange old book into a world filled with elves, goblins, dwarves, trolls, and a fantastical menagerie of other creatures. The oddest part is in entering that world, they didn't leave this one!

Five captivating books!
One thrilling adventure!
The Spiderwick Chronicles
N.B. I still want to see the movie!

Old Reviews (2): Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner and the Princess Diaries 10 by Meg Cabot

As I said in this post, I'm moving over mini reviews that I did in my old non-book blog. Here are the next two for your enjoyment!

REVIEW #1

Title:Plum Wine

Author:Angela Davis-Gardner

Rating:

Recommended?Yes, if you are a woman interested in Japan

What I Have to Say:This book was a great look at what it must have been like for an American woman to be living in Japan during the Vietnam war. It was touching and heartwarming, and I managed to basically adore it despite not really liking the two main characters. I think that's saying a lot.

Summary:Bottles of homemade plum wine link two worlds, two eras, and two lives through the eyes of Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching at a Tokyo university. When her surrogate mother, Michi, dies, Barbara inherits an extraordinary gift: a tansu chest filled with bottles of homemade plum wine wrapped in sheets of rice paper covered in elegant calligraphy—one bottle for each of the last twenty years of Michi’s life.

Why did Michi leave her memoirs to Barbara, who cannot read Japanese? Seeking a translator, Barbara turns to an enigmatic pottery artist named Seiji, who will offer her a companionship as tender as it is forbidden. But as the two lovers unravel the mysteries of Michi’s life, a story that draws them through the aftermath of World War II and the hidden world of the hibakusha, Hiroshima survivors, Barbara begins to suspect that Seiji may be hiding the truth about Michi’s past—and a heartbreaking secret of his own.

REVIEW #2

Title:The Princes Diaries 10: Forever

Author:Meg Cabot

Rating:

Recommended?Yes, yes, yes yes, YES!

What I Have to Say:So, I unfortunately like Mia less in this book than in the other books. She has also become a flexetarian that is flexible even for a flexetarian, which I think is ridiculous and kind of a cop out. And it doesn't really fit with her character. (And HELLO, she should have gone vegan!) But still, it was the last in the Princess Diaries books, and despite my minor complaints, it was possibly the best of them all. I feel like saying - Meg Cabot has done it again!

Summary:What's a Princess to do? It's Mia's senior year, and things seem great. She aced her senior project, got accepted to her dream college(s), and has her birthday gala coming up . . . not to mention prom, graduation, and Genovia's first-ever elections. What's not to love about her life? Well . . . Her senior project? It's a romance novel she secretly wrote, and no one wants to publish it. Prince Phillipe's campaign in the Genovian elections isn't going well, thanks to her totally loathsome cousin René, who decided to run against him. Her boyfriend, J.P., is so sweet and seemingly perfect. But is he the one? And her first love, Michael, is back from Japan . . . and back in her life. With Genovia's and her own future hanging in the balance, Mia's got some decisions to make: Which college? Which guy? How can she choose? Especially when what she decides might determine not just the next four years, but . . . forever!

Old Reviews (1): Blindness by Jose Saramago

Okay, so as I mentioned in my Man Booker Rant, a long time ago, before I started book blogging, I used to do short little reviews of books in my other blog.

Presently, I have embarked upon a heavy duty very time-consuming writing schedule, in an attempt to finish my present WIP. I also decided to start a 700 book (that I am reading in French, meaning slightly slower reading pace)at the same time. Which means, I am guessing, that's it's going to be hard for me to post reviews for the next little while.

SO, in the meantime, I have decided to go back and post my mini reviews of books that were originally done in my other blog, Vegan In the Land of Frog Legs and Cheese. I was thinking I would do two per post, but since this is an introductory post, it will just get one.



Title:Blindness

Author:Jose Saramago

Rating

Recommended?Sure thing, even to a YA crowd. This book is GOOD! And even if you're not someone who would normally read a book that won the Nobel Peace Prize, don't let that scare you away. This book is a total page turner!

What I Have to Say:
I absolutely LOVED this book! I had for some reason heard bad things about it, but I can't even begin to understand why. I really couldn't put it down, and I am now dying to see the movie, despite the fact that there is NO possible way that it will do the book justice.

Summary(from GoodReads)(but I wouldn't read it if I were you; I feel like it gives away too much of the book):In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness.

As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

Notice how short that was. And how very little it said about the actual book. Some are a little bit more detailed than that, but that's about what you'll be getting for the next few posts.

YAY for Blindness.
N.B. I still have not seen the movie.