My Favorite Books

What I remember from when I read it last (I was thirteen): I loved its use of language- lyrical, beautiful, sad. It made words seem powerful to me. I remember pausing while reading a sentence at the word "devour" and just thinking about that word and how language can be so powerful when used right. Does this book have a perfect ending? Yes, of course. My all-time favorite, in fact. I am, after all, the type of person who will read a one star book with a five star ending and give it four stars. But this book is not one star- I think, I don't really remember. What I do remember after six years are vague ideas of activism, a woman frozen in the snow, a line about someone being devoured by subway shadows, a line about how moving furniture around on the Titanic would not do much to prevent it from sinking, and the ending sentence which I cannot throw enough praise at. Quite a recommendation, I know.

I have been too scared to reread this book out of fear that my modern insights will spoil my love for it. So it shall stay forever as my number one favorite...

When did I last read this? ...I think I was fourteen. It has my second favourite ending of all time, I had it memorized for a while, I had it taped to the wall of my room for a while... Read it if... well, gosh that's hard... Read it if you're interested in things like stagnating suburbia, suicide, teenage angst- ah, but no, that's not it either. I can't describe the draw of this book but it's beautiful and profound and sad and unsatisfying and excellent.

A Quote or two:
"Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly."

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, 'What are you doing here, honey? Your not even old enough to know how bad life gets.' And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: 'Obviously, Doctor,' she said, 'you've never been a 13 year old girl.'"

I could write essays on this book but I'll try to keep it relatively short. This will be helped by the fact that I read it last when I was fifteen, so it will be another review filled with vague memories. I watched the movie first and My Summer of Love the movie is one of my favorite movies of all time and completely different from the book, which is also one of my favorite things of all time. Who should read this book? Um... people like me. People who love 1) weird relationships, 2) a kind of stagnating atmosphere filled with sweat and human dirtiness- oh boy, I wish I could describe it another way but there you go, 3) teenagers questioning 'the system', 4) the pondering of what it means to be extraordinary- in the age we live in of overpopulation, what does it mean to be special? Not that the book is really about that, I don't want to give you the wrong idea, but it touches on it well.

I thought the only difference between the book and the movie was instead of stopping at the end, Mona goes ahead and kills Tam. But, nope. It's best to consider movie and book as separate, beautiful entities. Very little of the natural beauty and atmosphere of the movie is described in the book, and the touch on religious beleif is also film only. The book has anorexia, gambling, murder, and fantasy all mixed in with teenage boredem. Mona goes from being madly in love with Tamsin to not wanting to be with her and back again quickly. Their relationship is strange- I wanted to shake Mona many times through out the book and get her to open her eyes. One of the problems I had while reading is that the characters are kind of insane. They tried so hard to be extraordinary and they did it by ruining themselves and those around them.

It reminds me a bit of Heavenly Creatures so if you enjoyed that movie, you might like this. However, in all its irony, liking My Summer of Love the movie guarantees you nothing.

I originally rated this book 2 stars, which just goes to show that immediately after reading a book is not the time to rate it. Rate it after a year has passed. Do you even remember it? I find books take time to get in your system and affect you.

Some quotes:
"Her words were like tinfoil; they shone and they covered things up."

“Done any more robberies?' he asked with a nervous grin.
'You look a right berk,' I told him, ignoring his question. I'd learnt from Tam that cruelty was an effective method against sadness. I'd cried much less since I'd known her.”

A review in quotes:

"This morning I noticed there was one room missing."
"My ID card says civil servant and I try to dream as politely as possible."
"How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?"
"...a house playing hide and seek with itself."
"We like to eat together and share a bottle of wine. My wife buys it from the Family Wine Club. We usually get the Mystery Mix and it's always the same."
"We have to cope don't we? Get on with life, pull ourselves together, be positive, look ahead. Therapy or drugs will be freely offered. I can get help. We live in a very caring society.
It cares very much that we should all seem to cope."
"Never has so much been recorded by so many; the documented, identified, archival, tagged and saved world. The British library has a copy of nearly every book written since 1840. Weather records began in 1854. Births, deaths, marriages, all there. Planning consents and blood groups. Tax returns, passports, dietary habits and driving licenses. Where to find me, what I'm worth, watch I watch, what I wear, my goings out and my comings in, for my security on surveillance camera. All you need to know except what I need to know: Who am I?"

"Why doesn't every mother believe her child can change the world? The child can. This is the joke. Here we are still looking for a saviour and hundreds are being born every second. Look at it, this tiny capsule of new life, indifferent to your prejudices, your miseries, unmindful of the world already made. Make it again? They could if we let them, but we make sure they grow up just like us, fearful like us. We don't let them know the potential that they are. We don't let them hear the grass singing."

"The big day. The best day of your life. The day I was born, my birthday. Graduation Day. Pay Day. The day we met, the day we no longer met. When I take out the pocket calender of my life I want someone to tell me where the days have gone. There are none in January. Where are my Januarys? Forty-one years of thirty-one days and I cannot remember any of them. Is there such a thing as January? You say,'Such and such happened.'Did it? It didn't happen to me.
...Is it so unreasonable to want to play the main part in your own life? When January was showing I was asleep...
And February? March? April? May?"

"[All I wanted was to dive] into the obliging water and kick the stars off the surface."
"...throw myself across chance for you."
"If I were able to speak the truth..."

I remember one line from the book- the Count gets tears in his eyes and they are so rare and immediately gone the author describes them as more precious than pearls, immediately taken by angels. It sounds better when he writes it but I liked the idea of tears as precious things. What else do I remember? I know there was a Count... and that sometime ago I decided this was the best 'classic' I've read. That doesn't mean I have to remember it, right?

Read it. Read it if you love books.

Quotes:
"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."

"It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears..."

“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...”

“ 'That's right' said the fox. 'To me, you are still just a little boy like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. To you, I am just a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we shall need one another,. To me, you will be unique. And I shall be unique to you.' ”

Basically a dark fairy tale. Synopsis: High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own -- populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things

“'You mean they killed her?' asked David.
'They ate her,' said Brother Number One. 'With porridge. That's what 'ran away and was never seen again' means in these parts. It means eaten.'
'Um and what about 'happily ever after'?' asked David, a little uncertainly. 'What does that mean?'
'Eaten quickly,' said Brother Number One.”

I loved this book. It's another one of my dark favourites. It's about Smokey: her daughter and husband were recently killed by a madman and she can't stop having nightmares or looking in the mirror at the scar he left on one side of her face. She’s fallen out of contact with her best friend and soon enough someone's knocking on her door and telling her she's dead and that her daughter was tied to her dead corpse for hours while blow flies swarmed around. As a result her daughter is mute and also having nightmares. Smokey adopts her and they slowly comfort and heal each other. The relationship between them in the dark atmosphere of the book is amazingly written.
Smokey is a detective who's on the verge of suicide pretty much through out the novel and the plot centers around her having to go after her best friend’s killer so her newly adopted daughter might finally sleep close to well.
I really liked the nightmarish quality to this book. A lot of traumatizing stuff had happened to the characters and we get lots of flashbacks as if there might've been a whole book before Shadowman. I'd recommend the series to anyone who likes their books with a little bit of darkness and some good character/relationship development.

Reminds me of my childhood. I think the narrator is more human than any character I've ever read. Vegetarian friendly but not preachy. It tells the story of the everyday life of a teenage girl as she grows up and starts to becomes her own self. I loved the characters and I loved the story. I wish there was more.

So here's what I remember from the great classic I read last when I was fifteen: I had to slog through a lot of description but it payed off in the end with an amazing ending. And I mean the sad ending- not the other one. Do not read the version with the other one. I basically only cared that the book made the ending possible. Do I remember what the ending was, you ask? Well, no. But I remember I loved it. I know, I make quite a recommendation.

The first page says it all:
"Why is the measure of love loss?
It hasn't rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into dry ground, roots like razors to open any artery water-fat.
The grapes have withered on the vine. What should be plump and firm, resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth, is spongy and blistered. Not this year the pleasure of rolling blue grapes between finger and thumb juicing my palm with musk. Even the wasps avoid the brown dribble. Even the wasps this year. It was not always so.
I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing that we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.

CALIBAN: You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language.

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. It is no conversationalist love..."

Scattered, yes. Unorganised, yes. Sort of confusing, yes. Beautiful, yes. Almost made me cry, yes. All the characters are similar- yes. I needed more information on Smoke and Echo, yes.... I mean they are tied into the story just as suddenly as they seem to be tied out of it. Er. Yes.
As usual an FB book with a so, so plot, but the way she writes! I think this might be one my favorites. The big disappointment for me is that there wasn't any explanation into the end of Echo and Smoke's relationship.
Can I say FB is my favorite lyricist? Is that even a thing? There are authors you love because of the stories they tell, the way they reveal things, how they weave a story. But FB could write about anything in any way and I would find it beautiful. She simply has a way with imagery and atmosphere. She never fails to blur the line between imagination and reality just that little bit, to make it dreamy. Not because she uses supernatural elements in her stories like faeries and vampires, but because she has this tendency to emphasize magic existing inside people and oh, the beautiful results!

Lyrical writing filled with imagery and a dreamy plot. Through out the entire novel I wasn't sure who was alive and who was dead. The characters are beautifully brought to life.
Wish the ending had a bit more amazingness in it. I don't know, I am very picky about my endings. They are half my enjoyment of a book.

** spoiler alert ** Thoughts, not so much a review~

This is one of those books that I feel I have to reread to fully appreciate like those movies with a twist at the end. There isn't a twist- if I hadn't been so afraid of the back jacket giving too much away I might have felt less confused- it's just that the book begins after the event and then precedes to tell the stories before the event. It is not even clear who the woman of the beginning is in the new mix of characters as you delve in (she is Lucie). I feel like if I had known from the beginning what the event was I would have felt more satisfied with the story, if it was told at the beginning as well as the ending. So I don't really feel (at least I hope) I'm not reveling too large a spoiler when I say what their (I feel I should say "theirs", Lucie and Claire's) daughter dies.
It is one of those novels I like, it is character driven. No great plot devices are used, just the characters and their stories. But it was one of my greatest problems with this book that I didn't really get where it was going. It seemed to randomly switch from story to story, character to character. It was almost boring because I didn't understand the point, I didn't understand what the novel was really trying to show me. Now I understand it all as a beautiful back story to a very deep relationship and the loss it suffers.
I think that not knowing what exactly the tragedy was stopped me from really being able to understand the character's grief when she is shown in the Breakwater House, how important her story and Claire's are to understanding her healing.
Another big problem I had was that what was being said was sometimes difficult for me to understand. Maybe because of the translation from French to English, it left more ambiguity than I could ponder through. I think because of this I didn't really get the full breadth of the book, I couldn't fully understand all its themes, its beauty. And there are passages which are beautifully described.
My favorite parts of the book are the beginning and the ending. The introduction to the Breakwater House is gorgeous and the description of Odyssee's dying was so well written, so real and so full of grief. I found myself surprised to be crying at the end and feeling a larger emotional attachment to the characters than I had felt through out the entire book. And so I have the urge to reread it, to fully take in what I lost in wondering at the seeming randimosity.
Note: The back jacket is really strangely written, it is almost more a summary of small events that happen in completely different parts of the book. Which kind of makes sense because of the way the book is structured, in both the past and present with a knowledge of each needed to understand the other.

“Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm.
Don't scream or cry, don't run to him and throw yourself at his feet, pleading for him to take you in his arms, don't strip off your clothes and run naked to the water, wild with wanting.”

Quotes:
“I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked god if they could stay. ”

“But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, mothers who would fight for us, who would kill for us, and die for us.”

“And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door. ”

“My mind is like the valley—this vast barren waste. Car lots. Malls. Tract homes. I know there are other worlds beyond it—of canyons full of coyote and monarch butterflies, squirrels, bunnies, purple and yellow wildflowers, of magical boulevards lined with palatial movie theaters and movie-star haunted mansions, of parks and palms and palisades, especially, especially of the ocean, where it all ends and everything begins. I know the rest is out there but from where I sit in my head it’s like being on the bottom of a hot sunken pit—you can’t see anything else around you no matter how hard you try.”

"You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew ...”

I love Sylvia Plath's poetry. This book has wonderful, descriptive prose at parts but to be honest I found it a bit boring (I'd just finished reading Prozac Nation which dealt with similar themes). 150 pages in I found myself wondering what the hell I'd read that could've taken up so much.

Quotes:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

“I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.”


“She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying.”

I don't remember this book, at all. But the review I wrote of it seemed pretty positive: I loved this book up to page 254 for reasons I won't spoil but ARGGG. It has been one of my secret hopes for a long time to find a book that doesn't have a plot. I know you're going "But why?" and here's my answer: I am so very very sick of the same plot development. Introduction of conflict, trying to solve the conflict, almost but!!!, climax, end. I am bored of it. Is it too much to ask for a plotless book? Do they exist? One filled with such beautiful imagery and characters as this one was? Sure they had their problems but it was so nice to just read about them. And then she goes and has to create a conflict. *sigh* I wish the relationships were better developed, that's a major flaw for me.

Salander: "I don’t give a shit about whales."

Happy making world building. I desperately want a hoverboard.

Wow, this series came out in 2002 and had its latest book in 2009. That's seven years of my child-teen-hood. These books are amazing. They suffer from a bit too much recapping in the later books but the world building is truly original and fantastic. I read it so long ago the specifics are vague, but Pendragon travels to a new world and has a new adventure in each book. I don't really know how you could hate it. You have worlds which have hunger games esque battles for water, worlds of floating cities, worlds where fantasy is chosen over reality... onwards. I have particularly fond memories of #2. I will have to reread them.

I have fights with my friends about Peeta versus Gale. I grumble about her choosing Peeta whenever it comes up. But moving on...

I was surprised at the writing of this book. Not that it's bad or anything but the use of language was... simpler than I expected. Not at the level of a children's story obviously, and I wasn't expecting Nabokov, but simpler. Story wise, there was a lot of hype around this book and I was expecting something like the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld or maybe even with a tiny bit of the epicness of Harry Potter but it fell quite bellow my expectations. I can't believe I'm saying this but I wish there had been less romance. I wish more focus was put onto the world of Panem- that's what's going to keep me reading the next book. And if I may rant one more time: A series of books has a group of individual stories that should be able to stand on their own independently but which have connections or continuations in other books. A series is not one book which has been broken into multiple pieces to make more money. A cliff hanger ending only make me not want to burn the book (burnnn, burnnNNNN, die, dieeeee, mwahahahah), especially when it's not preceded by a conclusion to the story. Perhaps I am strange in that I like my books to all have closure. Not permanent closure necessarily, but a bloody ending! A moment to look back, thoughts of the character of what is to come, whatever, something that brings closure to the book and then your stupid, stupid, marketing ploy.

Pros: One of the strongest female characters I've read in a really long while. But I was expecting an epic, dystopia based novel, and it sort of turns into a reality TV romance. And I really don't like Peeta. Or it's not that I don't like him, but I don't like the relationship between him and Katniss. Or maybe just how the relationship between them is portrayed, as in she thinks more about faking her emotions than actually feeling them and there's only so much that can be chalked up to a defense mechanism. Also I really dislike Peeta. They just don't fit and...hmp. Okkkayyy. I wish more focus was put onto their world rather than them...

How do I explain why I like this series? Don't let the kind of cringe worthy title make you think-well, whatever you're thinking. I guess I'll just tackle recommending this book from a character angle not a story angle. Rose is a damphir, which for now I'll just define as a stronger version of a human. She's kick-ass, loyal to her friends, social, quick to break rules, and pretty (something the series mentions a few too many times). And then we have Lisa, her best friend, who may be being driven insane by her magic. There's rom. but not the souls talking to each other kind. Why do I like it? 1) The characters. Yeah, you could say the author makes them a little too perfect in places but it's enjoyable after all the troubles they've been through. 2) Well, the rom. 3) The world of damphirs, moroi, and strigoi- basically strigoi=evil undead 'vampires' with superhuman strength, damphirs=the results of moroi + human/damphir breeding- they have a bit of super strength themselves and many become guardians of moroi= magic using vampires whom strigoi tend to target for lunch. Really, the vampire thing isn't played up that much except for the strigoi. Moroi just use voluntary feeders to get their blood-nothing True Blood eque. The characters grow as the series moves forward and come into themselves. It's not intellectual or poetic, but it is good fun and mostly light on any soap opera melodrama. And no one get turned into a tree at the end, I promise.

Artemis Fowl: "A genius. A criminal mastermind. A millionaire. And he is only twelve years old." In the world of the books it works, and it's also often very, very funny.
For example:

“Artemis: (shocked) Why, Doctor? This is a sensitive area. For all you know I could be suffering from depression.
Doctor Po: I suppose you could. Is that the case?
Artemis: (head in hands) It's my mother, Doctor.
Doctor Po: Yes?
Artemis: My mother, she...
Doctor Po: Your mother, yes?
Artemis: She forces me to endure this ridiculous therapy when the school's so-called counselors are little better than misguided do-gooders with degrees.”

Ah, Artemis.