The 13th Reality

I'm a big fan of James Dashner, so I decided to begin the year with his series The 13th Reality. The series is four books: The Journal of Curious Letters, The Hunt for Dark Infinity, The Blade of Shattered Hope, and The Void of Mist and Thunder.

Atticus "Tick" Higginbottom is launched on an adventure when he receives a mysterious letter from a stranger in Alaska. This and future letters lead Tick to join a group of scientists called the Realitants whose mission it is to understand quantum physics and the new realities created by our decisions. Reality Prime has other realities branching off it, each of which contain "alterants" of people who live in the main reality. In one of the realities, the 13th, the power behind everything, chi'karda has mutated and is being used by the crazy Mistress Jane, who wants to destroy all realities but her own.

Dashner often breaks the rules of children's fiction, the main one being that you get rid of the adults so the kids can solve the problems. Tick's family is alive and well and often helps him accomplish his mission. Dashner also requires great sacrifice from his heroes, considerably beyond what is typical for a kid's book.

One of the best things about these books is that they make science cool. The Realitants are a group of scientists who must save all the realities from destruction. Tick and his friends (Sofia, Paul, Sato, Master George, Mothball, and Rutger) must use both science and love to save the world. That's a pretty good message.

James Dashner has delivered a story that kids will find fun and entertaining while possibly learning a little something, too.

4 movies and 1 book

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, was a bit complicated but still enjoyable. I like both Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. I liked when Holmes would imagine how a fight would go, which was demonstrated for the viewers in slow motion, then we would see the fight not quite work out that way when it actually happened.

I went to see The Avengers with Leslea and her family. Even though we spent the first five minutes of the ride home commenting on all the things that were wrong with it -- apparently Hawkeye had about a hundred arrows in that quiver before it finally ran out and a bunch of beautiful people would fight for 10 minutes and end up with token scratches on their faces. That being said, we all agreed that it was a fun movie.

I can understand what Leslea said about the resemblance of The Artist to Singin' in the Rain. I felt The Artist used the earlier movie as an inspiration and jumping off point. I really loved it. It was beautiful and well done. Well worth watching.

I watched Disney's John Carter last night. I was expecting it to be really terrible, so I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't the best movie in the world, but it was pretty good. The dialogue could have been written better. But it was filmed beautifully and the special effects were great.

I read Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars by Daniel M. Pinkwater. I found it on the shelf when I was storing some old kids books. I must have considered reading it in high school, because I found a ninth-grade class schedule in it. It was an interesting book and a clever idea. Leonard Neeble moves to a new school and everybody hates him until he meets Alan Mendelsohn. Together the boys go on crazy adventures in which they learn mind control, visit other planes of existence and save the Waka Waka people from their oppressors. I like weird books where weird things happen and normal people have solve difficult problems. But I didn't love this book. It was very creative and the characters likable, but it wasn't great. I did like that by the end Leonard had grown as a person and learned how to confront all the problems he was having in school. And maybe, he'll get to visit his friend at home on Mars.

The People of Sparks, The Hiding Place, The Guernsey Literary Society..., Prince Caspian etc.

I haven't updated in a while so I have a lot to catch up on.

I read The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau. It is the second book in the City of Ember series.  I read the first book a few years ago and I think I liked that one better than this second one.

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. This book is amazing! It is a true story.  The author of the book was a Christian during World War II who hid Jews in her home and then her and her family were caught and put into a concentration camp.  This story tells of her experiences during the war and is a tearjerker.  It is  definitely worth the read! 

How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse by Cressida Cowell is the fourth book in the How to Train Your Dragon series.  I loved it!  It was fun and easy to read. 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  This is a fiction book that takes place during World War II.  The book is written in the form of letters and I really liked it. 

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis is the second book in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series.  I liked it although I think I liked the first one better. 

Edenbrooke by Julianne Donaldson is a clean chick flick book.  I liked it! 

I will talk about the movies I've seen later.

Searching for Dragons, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Midnight in Paris, Whisper of the Heart

I've finished Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede, the second book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles.  It is written from the vantage point of the King of the Enchanted Forest, Mendanbar. It is the adventures of Mendanbar and how his life becomes intertwined with Princess Cimorene from the first book.  It's a fun and easy book to read.

On Thursday I flew from Virginia to Utah to visit my parents and started and finished The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare while on the plane rides.  I really liked this book.  The book is about a 16-year old girl named Kit who grew up in Barbados in the 1600s.  Her grandfather, who raised her, passed away and her only other family was in New England.  She found passage on a ship to Connecticut.  She arrived in Connecticut and soon realized how completely different it was from her life in Barbados.  She had a hard time adjusting to her new life but was strong and worked hard.  Kit eventually met Hannah Tupper and quickly became friends with her.  But everyone believed Hannah was a witch. This book tells of the trials and triumphs of Kit adjusting to her new life in Connecticut and dispelling the rumors that she is a witch.  It is a really good book.  I liked it a lot.

I watched the movie Midnight in Paris with Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams.  I was honestly a little surprised by how much I liked it.  I wasn't exactly sure what it was about when I first started watching it, but it was a good movie.  And I think it had a good lesson at the end.  Wherever you are, whatever time period you are in, be grateful for that which you have and be happy.  (At least that is what I got out of it.) 

I also watched Whisper of the Heart in Japanese with English subtitles.  It is a Studio Ghibli Japanese Anime film. I really really liked it. It is funny and cute and a little odd, but I liked it.  If you've never seen Japanese anime, you should.  I haven't seen a lot but some of the ones that I've seen and liked are Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Ponyo, and Grave of the Fireflies.

A Girl Named Disaster and Dealing With Dragons

While we were at the Green Valley book fair a few weeks ago I bought a book called A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer.  I had never heard of it before but decided to buy it after reading the back cover.  A Girl Named Disaster is about a 12 year-old girl who lives in a traditional village in Mozambique. Her mother was killed by a leopard when Nhamo was a toddler and her father was a drunk and ran away.  She was left to live with her aunt and uncle who didn't like her very much.  They tried to force her to marry a cruel man with two wives, but at the encouragement of her grandmother she ran away. Her plan was to paddle a stolen boat upstream to Zimbabwe, which should only take a few days, to find her father's family. But it "turns into an adventure filled with challenges and danger that spans a year."  I really liked this book. I learned a lot about the culture in traditional Mozambique.

Some other books I bought at the book fair were the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede recommended to me by pricklypear.  I finished the first one.  I really liked it.  The first book is Dealing With Dragons.  It's the story of a young princess named Cimorene who doesn't want to be a proper princess and runs away to live with the dragons.  As you can imagine many adventures follow the princess as she learns to deal with the dragons.  These are an easy read.

Life of Pi, How to Speak Dragonese, and Pretty in Pink

I recently finished listening to Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  I really liked it! Pi is a teenage boy from India and the main character of the book. Pi is a religious boy who practices Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Pi's family owns a zoo and they decide to sell the animals from their zoo and move to Canada to make a better life for themselves.  As they embark on their journey to Canada via boat, the boat sinks. The only survivors are the boy, a Bengal tiger, a spotted hyena, an injured zebra and an orangutan.  The book tells about the adventures of the boy and the animals on the lifeboat.  I must say that the book does get a bit graphic about the boy's survival on the boat and it is a little disturbing at times, but I think it adds to the book and it almost feels like you're there a long with Pi and the animals on the life boat.  I liked the book so much that I decided to buy it and add it to my collection.

I also finished the third book of the How to Train Your Dragon series, How to Speak Dragonese. It is more adventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third.  These are fun and easy reads! 

I watched "Pretty in Pink" with Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, Jon Cryer, Harry Dean Stanton etc.  It was okay.  It's a film from the 80's.  It's about a poor girl who likes a rich boy (which was socially unacceptable at the time). The girl and the boy must overcome some obstacles as their relationship blossoms.  I found the movie a little awkward and I don't think I would watch it again. 

Eat, Pray, Love, Contagion, The Vow, How to Be a Pirate

I am definitely doing much better with the movie aspect of this goal than the books, but it's all right.  I am still trying :)

I watched Eat, Pray, Love with Julia Roberts.  I really liked it.  It's about a lady (Julia Roberts) who is unhappy in her marriage and gets a divorce.  She has a hard time with the divorce and decides to travel around the world to find out who she is and find balance in her life. (She travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia)  It's based on a true story and there is a book with the same title written by the lady that the movie is based on.  I liked this movie because there are some really good characters in it and I think we all go through times in our life of needing to find out who we are, but we all have different ways of doing it.

I also saw Contagion.  I did not like this movie.  The beginning was scary to me.  And it didn't get much better after that. It's about a deadly disease that starts to show up all over the world.  It moves quickly and kills fast. The Center for Disease Control strives to find a vaccination for it as it continues to spread. After much research they find out where the disease started. 

I saw The Vow. I really liked it. It was a sad movie, but overall it was good. I liked that the husband fought for the wife even though he had to deal with his wife's family trying to keep her away from him and her memory loss.   

I read the second book of the How to Train Your Dragon series, How to Be a Pirate.  It was good.  I really like these books.  They are an easy read, but they are entertaining.

Adventures, Fashion, Mystery, and Shame

Watched:

The Peacemaker – This is an older movie about terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons, with Nicole Kidman and George Clooney chasing them. Lots of cliché action scenes, you know, the car exploding in the background as they run away (jump!), the inevitable fist fight with the bad guy at the edge of a cliff, and of course, attempting to disarm the bomb while the time runs down. I’m married to someone who studies and works with issues of weapons of mass distruction, so when he finds another movie about nukes, we generally watch it. I didn’t love the movie, but it wasn’t terrible, and other than the F word several times, there wasn’t anything inappropriate.

Bill Cunningham New York – This is a nice documentary about Bill Cunningham, a fashion photographer for the “On the Street” column of the New York Times. I’ve seen people recommend this, people who are into clothes, and I figured that I would not watch it because I figured it would make me depressed about my whole sense of style and fashion, but I had a cold this week and while resting and watching endless TV, this came up on my Netflix, so I watched it, and it had quite the opposite effect on me. The thing about Bill Cunningham is that he seems very authentic, true to himself, and very respectful to people of all walks of life, and he would never make fun of anyone for what they were wearing, he just wanted to document it all. It was overall enjoyable, and not depressing. In fact, it made me feel even less like being a slave to fashion than I already do, but in a happy way, not in a rebellious, angry at the industry way, just like: well, I can wear whatever I want and if someone is judging me for it, it’s their problem, and I’m fine even if Bill Cunningham wouldn’t take my picture.

Read:

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (Alfred Lansing) – Pretty amazing story about an attempted Antarctic expedition, Shackleton and his crew were going to do the first transcontinental exploration. This is right around WWI, so they have no particularly advanced technological gear for dealing with the extreme conditions they would encounter. They didn’t make it across the continent, they didn’t even make a landing on Antarctica, but they all survived, sometimes because of luck, sometimes because of skill, sometimes because of sheer determination. There were a lot of things that I didn’t understand when the author talks about navigation and maneuvering through the sea, because I’ve never sailed on a ship and I don’t know anything about these things, but that doesn't detract from it, and it was a riveting story.

How to Be a Pirate (Cressida Cowell) – The second book from the "How to Train Your Dragon" series. Hiccup has a grand adventure looking for pirate treasure, he's learning bit by bit how to be a hero, because it doesn't come easy for him. Another fun, quick read, and no techno-babble about how to actually sail and navigate a ship.

The Red House Mystery (AA Milne) – This was a fluffy, fun mystery from the author of Winnie the Pooh. It had lots of Sherlock Holmes references and a secret passage. I’m a sucker for secret passages. I actually listened to this book, I found a website where you can download free podcasts of books, they are mostly older and not under copyright. The ones I’ve listened to so far are all very well done. If there’s a book you want to read but you don’t want to spend money on it and the library doesn’t have it, and it’s a classic, I recommend looking on this website.

I Thought It Was Just Me: Women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame (Brene Brown) – This book is so, so good. Brene Brown researches shame and its effects on women and this book is all about how to build resilience to shame. Here is a good video of here explaining some of her research and it is a good introduction to the book. The book goes into more detail about how to identify when what you feel is shame instead of something else, like embarrassment or anger or guilt, and how empathy is the opposite of shame. She shares a lot of stories from the women that she interviewed, as well as some from her own life. Some of these stories hit me right in the gut, and some of them didn’t seem as applicable to me, but I could definitely understand why they were painful experiences. I would recommend this book to everyone that I know. If you have ever felt in some way that you are not enough, and it worries you because you think you're the only one (I’m raising my hand over here), read this book! I would be interested to see what my husband thinks of all of the topics in it, but he probably won’t read it because of the title, he seems to be under the impression that it is weird feminist stuff, and it isn’t.

Agatha Christie,The Help, War Horse etc.

I've been meaning to blog for a while now and here I am finally writing about what I've read and seen so far this year.

I read Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie.  I've never read any of her books before and I really liked it.  It was a page turner and the end was not what I expected, but it was good.   I will be reading more Agatha Christie books this year.

I also read How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell, which pricklypear talked about in an earlier post. It was an easy book and I found it quite enjoyable. 

The last book I've read so far is The Continuous Atonement by Brad Wilcox.  I really liked this book.  I liked how the author told stories to go along with the principles he was talking about. It helped me remember and understand what he was talking about.

Now onto the new movies I've seen this year.  Well I saw The Help, which I enjoyed! And it really got me thinking about American history and racism and slavery and servitude.  I would recommend this movie.

I watched Just My Luck with Chris Pine and Lindsay Lohan.  It was okay.  It is a chick flick but it was a little too cheesy for me.  (Although I must say that Chris Pine has really beautiful blue eyes:)

The last new movie I've seen so far is War Horse. It was also only okay for me. Some of my friends really liked it, but it was a little too much for me.  Too much of what, I'm not sure.  Just something.

Well those are all of my reviews for now.

How to Train Your Dragon and Real Steel

Book: How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell

Recommended to me by Annalisa, and I LOVE the movie. I liked the book a lot, and it was different than the movie, and since it is a kid’s book it’s an easy read. Looking forward to more of the series. Whenever I read a book about dragons, I compare it to my longtime favorite dragon book, Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C Wrede. What do you think dragons would be like? Are they ferocious creatures that will destroy anything in their path? Are they nice, misunderstood creatures that just need to eat a lot? Are they intelligent? Can they talk to people? Another dragon book that I’ve liked is Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley, and I know there are others and I just can’t remember all of them. Do you like dragon stories? What are your favorites?

Movie: Real Steel

My husband figured I would watch this movie with him because it has Hugh Jackman and he might take off his shirt. So I did, and he did, and that was all good. As for the rest of the movie: Futuristic boxing robots, Human trafficking, Typical sports movie plot template, Special father-son and robot bonding. It was okay. 

Impassable Wilderness

Prue lives outside Portland with her family. Since she was a baby she's been warned not to go near the Impassable Wilderness. One day, she is at the park with her Sibley Guide and her baby brother, Mac, when suddenly Mac is abducted by a murder of crows. This is the beginning of Wildwood, written by Colin Meloy (singer/songwriter for the band the Decemberists) and illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis. Despite being over 500 pages long, this book is written at about a 5th to 6th grade reading level.

On the whole, it was an enjoyable book. I'm pretty good at willing suspension of disbelief, so I had no problem with the abduction by crows, oblivious parents, or a forest full of bandits, talking animals and mystics who talk to trees, just outside of Portland. It's Meloy's first novel, which accounts for some of the times during my reading when I was a little dissatisfied with how things were going (novel writing is difficult work, at least for most of us). I also had trouble with the two main characters, Prue and her friend Curtis always believing evil people who were lying to them. But that wasn't a problem with the book so much as it was a problem with me and my recognition that I would probably be too trusting and gullible myself.

The novel has a clear environmentalist bent that I find appealing, especially since it acknowledged, figuratively and literally, the evilness of invasive ivy. I also liked that the readers, who are probably mostly kids, are not talked down to. They will probably learn a few new vocabulary words while reading. I have no problem with a writer using "smart" words that his readers might not know provided that those words are the "right" ones for the situation. If you've ever written something, you'll know what I mean by that. I think Meloy employed the occasional "smart" word very well.

There were a few small plot annoyances and I didn't care for how Curtis's story ended. But, I think that was just a setup for the sequel. Yes, there will be a sequel, and I will read it.

This would probably be a fun book for families to read together. For more information, you can visit the book's very pleasant website at: www.wildwoodchronicles.com.