Sunday, August 28, 2011

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

For my internship this semester, I had to read Fahrenheit 451 as it's part of the freshmen class assignment and it's also part of the banned book month coming up for the library's display. As an English major, I'm ashamed to say that I had not read this book before now, and after the first few pages I actually enjoyed the book and the message that it gave to the reader.

When I found out that the firemen were burning books instead of putting out fires, I was very sad. Who would want to burn books?!?

Following Guy's thoughts and feelings throughout him thinking about his life and his career was very interesting and it showed how this society in Bradbury's novel thought they way they did to destroy all books. Knowledge for us today is a great thing to have, but in this society, only knowledge about doing things was deemed important - not about things that made others think and criticized why things worked the way that they did.

This novel definitely made me think more about books in the sense that one gains critical information through the words rather than for pleasure or entertainment purposes like I do with my young adult novels that I fly through.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

New TV Show Obsession

I've been wanting to watch a tv show for quite a while now but didn't want to buy all 6 seasons - I wasn't sure if I would like it THAT much. So I decided that I would find links online to watch the first season.

What, may you ask, is this show? It's none other than Lost which finished airing last year. I'm so upset that I didn't watch this show when it was on ABC! I LOVE it!

The reason I started watching this show was because Ian Somerhalder is in it. I know he's not a main, main character, but after being obsessed with Vampire Diaries (which I pre-ordered the second season already, eek!) I wanted to see other roles that he's acted in. I did stumble upon him in the pilot episode of Fearless (which is talked about in detail at this link) and now I'm flying through the first episodes of Lost.

Thankfully I have an account on www.sidereel.com where I can track shows, current or completed, and they provide a ton of links that I'm able to watch.

So, suffice to say, I love this show and while I may be able to restrain myself from buying all of the seasons on DVD, I'm definitely going to be spending a lot of my free time watching the shows because it hooked me right from the first episode.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Teeth: Vampire Tales by Ellen Datlow

I picked up this anthology of novella's about vampires because there were stories by Cassandra Clare and Holly black included, so I wanted to see what these two authors wrote about vampire wise. However, their story The Perfect Dinner Party wasn't my favorite out of the 20 stories, which kind of disappointed me.

Many of the stories were alright in my opinion. I'm not going to go and give a review to all 20 stories because some I just skimmed or skipped it entirely. There are two poems in here that caught my attention, but my 3 favorite stories were Flying by Delia Sherman, Transition by Melissa Marr, and Why Light? by Tanith Lee.

Overall, I'm glad that I got this at the library and didn't buy it to have for my own copy. It just wasn't that good. I read the reviews on Goodreads that said pretty much the same thing, but I had to give it a go for myself because of the hit names that were included in this anthology of stories.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Bloodspell (Giveaway) by Amalie Howard

Isn't this cover great!
Definitely want to read it!
I'm following another blog called "The Book Swarm" and they are doing a giveaway for the book called Bloodspell by Amalie Howard. The description of this book looks really great and I'm definitely going to read it in the near future (so it will be going on my "to reads" on Goodreads!)

Here is the website if anyone else is interested in going into the giveaway for the book, which closes August 13.

Monday, August 1, 2011

August!

I want my walls at my house to look like this!
I have blogged about one thing or another for 2 whole months! This is very exciting, as some of my friends can agree, because I talked about blogging for 2 years before I finally did it... It was a late process haha.

However, now that it's August, I don't think I'll blog every day. I'll be starting my internship for 2-3 days, working my normal job for 2-3 days, and homework will start to roll around in the middle of the month so I won't be reading AS MUCH as I did for the last 2 months. I'll probably blog once a week, just to still stay in the process of blogging.

Also, I've requested a few more books from the library to narrow down my "to reads" on Goodreads, so I'll have those still before I either slow down in reading or reread a bunch of books that I've been wanting to read all summer.

Thank you for reading all of my blogs all summer! I'll try and find good books throughout the Fall semester and keep blogging :)