The Fault in Our Stars

THIS WAS A REALLY GOOD BOOK!!! This book was about a 16 year old girl named Hazel who has cancer. She has to be connected to an oxygen tank at all times, and she takes drugs and stuff. She meets a guy at her support group type thing and he becomes her boyfriend... I guess it's basically about her fight with cancer and helping each other through the ups and downs of their life. I really can't say more than that without giving it away, but just please READ THIS BOOK!!! It's crazily good and really makes you not take what you have for granted. It's not really a traditional love story at all, I wouldn't really call it a romance story. My description sounds really boring, but it's not. The characters are actually really connectable and totally just could be someone you know. The plot is totally surprising, and even when it's not just really smart and well written. It also makes you not take what you have for granted and really enjoy all of the amazingness of life. OK, now your probably going to read it and be disappointed because I made it sound so good, but it's definitely worth reading. The style is pretty cool, I read it in about 3 days, and it's not that hard to read. So yeah, read this book!

In a Heartbeat

This week I read In a Heartbeat  by Loretta Ellsworth. One of the main characters, Eagen, died when she was 16 because she hit the boards just right in her ice skating competetion. I mean, that sucks. The other one, 14 year old Amelia, is dieing. OK, that also sucks. Amelia needs a heart transplant, and finally gets the call to be transplanted. Amelia doesn't know how to feel about this, actually, because she's worried about having someone else's heart. After the transplant, Amelia starts to take on traits that she had never had before; she starts almost acting like Eagen. Amelia thinks that it's almost like Eagen is trying to communicate with her. After a lot of searching, Amelia finds Eagen's family, and tries to get in touch with them. At the same time, Eagen finds that she can't move on into the afterworld or whatever until she sets things right with her mom, and tries to tell Amelia to help her with this. This book was good, and a really fast read; it's almost so short that it kind of feels abrupt. I would recommend this book to mostly girls in our class, just because I think that the characters are more connectable to girls, but whatever.

SOL

The buzz and the shaking comes first. My eyes flutter open, my head propped up against the headrest. The plane shakes, and I have that brief moment of panic thinking that it will crash that you always have when you wake up on an airplane, and then remember where we are. On a plane, headed to middle of nowhere, Dominican Republic. I pull out my iPod headphones, snagged in my ears, which apparently were playing music while I slept. Great. The plane shakes again. I unlock my iPod and see that it's playing If I Lose Myself by OneRepublic. How ironic, actually. The lead singer, Ryan Tedder, wrote that about a plane crash. Not that this plane is going to crash or anything. I pull my head off of my headrest, static popping against my hair, which is all over the place and has apparently, despite all of my efforts, become frizzy because of the humidity in the plane. I mean, it's a plane! Where do we even LIVE that's less humid than a plane?!? I peek out the darkened window at the night sky and notice that we must be descending already. The lights from the little city twinkle like stars. "air planes, and the Night Sky, and Shooting Stars", and start singing to myself. "I could really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now"... Wow,ok, seriously. Why does everything have a song today?

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/claudio_ar/1454446652/">Claudio.Ar</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">cc</a>

Huckleberry Finn

This week I read Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It is also the sequel to another Mark Twain book called Tom Sawyer, which most of you probably read (I haven't). You can still read Huckleberry Finn if you have not read Tom Sawyer, though. Huckleberry Finn is about a boy named (guess what?) Huckleberry Finn. The book starts with him in the home of someone who is apparently his foster mom, completely disobeying her orders and joining a gang. It doesn't seem very serious though, that's kind of the whole point of the book. It's about a boy who I think is about eight, maybe a little bit older who doesn't really know anything about the world, who has to make some pretty serious decisions. The book is written from his viewpoint, so that makes it really entertaining to read.It's actually kind of funny, and the writing and storyline is too. It is, though, in Southern-ish dialect so that makes it a little harder to read, but it's not awful or anything. Anyways, Huck Finn eventually gets basically captured by his dad, who's a stupid drunk, basically. He escapes and finds a former slave that he knows, Jim. He has to decide if he is going to help Jim escape or watch him be sold as a slave.
I won't give too much away, because I don't want to ruin it. Right now I am about 20 pages from the end, so I haven't finished it yet, but pretty much everything has been resolved, and I can predict the rest.
I think that this book is a classic for a couple reasons. One is that it just fits all of the standards the a "classic books" kind of fit in. It has that 'the journey is more important then the outcome view, although the outcome is still pretty important. It probably might have had some new view on slaves at the time, too? I really don't know. It's also just great writing; the viewpoint is pretty amazing. I would agree that this book is a classic, for all of these reasons. I wouldn't call it lifechanging or anything like that quite yet, and I'm almost at the end of the book, but it's pretty funny and interesting and definitely worth reading.

A kind of stupid ode to my old iPod (SOL)

Once upon a time there was an iPod. This iPod was a 4th generation, shiny iPod that was given to a girl for her 10th birthday. The girl was extremely happy to get this iPod, and started downloading music like crazy, not knowing that every single time she downloading a song she was using up $1.29 of her mom's money. This is how she got her own iTunes account, which to this day still thinks that she is eleven and because of this does not let her download songs with the word "hell". This iPod traveled with her everywhere; first to Ecuador and the Galapagos islands, then to New York, then to London, Paris, and Switzerland. She did everything on her iPod, like listening to "explicit" songs because her iTunes account still thought that she was ten, emailing with her friends, and even typing some unit stuff (that didn't last for long). Her mom got mad at her multiple times for listening to music 24/7 when she should have been having "family time". Then, one cold snowy day, the London family drove up to the mountains. This girl's mom picked up the precious iPod, and then dropped it on the cold hard, cement floor. The glass screen shattered everywhere. Two weeks later, she had to go and get a new iPod. The girl is now on her 2nd (or 3rd; I can't even remember) iPod, which has multiple cracks in the screen. The good news is that she finally got a case.

Out of the Easy

This week I read Out of the Easy  by Ruta Sepetys. This book was REALLY good. The main character, Josie (who's 17), grows up in New Orleans. Her mom is a prostitute in a house owned by someone named Willie. Josie's mom was never really very nice to her, and was never really around, so she sees Willie as more of a mom then her own mom. Her dad is missing (dead?) and she lives in her own apartment above the bookstore she works at and has been since she was 12. Long story short, someone who she only has met once and really admires as kind of like a father-figure type person dies, and the police decide to investigate. This eventually leads to a couple surprises that are not very good ones either. I really can't tell you much without giving a lot away, but she eventually decides she wants to get away from New Orleans, or "The Big Easy" which is what the book is named after, obviously. She tries to raise money to go away to Smith College in Massachusetts. She also recruits a lot of interesting people to help her along the way, including her friend (maybe boyfriend?) Patrick, her other friend (maybe boyfriend?) Jesse, Willie, Cokie, Charlotte-well, you'll just have to read the book. It's very excited and fast-paced, with a lot of surprises and sudden plot twists, some good, some bad. This book does have some mature content, there are prostitutes and people like that, but overall it's really not that bad.
Books that I am going to read soon:
Huckleberry Finn
The Fault in Our Stars
Blythwood

Slice of Break.

The wooden rafters normally tower up above us, but today, maybe because of the crowd, they seem smaller. We're at Gwyn's High Alpine cabin at Snowmass, stopping for lunch after half a day-I check the time on my phone-almost half a day of skiing. The warm, cozy log cabin is stuffed full with other skiers, in our fluffy coats and scarfs pulled up and around our faces, and like Snowmass in general, it is kind of a hangout for weirdos. Looking around, I see two girls wearing tutus, one pink and one green, a guy wearing a Thing-1 bodysuit, and about 100 weird pairs of Sunglasses. I mean, sunglasses skiing? Really? Get a pair of goggles. Not that it's not cool, though. I carry my plate up the wood planked stairs, and then look around to find my dad. He waves and calls me over. "Yes, finally a window seat!", I say as we look out on the cliff down to the skiers below. My mom and brother, Jack, come over and join us. Jack, of course, points at the many hang-gliders, small sailboats, and a big glider-plane hanging from the ceiling above us. "Which one do you like, Sarah!" he says! "which one"! "I really don't care, Jack" I say, brushing his arm away. He puts his arm up again to point at the glider, with it's big metal wings-"I like this o-" And promptly knocks over his tomato soup. How did I just know that that was going to happen?
Yeah, that's it. So the picture is from the corner of Gwyn's High Alpine.

The Song of the Quarkbeast

One of the books that I read over break was called The Song of the Quarkbeast, by Jasper Fforde. This is the sequel to the book that I loved so much, called The Last DragonSlayer. This book wasn't as good, but still not really disappointing. The Last Dragonslayer is kind of like this weird fantasy-type-book with Dragons and (guess what!) a Dragonslayer, set in the un-UK in modern day. The thing that makes it good is it's unbelievably quirky and funny, and has all of these unexpected plot twists. The Song of the Quarkbeast is awesome too, but not nearly as quirky, and that's what made the first book great in the first place. It was still a really good book though; the author makes the cheesiest plot lines make sense and seem funny and actually kind of credible sometimes. If you read the first book, you definitely should read this one too, because it ties up the story pretty well but not all the way (OMG THERE'S A THIRD ONE COMING OUT!!!). Some of you might not like the first one, but you should read it anyways!!! Also, you should probably read the Last Dragonslayer before you read The Song of the Quarkbeast.
Alright, that's all folks. See you on Monday.