Blog Feed – Page 24 – Reading Responses at 2am

Matched by Ally Condie, Matched #1

January 22, 2019 – January 23, 2019

Gotta love me a good teenage dystopian! I had seen this book and heard of it, and it was better than I hoped! In the beginning you really see the world as she saw it and yeah, I was starting to be convinced that how the Society was run made a lot of sense! I mean, you could totally have a perfectly fine happy life, they crunched the numbers and hand you your happily ever after on a silver platter.

Well, for most people.

Then as you keep reading your eyes open at the same time as her’s do – and you just get that claustrophobic feeling. It reminded me of when Amit was talking about possible astronomy post-docs a million years ago and brought up Hawaii. I instantly felt sick, because no matter how great it was, I would be trapped – I couldn’t just get into my car and just drive for days on end, to another state or even another country. My horizons would be limited, no matter how nice the scenery was.

Benjamin Franklin once said “he who trades freedom for security deserves neither.”

Anyways, enough high school English essay material- yay for fighting the power, standing up to the establishment and believing in TRUE LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Requests!

So here’s a fun thing! A friend of mine just finished the Matched books and asked if I could post my responses to them! I guess this is a thing – except for those of you who are not directly in my life can’t make requests… that’s something I can figure out later.

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, Discworld #1

July 30, 2019 – August 14, 2019

My dad was starting to read Red Rising at the recommendation of Amit and I (because the trilogy is awesome and amazing – for the first book think Percy Jackson meets Hunger Games, except rated R) but said he wasn’t in the mood for something depressing and dark – which Red Rising kind of is. So I thought for a while and said he should read the first two Discworld books, because they are light and fun – and honestly you have to read the second if you’re gong to read the first. Which is hard if you are trying to get it from my library as an ebook because soooo many people want to read it that it makes me wonder why they just don’t buy more copies. It took me six weeks to get this one and there were six people waiting for me to finish!

I really should just buy these two.

I was kind of shocked the first time I read this one because of how cliffhangery the ending was (hahahaha) and looked all over the place for the real ending. I mean, it say “The End” awhile before it actually ended, so I thought there was more. But all there was was a very amusing and quirky About Author. Which turned out fine and brilliant when matched with Light Fantastic.

It made me wonder, though, how in the world he ever got someone to go with printing this one!

On another note, for the Forward I couldn’t help but laugh and show it to my mom, because a few weeks ago when I was describing the Disc world she jumped in with “that’s taken from a bazillion myths and legends about the world riding on the back of a turtle!” And I kind of brushed it off, only to have her be proved right when the author said – in a very humorous way – that that was where he got the idea from.

What made these first books so special to me was how they poked fun at fantasy and were focuses on the world and how ridiculous it is. Sure there may not be the hard core life lesson that you can force at pains of death for high school students to write essays about instead of just enjoying the stories, but sometimes that is just what you need.

To just go somewhere else for a while, and enjoy the scenery.

August 13, 2021 – September 12, 2021

You know what’s really nice about these first two books – other than everything- is that there isn’t any romantic relationship stuff, or really any relationship stuff other than between Ricnewind and Twoflower, and even that isn’t that crazy. All this book is is fun. My only complaint is that I finally ordered a hard copy so I can read it whenever I want, but you have to strain your hands holding it open. Hopefully with multiple reads the spine will be a little more bendable. That is honestly one of the main reasons it took me a month to read this time. And because I’ve been working on my book, which has A LOT of relationship stuff.

Start a Blog? Sure! Why not?

A couple of years ago I discovered GoodReads and flipped out at how much I loved it because it’s basically Facebook but for reading! I loved how you could find and share books and see what your friends were reading, but the feature I loved the most was your ability to save what books you had read and write your own reviews.

At first, my reviews were just that – reviews. Nice and boring and with vague references to cryptic things such as “character development” and “plot pace” accented with large, paintbrush declaration of “I like it” – all from the safety of not actually giving anything important or worthwhile away about the book so no spoilers could leak all over your friend’s newsfeeds.

It didn’t take long for this to kind of, well, dissolve, and from the comfort of being completely convinced that no one in the world was interested or would bother reading my reviews, they turned into more of a reading response journal where I would just let loose about how I felt after finishing each book.

Sometimes I would just gush about this character or that scene, other times I would give more traditional thoughts about specific literary elements, but for all of them I now had the “spoiler alert” button always selected – and basked in the freedom that it gave me.

Then the unthinkable happened.

A friend of mine commented on one of my reviews.

I had no idea what to do! I mean, it wasn’t like she said anything mean, it was just that I realized that maybe my reviews weren’t so seventh-grader-with-a-journal private after all. This wasn’t a bad thing necessarily, and weirdly enough it didn’t change how I wrote my reviews, but now I knew that when I wrote there was a very real chance that someone out there was actually reading it.

This continued for a while, and I was happy in the simple knowledge that a few close friends and family were enjoying my thoughts. But like all things in life the universe decided to kick it up a notch.

One evening, while hanging out at book club, one of those close friends mentioned how much she liked reading my reviews, and that she thought they would make a great blog.

A BLOG?! That would mean throwing my thoughts out to the world! Where ANYONE could read them!

Which is kind of the point. But could I do it?! What if someone in South Korea or Wisconsin found this blog and thought that it (aka I) was stupid! But then again – does that South Korean Wisconsian really matter to my over all life? As long as I didn’t turn the comments on, would I ever really know that they hated my soul bearing entries?

The answer is obviously no – so here I am, with a blog, that I’m sure only twenty people will read. But hey! For you lucky twenty people, sit back and enjoy your completely spoiler saturated ride as I copy and paste my Goodreads “reviews” for your enjoyment!