Booking Through Thursday: If You Could Ask One Question

Suggested by Barbara H:

I was wanting to try a certain author and wished I knew someone who had read her works so I could get a recommendation when it occurred to me that having a “YOU ask the question” Booking Through Thursday might be fun. Each participant could ask a question they’ve wanted to discuss with other readers. Perhaps, like me, you’d like a recommendation of a certain author’s best work, or perhaps you LOVE a certain genre or series but no one else you know does and you’d just like to discuss it with someone. Or perhaps you want to try a new genre and would like recommendations from seasoned readers.
It would help if everyone put some idea of the question or topic in their response comment here rather than just saying, “My post is up” so that those who can’t get around to everyone can see what the topics are and get to those which most interest them.

Don’t forget to leave a link to your actual response (so people don’t have to go searching for it) in the comments—or if you prefer, leave your answers in the comments themselves!

My question is: Is there a book that, as a teenager, made you think differently from how you had thought before?

The reason I am asking is that I just re-read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which, despite, or maybe because of, its dystopian themes made me think differently, or maybe I should say more, about the relations between men and women, how we look at sexual relationships and how our consumer society is shaping us. It was one of those books that left me forever changed.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [Audio book]

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
Read by Jim Dale

Synopsis: The sixth book of the Harry Potter series continues the darker themes started in previous books. Harry begins to learn more about Lord Voldemort. His history and his methods. Life for Harry also becomes more complicated, his two best friends spend a large portion of the book not talking to each other and Harry starts having feelings for someone. Then there is the ever present feud with Professor Snape, essays to write, Quidditch practices to organize and matches to play, and Professor Slughorn to avoid.

My Thoughts: It is hard to have thoughts about this book without spoiling it for anyone so I am going to say that there may be spoilers here. I love the mixture of absolute hilarity (WonWon and LavLav being a personal favourite of mine) with the seriousness of the growing darkness. I can sometimes feel like Rowling spends a lot of time in her books setting up the action scenes and then they are over in a flash. This is also true in this book. I love the richness this adds to the characters but at the same time it becomes predictive and repetitive at times. I could completely understand Dumbledores frustration with Harry when Harry refuses to let the Snape/Malfoy connection go. But then again I work with teenagers and boy when they internalise something it is STUCK so it is rather in character. On the whole I do love this book even though the ending makes me very sad. Just sad.

Audio book: You can see my thoughts on the narration of Jim Dale here. Since my views are still the same I won't bore you with the same comments again.

Wordless Wednesday: I Feel There Is a Story Here

Teaser Tuesdays: Magician's Gambit

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teaser:

"Your Highness," the armoured knight said respectfully as she pulled her horse in beside his huge charger, "dost think it prudent to place thyself in the vanguard thus?"
"Who would be so foolish as to attack the bravest knight in the world?" she asked with artful innocence. 

pg 25 Magician's Gambit by David Eddings

Musing Mondays: What's on Your Wishlist

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about books on your wishlist…

Last week we talked about keeping a wishlist. Why not pull out that list and show us some of the books you’ve been eyeing off?

Books I want:

In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming
This one was recommended to me by a friend when I said I liked J. D. Robb's In Death series (where I really want the next instalment, is it November yet?). It looks really good and like it would be right up my aisle. A female priest who used to be a military helicopter pilot starts work in a small town. A murder is committed and she becomes embroiled in solving it. And falls for the married police officer she works with. Sounds just like my thing. 

The Messenger and Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry. These are connected to The Giver which I loved. I want to see what happens next. Dystopian novels are so my thing.







I have many more on my wishlist but these are the ones I want right now :D

The Sunday Salon: Influential Ideologies

What is the Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake....

Trisha over at Eclectic/Eccentric posed an interesting question:

Are the ideologies portrayed in books as influential as the ones seen on television and in movies?

Like her, I don't know the answer to this question, but I do have thoughts. This past spring I took a university class titled Themes in Popular Literature. For one of the classes we read The Family Way by Tony Parsons. We got into a discussion regarding the stereotypes in this and other books like it. A friend of mine talked about the stereotypes in chicklit books (and please don't think I don't like them here, I really do) such as Bridget Jones Diary. In books like these the heroine always has a fraught relationship with her mother and a slightly dopey father. Men and women always talk and act past each other. This is a view of society that is presented. This ideology perpetuates a view of society that I, personally, am less then comfortable with, but it is also one that I see echoed in many movies and television shows. It would seem to me that in this case the books are as influential in their ideology as the television shows and movies.

Banned Book Week Round-Up

I have much enjoyed reacquainting myself with with an old favourite Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and finding a new one The Giver by Lois Lowry. I also spread the word of BBW to people (bookworms no less) who had never heard of it. I also posted regarding a favourite collection of poems of mine, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

Challenges

Fall into Reading:
I've finished two of the books on my list, The Giver and Brave New World. I've two left but now I am taking a break from this challenge for a few weeks to get back to reading The Belgariade and The Mallorean by David Eddings. I haven't decided which of the two books I have left I will read first but I think I might read My Ántonia by Willa Cather. I will have to write my thesis next term and I know that the teacher that I want as my supervisor is the resident expert on this time period so I want to see if I can use the book for that.

Childhood Favourite Reads:
This is a new challenge to me. I haven't started reading any of the books for this one. I will be starting that one once I need a break again. I think I will be starting with Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery. I have a hankering for some of the calmness I always feel when I read the Anne books.

Other Reading

I have also started the history portion of my self-education. I'm reading The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer for this. So far I have read three chapters and I am not sure of what I think. I do like that she uses the stories that people told in that time to tell us the story. It is different from what I am used to from school (where history was my favourite subject) and I think that this is where my problem lies. I am just not used to it. I will keep trucking with it.

Book Review: Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Synopsis: In the future the world is organized. There is stability and everyone is happy. Or at least so it would seem on the surface. Only in the reservation do people live a different life. A life where there are mothers and fathers and religion and feelings. When the two worlds meet some lives are forever changed.

My Thoughts: I first read this book when I was seventeen or eighteen. It was one of the few books that I have ever been told to read that I loved unconditionally from the get go (some I loved after a while). I loved this book despite the loneliness of most of the main characters. In a society where everyone is conditioned to loath loneliness loneliness still creeps in to the lives of those who have been conditioned to think and into the lives of those who, for unexplained reasons, are different. As Huxley writes "Yes, that's just it.' The young man nodded. 'If one's different, one's bound to be lonely" (pg124). As someone who was lonely as and felt different as a teenager I could readily identify with several of the characters. I love how Huxley weaves in our heritage and what was happening in the world at the time into making predictions about the future. Predictions that are looking increasingly as if they are coming true.

Brave New World is an often banned or challenged book, something I find ironic since in the book books have been banned. If people read books then they are not consuming perishables. I always find it interesting that in dystopian novels reading of books is banned. In both The Giver (my other banned book) and in Brave New World only reference books are allowed and even these are sanitized to show only that which the controllers want the population to read. It is fascinating when so much power is ascribed to books. They are truly powerful.