Off The Shelf

Hello! I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays - eating lots of gingerbread and spending lots of time with family. Today, I will be wrapping up my "Best of" posts for 2014. So far, I have posted my Best Nonfiction / Memoir / Autobiography  books and my Best Historical Fiction books of the year.  In 2014, I read a total of 26 books, or 7,876 pages. I gained several new favorites this year, including Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and The Catcher in the Rye .  I re-read several books this year before seeing their movie adaptations on the big screen. The Fault in Our Stars and Mockingjay Part 1 were just two of many Hollywood blockbusters of 2014 that were based on novels. This past year I was also selected to attend a five-day creative writing program at Alfred University, and became the Editor-in-Chief of my high school's literary arts magazine.  2014 was a great year for books and for me...so without further ado, here are my top 10 Fiction novel...

2014 was the year I think I fell in love with history. I have had a really great US History teacher for the past two years, who not only gives us bonus points when he scores over par while playing golf, but whose enthusiasm for the subject has made the AP class comedic and interesting. I also discovered Downton Abbey and Midnight in Paris this year, a TV show and a movie that have helped me realize that the period from 1915-1945 is my favorite to read about. Historical fiction is certainly the type of novel I could see myself writing in the future.   Of the historical fiction novels I read this year, here are the top six. It was a tight race for the #1 spot! Top Historical Fiction of 2014:  6. The Chaperone , Laura Moriarty 5. Life After Life , Kate Atkinson 4. The Things They Carried , Tim O'Brien 3. All the Light We Cannot See , Anthony Doerr 2. Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald , Therese Anne Fowler 1. The Paris Wife , Paula McLain ...

It's that time of year! Yes, it is the time for some good Christmas cheer, but also for naming the best books of the year. My "Best of"lists for 2014 will be posted over the course of three days, so be sure to check back tomorrow for my top historical fiction novels of the year. Top Autobiographies, Memoirs, and Nonfiction of 2014:  4. Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the United States, Nell Irvin Painter 3. Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass 2. Outliers: The Story of Success , Malcolm Gladwell 1. Wave , Sonali Deraniyagala (Scored: 25 /30) Wave is the story of Sonali Deraniyagala, who was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka during Christmas, week of 2004. On December 26th, a tsunami and earthquake occurred, consuming her hotel in waves. Deraniyagala lost her parents, husband, and sons to the tsunami...she writes in an unsentimental prose that is intimate and angry... Wave  is dark and haunting, and yet ...

"Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!"   On November 21st, Mockingjay Part 1 , based on the bestselling third book in The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, opened in theaters.  All of the fan-favorite actors and actresses returned to play their leading roles, but a few new additions needed to be made. Natalie Dormer joined the cast to play Cressida, as well as Julianne Moore to play President Coin.  The following are some differences between the film adaptation and the book - some for the better, and some for the worse. If you have not yet read Mockingjay, please   be aware because... SPOILER ALERT.  Effie Trinket makes an appearance in District 13 very early in the movie, unlike in the book where she does not appear until the end. I whole-heartedly believe in this change because 1) by replacing Katniss's three stylists, Effie works as a symbol for even greater change within the rebellion, as now even Capitol people are...

All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr 530 pages "Could they hide here until the war ends? Until the armies finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to do is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunshine? He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten, France and Germany would not mean what they meant now."    -page 473 France 1944. A sightless sixteen-year-old girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc is curled up beneath her bed, listening as the Americans shower bombs over her beloved ocean, her town, her house.  The roar of explosives is deafening in her ears, her body shakes. Down the street, an eighteen-year old German private named Werner Pfennig sits in a hotel cellar, one hand on his rife, the other on the radio transceiver he invented. He thinks of his younger siste...

The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien 233 pages “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”    (page 36) In Vietnam, Tim O'Brien and the other members of Alpha Company carried dog tags, two or three canteens of water, and love letters. They carried pocket knives and canned peaches. Plastic ponchos and comic books. An M-60 machine gun and an illustrated New Testament. Grenades and M&Ms. They carried fear, they carried each other. They carried what they could bear, and then some - including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried  (page 7).   The Things They Carried is a fictional story based on O'Brien's experiences during the Vietnam War. The novel is broken into short story-like chapters, with titles ...

  { “Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably." -C.S Lewis}   Hello! It's been a little while, but I am here this week to share what I am currently reading, interested in, and working on this August.   Currently Reading I am currently reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as part of my AP English summer reading requirement for the upcoming year. The nonfiction story of success has spent 166 weeks so far on the NY Times Best Sellers List.   In Outliers , Gladwell argues that it has become no longer enough to look at what a successful person is like , but rather, in order to understand their rise to the top fully, we must look at where these people are from : their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Throughout the book, the author reveals why no star hockey players are born in the fall, why Asians are good at math, and that Bill Gates and the Beatles are more alike tha...

{Lake view from a hammock} “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”      -F. Scott Fitzgerald   I almost named this post "Mid-Summer Blues", given that I've been a bit down recently. I suppose it's because I've just gotten all four of my wisdom teeth removed, that I just finished Jojo Moyes' extremely sad Me Before You (review coming soon), and that I've realized that the summer is already half-over. Don't get me wrong, I've been having a wonderful summer so far - reading lots, kayaking a bit, sleeping in, and venturing out. But still, I can't seem to shake the feeling that with every day that passes, I'm inching closer and closer to what is supposedly the toughest school year yet.   In spite of all that, there are several small things making me happy as the hot days of ...

Life After Life Kate Atkinson 544 pages "Ursula found it very odd to think that up above there were bombers being flown by men...They weren't evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men.     -page 411 Ursula Todd is born on a cold and snowy night in 1910. She dies before she can take her first breath. No sooner does she die, that she is born again, on the same cold and snowy night, in the same English country home. Ursula continues to die, in various ways and at varies ages throughout her life, but just as soon as darkness falls over her, Ursula is reborn, allowing her to live an infinite number of lives. As the 20th century barrels towards it's second cataclysmic world war, Ursula's seemingly unusual lifestyle may give her the power to save the world from its destructive destiny. Kate Atkinson's Life After Life deals with the delicate idea of choices, and it argues that even the...

The Paris Wife Paula McLain 314 pages "We were all on the verge now, bursting with youth and promise and little trills of jazz...Girls everywhere stepped out of their corsets and shortened their dresses and darkened their lips and eyes...Youth, in 1921, was everything."   -page 40 Hadley Richardson expected her trip to Chicago to be simple - as she was a simple girl with simple wishes. What she did not expect however, was to fall madly in love with Ernest Hemingway. After a speedy courtship and wedding, the newlyweds set sail for Paris, where the Jazz Age has already swept what becomes known as the "Lost Generation" right up into its chaos. Once there, Ernest throws himself into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises  while Hadley struggles to balance the roles of friend, wife, and muse. All too soon, a deception more complicated  than either of them could have imagined, blows the marriage they had built on loyalty and love, to pieces. My rea...

"I believe we have a choice in this world...about how to tell sad stories. On the one hand, you can sugarcoat it. Where nothing is too messed up that it can't be fixed with a Peter Gabriel song. I like that version as much as the next girl does. It just isn't the truth. This is the truth."   After months of waiting, I saw The Fault in Our Stars movie on opening night with some friends. The theater was so crowded that they had to turn many people in line behind us away! Hazel Grace Lancaster was played by Shailene Woodley ( Divergent ), Augustus Waters was played by Ansel Elgort, their friend Isaac by Nat Woolf, and Mr. and Mrs. Lancaster by Sam Trammell and Laura Dern respectively. Above are the opening lines to the movie, and right away Hazel tells the viewer that this is not your traditional love story. My friends agreed that this was one of the best parts of the movie because it makes the story more real, and less Nicholas Sparks-esque where everything is...

     {An odd mix of classic literature and blockbuster contemporary}   Currently Reading I am currently reading The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty. I went to the bookstore (in fact,  I drove to the bookstore :)) a few weeks ago hoping to buy something in particular, but ended up coming out with something entirely different. I bought The Chaperone  because of it's beautiful cover and of course because of the ever-deciding factor: the blurb on the back, which in a brief summary states:   Cora Carlisle, a traditional woman from Kansas, has volunteered to chaperone the beautiful, yet arrogant 15 year old, Louise Brooks to New York City. Louise is on her way to becoming the silent-film star of a generation, with her famous black bob with blunt bangs and lack of respect for convention. Cora has her own reasons for making the trip, but the five weeks the two spend together promise to change their lives forever. Set in the 1920s an...

Wave Sonali Deraniyagala 273 pages Wave is the story of Sonali Deraniyagala, who was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka during Christmas week of 2004. On December 26th, a devastating tsunami and earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean and her hotel in Yala was consumed by waves. Deraniyagala lost her parents, husband, and sons to the tsunami, and Wave is her incomprehensible story of recovery. For independent reading in English, we had to choose a memoir to read on our own. I came across several titles that took my interest - Half Broken Horses, Eat Pray Love, and A House in the Sky. Honestly, I choose Wave because it was the only one available at my local bookstore. Looking back now, I guess you could say it was some sort of sign, that this was the only book in-stock, as if the store was shouting: "This is the book you MUST choose." Wave is relatively short by normal memoir standards, but a lot is packed into so few pages. Deraniyagala covers the...

"'Mummy, have you seen my jumper?' 'Yes dear it was on the cat.'" -Ginny and Mrs. Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Although Mrs. Weasley from the Harry Potter books is undoubtedly the Best Book Mom Ever, I think my mom might be #1 on the real-life list. Mrs. Weasley has always been one of my favorite characters from the Harry Potter books. I loved the way she would sit in the kitchen and watch Mr. Weasley's clock hand move from "At work" to "Traveling" to "Home", the way she knitted family jumpers for all of her children plus Harry, and how she made her family home the coziest place. Some of my favorite moments from the books take place in the Weasley's home, The Burrow. Harry even agreed, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when he says "This is the best house I've ever been in." Many of my favorite memories also take place in my own home. My mom has always made it a welcom...

I first saw spine poetry a few days ago, when the Strand Bookstore posted a picture of a creation on  their Instagram in celebration of National Poetry Month. Since April 1st, they have been posting a new spine poem everyday. I have since discovered that "spine poetry", a poem made up completely of book titles, is quite a popular thing. They are all over many book blogs, Tumblr, and Pinterest - so I decided to dive into my bookshelf, and try some of my own!     Here Today , If I Stay , Between Shades of Gray Forget Me Not When Broken Glass Floats.   It ended up being harder than I thought, as after throwing a bunch of books that I thought made sense together into a stack, I realized the poem they created made no sense whatsoever! I found myself wanting to cheat a couple of times, thinking if only this book had a "the" in the title, or this one needs a different verb tense. But part of the challenge was making what you ha...

"Fear does something strange to people, but not you. Fear doesn't shut you down, it wakes you up."   On Friday, I saw  Divergent in the theater with a few friends. I read the three-book series by Veronica Roth this past fall. (I reviewed the first and third book a few months ago)   Divergent is the story of Tris Prior, who lives in what is supposed to be a very Utopian-like Chicago. The people of Chicago are divided into five factions: Erudite (the intelligent), Amity (the peaceful), Abnegation (the selfless), Candor (the honest) and Dauntless (the brave).  Upon turning 16, Tris and others must decide which faction they belong to. For Tris, she must decide between her family, and the chance to discover who she really is.   Tris Prior is played by Shailene Woodley, her brother Caleb by Ansel Elgort, Four by Theo James, and Christina by Zoe Kravitz.   Before seeing the movie, I had read an  interview with Shailene Woodley in Teen ...

{Books and Homework} I've decided to start a new series of posts entitled On My Nightstand , and hopefully I can get around to posting them once a month. The posts will focus on what I am currently reading, working on, and interested in. Currently Reading I had to pick a memoir or autobiography for English class, to read for this semester's independent reading project. I did a lot of research before making a selection, reading excerpts from, and reviews about, a number of memoirs including: A House in the Sky , Eat Pray Love,  and Half Broken Horses . And although each of the aforementioned titles have received high critical acclaim, I choose  Wave for the emotional power I presumed it would express. Wave is the story of Sonali Deraniyagala, who was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka during Christmas week of 2004. On December 26th, a devastating tsunami and earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean and her hotel in Yala was consumed by waves. Deraniyagala los...

Eleanor and Park Rainbow Rowell 328 pages “You can be Han Solo," he said, "And I'll be Boba Fett. I'll cross the sky for you.”    It's 1986 in Omaha, Nebraska and Eleanor meets Park in the most un-romantic place ever. The school bus. They instantly bond over their shared love of rock music, comic books, and disdain for the conventional. And just when they think they know each other inside and out, Eleanor's past comes shooting into the present, with enough force to blow them apart. As the winner of the 2014 Printz Honor and the 2013 Goodreads Choice Award for Young Adult Fiction, Eleanor and Park has quickly become one of the most popular YA novels of the past year. Told in a dual perspective, Eleanor and Park is a sweet and comforting read - one that is different than most other love stories. Rowell creates main characters that are very unlike others found in YA novels. Eleanor is a curly red-haired girl who dresses in oversized sweater...