Off The Shelf

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...