Book Review: Hyperbole & a Half by Allie Brosh

This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative--like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it--but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:

Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*

*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!

This book was a complete impulse buy. I had just wandered in to Landmark - a bookstore here in India - with the thoughts of just whiling away a bit of time. I should've known better. There was no way I would've have walked out of there without buying a couple of books. I actually had a couple of books picked out to buy and then my eyes fell on this book.

I had only seen this book on the videos made by Jesse from Jessethereader and Raeleen from padfootandprongs07 on YouTube. So I just picked it up. All I knew was that they thought this book was hilarious. And boy were they right. This book made me giggle incessantly. I mean I read this book out in public, while traveling, in a course of a day. Before this book I had not even known the author was a blogger.


For all those people who do not know what this book is about, let me enlighten you. This is a cross between a diary and a graphic novel. Or more like a memoir which is a graphic novel. The art is simple, child - like actually. What you need to look forward to is the content. She tackles a varied range of topics from training her dog to her childhood antics to her battle with depression. I was touched by the way she handled the topic of depression in her book. I liked that she did not spout theories on how to battle depression and about why she was depressed. She just was. And one day she came out of it. It was a process sure, she did not know the why or the how of it and she stated as such.

The other topics she handled were sooo funny. Especially about the dogs, and the Goose. If nothing else makes you pick this book up this will. Trust me. The part about the goose was HILARIOUS. And the part about little Allie's trip to the dentist.

I would highly recommend you to check this book out, even more so if you want to judge for yourself if you think the above parts were as funny as I thought. I rated this book a 4/5.

Book Rant: Classic Literature

As previously mentioned in another post of mine, I have this habit of reading from the same genre continuously if I find that I loved one book from the same genre. A while back it was Zombie/post Apocalyptic books and then it was dystopian. I think it's going to be the 'Classics' this time round. I just finished reading H.G. Well's The Island of Dr Moreau, War of the Worlds & The Invisible Man and also Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice and Frances Burnett.

In addition to reading a lot of classics I've suddenly bought quite a few of them. And I've bought the Penguin English Library collection that have beautiful covers. I now own the 3 books mentioned above and Persuasion & Emma by Jane Austen, David Copperfield & A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Fairy Tales by Hans christian Andersen and  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. And the best part about classics is that there's always an edition that is not hard on your wallet. So rest assured that I did not spend a lot of money on these books.(Though it does depend on what you would define as "not a lot of money")

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H.G. Wells Books

I read 3 of H.G. Wells' books - The Island of Dr Moreau, War of the Worlds & The Invisible Man. He has also written The Time Machine but I somehow could not finish it at this point in time. I got distracted by other books. So let us talk about the 3 books I did read. If I had to rank the 3 books I did read The Invisible Man would be ranked 3rd, The Island of Dr Moreau would be 2nd and the War of the Worlds would be 1st.

The Invisible Man was an enjoyable enough story but I just could not relate to the Main Character (MC) at all. I found that the other 2 books that I read were far more interesting than this book. One other reason could be that I loved the Hollow Man better.

I want to talk about the Island of Dr Moreau and War of the Worlds together. Now these stories were very interesting to the say the least. What bowled me over was that these books were set in the late 19th or early 20th century. And they are Science Fiction!! I loved the conflict the MC goes through in Moreau and the narration in War of the Worlds was just Amazing. War of the Worlds was like a Steam punk novel before there was any Steam punk. Both these books, in my opinion, will always be relevant. It is not hampered by time. I mean these books talk about aliens and genetic modification.

I would recommend these books to anyone who loves Science Fiction.

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Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

There are some books that I always go back to re-read. Pride & Prejudice is one of them. I finally bought a copy of my own and it is the beautiful Penguin English Library edition. I have always loved Liz Bennett and Darcy. This time around I felt I understood Darcy more than I did Liz. The last time I had read this book I was as indignant as Liz with Darcy, I mean in my eyes he was an arrogant jerk. But this time around I could see the circumstances through his perspective.

This is what makes me re-read books. The books kinda change for you as you grow older. There is always something new that you can glean from a story, a new perspective at the least. And the romance... It's just perfect. This is why the book is a classic. I would recommend this book to everyone - especially to people who hate insta-love.

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Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I had read the abridged version of this book when I was a lot younger. So when I got my hands on the unabridged version of this book I pounced on it. I had watched the movie adaptation of the book too. As it has been over a decade since I had read this book it was like I was reading it for the first time.

It was a different feeling reading this book as an adult. I found Mary to be spoiled, at least in the first half of the book. I mean the author herself states so. The story portrays her changing from a self-centered spoilt brat to a pretty agreeable child. I also love the depiction of the moor in this book. I could just visualize the scenery and the garden. Reading this time made me appreciate the writing more than the actual story. But if I were still in school I would have loved this book as much as all the Enid Blyton books I read when I was younger.

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I can tell you one thing, reading the classics wins you brownie points from your parents and also makes you seem very intellectual. This could be because people think that reading something that was written more than a 100 years ago automatically makes you smart. I mean the War of the World is not all that different from the Sci-Fi of today but its got the advantage of age on its side.

I would like to read Little Women and Jane Eyre next. Maybe not immediately but I would definitely read them in the next couple of months.

Book Review: Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Soooo... I though I would get back to reviewing books by reviewing a book that had a very different approach. And for that I chose Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion. I heard of this book after the movie came out. And for some reason I held out on watching the movie before reading this book. That was a great decision.

'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins. This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won't be changed without a fight...

As you can tell from the synopsis, this is a zombie story. What attracted me to this book was that this was a zombie story told through a zombie's perspective. That in itself was a winning plot in my mind. I admit that R is already a different kind of zombie when it comes to the others. He actually thinks. But what was even more interesting was that the zombies were not as mindless as we would assume. The zombies actually had a sort of society. It was like they were a community - they had a place of worship, a school, of course a school where they taught the young how to kill humans but a school none the less and they also had a concept of marriage.

One of the things that Marion made clear early on was that the zombies ate not because they felt hungry for nutrition but they just felt hungry with something other than their stomach. They could relive a persons memory by eating their brains. This is important because this shows that even though they were the living dead, they were trying to experience the life force by eating brains, by having those concepts of humanity that you would think that the living dead might not have. 

When R attacks Perry, a member of a salvage team, and eats his brains something happens. He suddenly decides to save Julie, another member of the team and girl friend of Perry, and takes her with him to his home at the airport. it is through his interactions with her that he sees the changes that happen. He starts speaking longer sentences, he doesn't feel as hungry as before and so on. Another change is that he starts dreaming. It is just Perry's memories at first but he slowly starts dreaming his own dreams. 

On the other end of the spectrum are the Living who have walled up a stadium and are living inside of it. The Living are barely surviving. They guard their borders, send out salvage teams to get necessary items, teach the children to hunt and kill the zombies. The people in charge think it more important to just keep fighting instead of preserving life. It is from this environment that Julie, Perry and their friends hail. There is a part in the book where Julie asks her friends what they dream of doing. Perry, who wanted to previously wanted to be a writer does not see a point in it anymore, he doesn't understand whom it would benefit. What would be the point of writing a story in a world that is in its last leg? This is how the living live now. They live to survive. The zombies were just the last nail in the coffin to a world already ravaged  with wars before the plague.

In the end the dead are more closer to living than the Living are. The dead are moving towards reclaiming all that they had lost in this plague but the Living have lost touch with all the good parts of being human and are just wrapped up, not in hate, but in fear and fear has always brought out the worst in us humans. 

That is why this book isn't just a zombie book. It is more than that. Even I did not expect such deep messages from this book. I mean it's such a small book too. Just 240 pages long. But it packs such a punch. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved it that it made me think so much. If anyone is hesitant to pick this book up because it has got zombies and the like, don't be. It's just that the setting is such that there are zombies. 

I rate this book a 4.5/5

Travelling...Via books

Whenever someone gets asked a question on what their hobbies are, the stock set of answers are: I love reading, I love music, I love travel and so on. I am not going to comment on the reading bit, because hello, this is a blog where I talk about books (and movies and other things, but mainly books). And I will maybe tackle music another day but I would like to talk about traveling as a hobby.

Someone recently asked me if I liked to travel, and I answered saying yes. And I do like traveling, especially with friends and family (right now more with friends than with family - a deliberate shout out to my family, who have gone on trips with out me :P ). But what with a busy work schedule that my friends and I have we are unable to really travel as much as we would like. So even though I answered with a yes I added a caveat saying: 'I like traveling, but I use books to travel'.

Now when I said this to this particular person, and to a lot of other people, he looked at me weirdly. Like I was the most crazy and laziest person on earth. And that offends me, even though it is true that I am lazy and I am definitely certifiably crazy, that they assume I must just not like traveling and am finding a lame alternate.

It is not true that I would not like to travel if given a chance. Come to think of it, I have traveled quite a bit. I've not gone overseas but my father loves traveling so he has taken me and the rest of the family on quite a few trips (near or otherwise). But traveling within the world that is created by a book is just amazing. And I am not bound by boundaries at all. Not just physical boundaries but the boundaries of space and time are of no match to me when I am reading a book. If a book is well written then it can take you to different locations like America (almost every YA book and various other adult books that I have read), Sweden (the Patrik Hedstrom series), Egypt (Sphinx  by Robin Cook), Russia, France, Brussels (Bourne trilogy) and it can even let me travel backwards and forward through time. And I didn't even need any documentation.

I have also traveled to distant planets, parallel universes (where I am just as lazy as I am now but either super rich and intelligent or super poor :P) and to Middle Earth of course. It might seem lame to some but I think of this kind of travel as preparation for actual travel. I know of a few places to visit in the countries I mentioned above and what is generally accepted or not accepted there. I also learn a bit of their culture and laws.

And if I ever meet a troll I know that I should keep them talking till the sun comes up (LOTR) or that I should be wary of black monoliths on unknown planets (2001: A Space Odyssey). I will always travel with a towel as that would be my best friend (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and to keep garlic and silver on my person while I travel if I ever meet pesky vampires or werewolves.

All in all I would say traveling via books has actually made me more prepared than anyone else who has not read. So take that all you doubters and travel snobs. I, I mean my imagination, has clocked more kilometers than any of you. And to all you readers out there, Have a happy journey!!

My Book Habits and Pet Peeves

I have been in the habit of reading ever since I can remember. I attribute this part of my character to my parents. My mother encouraged me by teaching me shlokas (poems), telling me their meanings and telling me stories. My father encouraged me while leading by example. We have always had a lot of books at home. Cultivating the habit of reading from such a young age has resulted in me having a few book habits and pet peeves.

My pet peeves are:

1. When people mark their places in a book by dog earing the pages. 
2. When people write in the margins of my book. I'm fine with people writing in their own books. I actually like owning second hand books that have notes in them, as long as I have a pristine copy for myself.
3. One of my other pet peeves is when someone opens a book really wide and cracks the spine beyond recognition
4. Licking a finger and then turning a page
5. People blurting out spoilers from the movie version in front of me when they know I haven't read the book or watched the series. (Though I have to mention here that I did this to my sister once, and I am extremely sorry that I did.)

My book habits are :

1. If I love a particular book I tend to keep reading books from the same genre for the next 3-4 books. I have done this quite a few times. Last year I read Boneshaker by Cherie Priest and I liked it. This lead me to read Feed by Mira Grant, World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks.
2. When I am reading a book I'm falling in love with I imagine myself in the world created by the author. I do not necessarily imagine myself as one of the main characters but I start creating a character of my own that I think would fit in to this world. 
3. I not just start living in the world but start to make up stories for the characters even after the book has ended. I am great at imagining these things but really bad at writing them down.

These are only some of my pet peeves and book habits. I cannot seem to think of more but I am quite sure I have a few more of both. Maybe I'll update the list whenever I do remember. So what are your pet peeves and habits when it comes to books?

The Effects of Book Hauls on life in general & TBR Shelves

I just ordered 9 books off of the internet. I do not know why I do this to myself. Though in my defense I have been holding off on buying books for a few months now. And then someone told me about the clearance sale on Flipkart and I just freaked out. I got two, that's right TWO hardcover books for less than 700 rupees. That's less than 10 USD, which is rare in India.

It is a good thing that we are now able to get a lot of books in India that were not really available to us before. But there is a problem that arises when there are addicts like me around. I allude to my addiction to books. The minute I hear of a good book, I need to read it.

I do read e-books but somehow its not the same. So when I read a book and love it enough, I buy the physical book. And sales like the ones this past weekend encourage me to buy books I've not yet read but have heard a lot of. My family might be horrified to learn that I ordered NINE books but what they do not know is that I passed over buying double that number of books. They would not understand that this is actually shopping in moderation for me.

I justify my buying of books by saying that I do not buy high ticket items like clothes or jewellery. But that actually pisses my mother off more I think. She would actually prefer me wearing better clothes. So buying books gets me into trouble with my Mother and also my Grandmother.

Another problem that arises is that of space. I am have stacked my books in boxes, in my closet, in shelf space behind a mirror and at my home in Karimnagar. I have close to 200-250 books that I bought with my own money or received as gifts. Now, when I have to move out and go to a place of my own I'll have to search for a place that can accommodate my existing collection of books and the future books that I will buy.

The major problem with me buying books is that my To Be Read shelf increases by those many books. One of the things I do to offset this is that I first read the e-book version and if I really love it I get the physical book. This helps me keep my TBR shelf in check. This would be a great solution if I didn't discover new books that I would just love to read every other day.

Anyway, no matter how much I think I'm going to curb on my spending when it comes to books, it ain't gonna happen. I'll just have to be very careful and save before I splurge. I will try and spend money on books when there are sales like the one Flipkart had just a few days ago.

If anyone is curious as to the books I got this time around, they are:

1. Blood Red Road by Moira Young
2. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa
3. Flipped by Wendelin van Draanen (Hard Cover)
4. There is no Dog by Meg Rosoff (Hard Cover)
5. Nobody's Girl by Sarra Manning
6. Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
7. Persuasion by Jane Austen
8. Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas
9. The Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherine Valente

Happy New Year !

Hello Everyone! Happy New Year! I know, I know... I've been away a long while - 3 months to be exact. I'm not going to make an excuse saying I was too busy, which I was, but I was not busy enough to binge read. The truth of the matter is I was lazy and I just could not bring myself to write. I was just in a writing slump. But I was not in a reading slump, not by a long shot.

I have read quite a lot of books that I tremendously enjoyed. Like the Maria Snyder books, Cinder, Feed by Mira Grant Wonder, Throne of Glass, The Rosie Project, A Monster Calls, Fangirl, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, A Fault in our Stars and I got to reread the first 3 books in the Potter series. 2013 was a great year for a book lover for me. The books I mentioned above are one of my favorite books I read.

There were other books I loved but just was not in the mindset to finish. I loved whatever I read of The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss but at that point in time I just did wanted some time to just marathon through the whole book and I did not have that time. So I put it on hold.

So I plan on reading the Kingkiller chronicles this year along with a few other series. I will hold off on reading a series unless the end of that particular series is near. And I will try and make a dent in my TBR. I have quite a few books on my shelves I've read so I need to read those. I am not saying I'll curb my buying of books. I'm not delusional enough to think I can stop but I've already curbed my book buying just a little.

I've set myself a conservative target when it comes to the number of books I plan on reading this year. I've already made a good start. I've read 5 books and loved all of them except one.The previous year I started with Zombie books and this year I started with Mystery novels.

I might do a joint review for all of them or just a few. But I can promise you that I will try to be consistent in writing posts. So here's to a great year ahead. I hope you find great books to read whose stories will stay with you forever.