Books and Sensibility

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Kat C

Audiobook Review: Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

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  • Release Date: October 16th 2012
  • Audiobook Hours: 7 hours 22 minutes
  • Genre: Adult Fiction
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I have this thing where I tend to read popular fiction waaaaay behind the curve. I read The Fault in Our Stars 3 years after I bought it, Gone Girl is still on my TBR and I bought 50 Shades two years ago and I will get past the first 50 pages at some point.

 If you think back to late 2012 it was all about Silver Linings Playbook because the movie was super buzzy.  So buzzy they have the actor’s names on the movie tie-in cover. When I saw this as one of the audiobooks available on Scribd’s audiobook section I figured it was time…

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Maggie Stiefvater and Gayle Forman Visit Richmond

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It’s always fun to attend  author events and I was so excited to see both Maggie Stiefvater and Gayle Foreman were coming to my neck of the woods. I listened to If I Stay last year and it blew me away with how amazing it was. It was the perfect mix of magic realism and contemporary YA that is my genre kryptonite….

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Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius

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  • U.S. Release Date: November 12, 2013
  • Page Number: 304
  • Genre: Nonfiction
  • U.S. Publisher: Thomas Nelson Publishing (Harper Collins)

I’ve recently become an NPR podcast junkie and I’m really loving their new podcast Invisibilia, about “the intangible things that shape human behavior.” Each week the hosts tell stories of people who have rare psychological or neurological experiences–on of their first stories is of Martin Pistorius, a South African man who spent six years trapped in his own body. After I heard this story, I had to know more and was happy to see his memoir was on Scribd.

When Pistorius (who as far as I can tell is not related to the convicted South African athlete Oscar Pistorius) is 12-years-old he develops a degenerative brain condition that leaves him mute and unable to move. Doctors couldn’t diagnose him and his parents were told he had the mind of a 3 month old and to take him home to wait for him to die. Only Martin doesn’t die and a few year later his mind comes back, but not his motor skills or speech. He can’t tell anyone he’s back and he lives like a ghost boy as the people around him assume he isn’t comprehending what he sees.  It takes six years for his parents to finally  figure out he was aware and the book is his reflections on his time as a ghost boy and  his journey learning how to communicate using technology.

This book tells a really incredible story. Martin becomes well known in the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) community and it’s interesting to see all the people he meets as he goes to conference. It can be a little nightmare inducing too. One of his friends was paralyzed from the eyes down from a stroke at the age of twenty-five.But it’s amazing the amount of technology and work being done so everyone has a voice.

The parts I found most interesting are the parts where he tells the things he sees people do when they think no one is looking. He observes many of his caregivers mostly at their worse, but also some at their best.

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If These Books Were Judged By Their Covers

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One of the best parts of books are the covers ! Each week we’ll look at the recent cover reveals and give some judgement. . . even though we have no qualifications whatsoever.

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I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios

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  • Release Date: February 3, 2015
  • Pages: 400
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Publisher: Henry Holt & Co (Macmillan)

Skylar Evans has one goal; get out of her small backwoods hometown of Creek View, California. With her acceptance letter to San Francisco State in hand the only thing standing between Skylar and the next step in her life is the summer. But when her mom loses her job and sobriety she’s not sure the summer is going to end how she planned.

 Right away this book reminded me of one of my favorite chapters from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Thingscalled How To Get Unstuckabout Strayed’s time as a counselor to girls whose success was measured by two things; not getting pregnant and getting a job at Taco Bell.  This sort of mentality is evident in Skylar’s story, her best friend is a teen mom and her mom worked at Taco Bell for 18 years. Skylar herself is trying to get “unstuck” from this life cycle. Creek View is a place where future plans are very short sided and people drink and party to forget about their problems.

I feel like the setting of this book is very important to understanding the story. Creek View is this lower income area with a mix of lower income white people and Mexican migrant worker families. Creek View represents a town we don’t see a lot of in contemporary YA; most YAs tend take place in nondescript suburban bubbles.

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National Readathon Day is This Saturday !

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When I first heard about National Readathon Day on the Books on The Nightstand Podcast I thought it sounded awesome. What is National Readathon Day ? It’s an event created by Penguin Random House where readers across the world will use the hours from 12 Noon  to 4PM on Saturday Jan. 24th 2015 to do nothing but read. You can do it in a school, in the library, at home or wherever and don’t forget to #timetoread.

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