It’s that time of the year again ! This survey is created by Jamie and The Perpetual Page-Turner. You can take it here.
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Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
- Release Date: July 10th 2012
- Genre: Essay Collection / Self Help
- Hours: 9 hours and 41 minutes
- Publisher: Random House Vintage
- Triggers: Child abuse
Cheryl Strayed is probably best known for Wild, the story of her journey hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, which kicked off Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and was recently released as a film with Reese Witherspoon. I feel like a couple years ago I heard her name sprinkled through every literary website and podcast I subscribed to, so when I saw this audio on Overdrive I checked it out.
The set up for this book takes some explaining. It’s a collection of advice columns from when Strayed wrote an advice column on the culture website, The Rumpus under the pseudonym Dear Sugar. For each question, he usually picks a story from her past to illuminate her advice. Strayed has had such an interesting and full life and her stories are captivating. She’s brutally honest about herself and doesn’t hold anything back, she shows quite a bit of vulnerability with her readers and I think that’s why the columns were so popular.
I’d heard so much praise for this collection, but I wasn’t sure it would be for me. I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I started, but I really enjoyed this audiobook overall. Strayed’s mix of memoir through advice is fun. Strayed does the audio and I think hearing her voice gets across some of her intention in her responses to advice seekers. Like she calls her readers sweet pea and when you read it it can sound condescending, but the way she reads it it sounds more affectionate.
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Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Cycle #3)
- Release Date: November 21st 2014
- Pages: 400
- Genre: Fantasy
- Publisher: Scholastic Press
The dreaded third book in a series review. It can be hard to review books mid-series, so this one is going to be brief and spoiler free for the entire series.
Blue Lily, Lily Blue in a lot of ways is a test to see how closely you’ve been reading the other books. It pulls a lot from a deeply established mythology to keep the plot going which was hard for me because I hadn’t re-read the previous books. I kind of had to catch myself up on what was going on.
My favorite parts of this series, that I noticed more so in the book, is the dialogue between characters. They just have this great back and forth that is super entertaining. The characters in this series are some of the most solid and well developed characters I’ve read in YA. They all have so much agency that it’s almost like you’re getting four story arcs with each book.
I have started to notice how flowery the writing can be at times, particularly when a scene is from Gansey’s perspective. When Stiefvater is writing from Adam’s POV it tends to be more straightforward and I wish she would stick with it more. Sometimes that kind of writing would take me out of the book.
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Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand
- Release Date: November 16th, 2010
- Genre: Nonfiction
- Pages: 473
- Publisher: Random House
Recently at work, I had to work on a project that involved repetitive data entry. There were times where that, mixed with the usual quiet of Friday was killing me and I needed something to listen to. I went into my library’s Overdrive and downloaded the first nonfiction audiobook under most popular. The book was Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand, which tells the story of Louis Zamperini. I’d heard the name Louis Zamperini mentioned on a podcast I like, so I figured it must be good. What I thought would be just something to listen to for a couple hours turned into one of those audiobooks I cleaned my apartment just to finish.
This book chronicles is the life of Louis Zamperini, a celebrated Olympic athlete, who was drafted into the US Air Force as a bomber during World War II. During a routine flight to Australia, he plane crashes and he and two of his crewmates are stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a 7 foot raft for 47 days, only to become POWs in a camp with some of Japan’s most notorious war criminals.
No event in the 20th century has inspired American culture and media more than World War II. It’s a
constant source for stories of survival, brotherhood and victory. It’s remembered as time when America threw its weight into a war and won. WWII narratives have spawned novels, memoirs plays, movies, video games and not one but two HBO miniseries. None have ever peaked my interest as much as the story behind Unbroken.
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| Zamperini ran for USC in the 1930’s |
One of the interesting experiences I had with this book is that even though I knew Zamperini was still alive when this book came out, I was so nervous he wasn’t going to make it through all of the trials. I found myself looking up dates so I would know when he would get out of certain situations. It also doesn’t help that there isn’t a lot about his crewmates, so I had to go Googling for their fates before I could finish reading.
Needless to say this has to be one of the most brutal reads I’ve ever read. And it’s not all from horrible treatment of the Americans at the POW camps and descriptions of their days lost at sea. When Louis is stationed in Hawaii he witnesses a lot of his fellow Airmen go out on missions and just never come back. The Air Force was making these planes so fast and really had no idea what they were doing and they would crash all the time. And this is the Pacific Ocean, so there are a lot of sharks.
I learned a lot about World War II from Unbroken. I feel like in school we learn a lot about the European side of the war and less about what was going on in the Pacific. I would be interested in reading more. (I startedHiroshima by John Hersey) This is an American book so it may have its own biases. Hillenbrand not only tells Zamperini’s story, but gives the entire context of the war so you begin to understand things like why exactly they dropped the atomic bomb.
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| Zamperini and Jolie who is directing the film version |
The narrator, Edward Herrmann was great, he kind of sounded like someone on the History Channel which worked for this book. Also, in the POW camp there are prisoners from different countries and he does the accents really well. I think Unbroken works especially well on audio because then you can hear all the Japanese pronunciations.
This book really had everything; reality, inspiration, romance and even humor which I always appreciate. Some of the shenanigans and pranks Zamperini and his crew members get into when they are stationed in Hawaii are hilarious. Hillenbrand weaves everything to create a fully formed and honest narrative, I can see why this book has been a New York Times Bestseller for four years !
I think this book might get a little more of a media boost with Angelina Jolie directing the film which is set coming out this holiday season. I feel like this movie is going to be so good (Oscar ??), so I’m totally going to see it in theaters. I feel weird saying this about a true story, but this trailer gave me the feels. Watch it !
I see there is a YA version of this book…I’m curious how this differs from the original.
Kat Joins #24in48 Readathon
Book Review: Everyday by David Levithan
I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”
― David Levithan, Every Day
- Release Date: August 28th 2012
- Pages: 233
- Genre: Paranormal Romance ?
- Publisher: Knopf (Random House)
This novel is fairly different from the previous Levithan novels I’ve read so far. It’s very high concept and cerebral. The story follows A, a who wakes up every day in someone else’s body. A lives their life for one day before falling asleep and waking up in a new body the next day. A is essentially a soul without a body, A has sentient thoughts and memories, A has no gender or form.
When I first heard about this book, I thought it would essentially read like a series of short stories, but there is a continuing plot. When A meets a girl named Rhiannon while in the body of her boyfriend, Justin A falls in love with her. Now, A is will do anything to get back to her and find a way for them to be together…