Books and Sensibility

We're an Open Book

Kat

Audiobook Review: Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

     3 Comments

  • 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…

Read this Post

I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios

     4 Comments

  • 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.

…

Read this Post

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

     4 Comments

  • 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.

…

Read this Post

Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand

     2 Comments

  • 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.

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.

 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.

Romance Review: Something About You by Julie James

     Leave a Comment

…

Read this Post

Love is The Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson

     Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: September 30th 2014
  • Pages: 352 
  • Genre: Science Fiction
  • Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic)

A few months ago I read Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince as my starting point to support the  We Need Diverse Books campaign and to start including more diverse books in our blog. The Summer Prince started out kind of rocky for me but morphed into an intricate, creative poignant dystopian tale. When I saw Johnson’s next book on NetGalley  I jumped at the chance to review it.

In the political, power-hungry world of Washington D.C. Our main character 18-year-old Emily Bird occupies a curious space as a black upper-class teen in D.C. society. Bird grits her teeth and bares it as her mother, who raised herself up from the lower-income Northeast DC neighborhood, pushes Bird to join the Ivy league crowd whether she wants to or not. But when  Emily loses hours of memories right before a pandemic flu turns D.C into a quarantine zone, she becomes a girl of her own making. With the help of Coffee, the son of a Brazilian diplomat and new friends, they will uncover her memories and who is trying to keep her from remembering….

Read this Post