I Am Officially Reading Too Many Books at Once

Let's make a list of all the books that I am currently reading!

#1 - The Year of Living Biblically-A.J. Jacobs (my non-fiction book of the quarter)

This book is about a man who read several versions of the bible and wrote down all of the rules he found. Then, he tried to follow them to the best of his ability for a year.

I like this book a lot more than I thought I would. I was afraid that it would be a really dry, boring retelling from some religious fanactic, but it totally isn't. This is a normal, not-really-religious guy living in secular New York City. He actually reminds me of myself a little, and I really like the layout and writing styles. I recomend it to anyone who wants to think a little bit. It's not particularly difficult, but it does ask serious philisophical and moral questions.

#2 - Feed-M.T. Anderson

Feed is a sci-fi book about a society where everyone has chips in their heads that tell them information about things, advertise, allow them to chat with people, and listen to music. It asks ethical questions about how far we should go with technology.

So far I like this book. It's a pretty easy read, but there are a lot of invented slang words sometimes make it hard to follow. I'm not very far into it (I just started it this weekend), so I can't really say for sure, but so far I'm liking it.

#3 - The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath



I've read this book before and absolutely love it. It's definitely different, ecspecially considering when it was written, but I adore it. There are certain metaphors and views that make me laugh and certainly make me think. This book is autobiographical, which explains how Plath captured what it was like to lose your mind so perfectly.

#4 - Fruits Basket-Natsuki Takaya

My first manga book!


I always thought that graphic novels were just a way to get out of having to use adjectives in your writing, but one of my friends, who is an elequent writer, loves manga, so I asked for suggestions and this is what I got.

I'm borrowing this from her, and I haven't really started it yet. I read a few pages, and it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. It's cute, though, and I can't wait to learn the "manga code," if you will, which is sort of like puncuation. Some pictures have certain meanings (example: flowers floating around a character means they're crushing on someone).


I'm reading a couple more, but I don't have time to write about them now. More later!

Paper Towns

For my fiction book this quarter I chose Paper Towns by John Greene. It's a coming of age book (oh my!), but I really loved it. It was about a boy living in Florida who has a crush on his neighbor. The nieghbor girl does some crazy things and eventually runs away. He tries to find her, in the literal sense, and discovers who she really is beneath what he had built her up to be. In the process, he also finds himself.

I really loved this book for a number of reasons: 1. It was written by John Greene, who I love, and who taught me how to write sentences with numbered lists in them, 2. There was no TRADEGY, but there wasn't really SUCCESS either, at least, not in the coming of age archetype cycle sense. I guess, there was a little of both, but not in the traditional ways, 3. One of the two main characters was a nerdy guy, while the other was an uber popular girl, yet he exposed who they really were behind who they were stereotyped to be.

I have to admit, though, that there was one part I didn't really like. That was the searching-for-clues-murder-mystery part. I like things to be a tad more realistic, and I just think clues are too Nancy Drew. But, overall, I liked it and would recomend it to anyone.