cover issues

It has come to my attention that covers play a VERY large role when people are selecting books.

I have just finished reading Looking for Alaska by John Green (and will review it soon I promise!). I bought the book because I had read Paper Towns and really enjoyed so I thought buying another book by John Green would be a good investment. And it was. The book is REALLY REALLY good, though read 'how far is too far in teenage books' if you think you might be offended by some of the content.

I have a MUCH bigger issue with the book than simply the sex, and that is the cover.

My copy of Looking for Alaska is the British version, and the cover looks like this:

Quite nice, yes, HOWEVER the main character in this book is a boy. Most of the main characters are boys. The author is male. Yet this cover suggests that the book is for girls, with the daisy and the curly writing with the heart. The daisy does have significance in the book, but not till very late in the story.

Now I don't know John Green's opinion on this cover (and I am considering emailing him about what he thinks of it) but if I was the author of this book, I would be slightly annoyed. Boys SHOULD read this book, in my opinion! It's definitely not a girly book.

This is the American cover of Looking for Alaska:

Well firstly, this cover is also black, like the British cover, but there is no flower. The candle with the smoke is a reference to events in the book and there is nothing remotely girly or boyish that would distinguish this book as for one gender as opposed to the other.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... covers annoy me sometimes. One of my favourite books, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli, originally had a hot pink cover. Just like Alaska, this book is narrated in first person by a BOY and is written by a MALE author. It is not a girly book at all! It's a book about breaking down stereotypes and friendship and love!

So, what do you think? Do covers effect the choices you make when you are choosing a book to read/buy? Boys, would you consider reading Looking for Alaska if you saw the British cover, or would you dismiss it as girly? Please tell me what you think in the comments! Also, do you have any books that you would not originally have read because of the covers but only read because someone recommended them to you?

I'm interested to find out whether other people see the issues with covers I see.

how far is too far in teenage books?

Well, this may be a slightly awkward post for some younger readers, so I warn in advance.

So I am reading Looking for Alaska, by John Green. This book is a book for young adults, I think at very youngest, my age (15).  It deals with many issues, including sex, drugs, alcohol and more, that some people may not be happy to read. They may find it offensive or controversial.

I personally do not, but I can understand why some people would, but I think in this case, every instance where these issues are touched on has a very good reason behind it.

John Green, the author, makes videos on YouTube with his brother, and on January 30 2008, he made a video entitled, "I Am Not a Pornographer", which I am embedding here and HIGHLY recommend to be watched if you are (a) planning on reading the book or have read it, (b) think sex/drugs/alcohol in teenage books is a bad thing or (c) want to see a funny author talking to his camera.

Also, it will help this blog entry make much more sense.



I first watched this video before I read Looking for Alaska, and I have to say, it did make me wary about reading the book. But it also reassured me and my ideas about the occurence of sex/drug use/alcohol consumption in teenage books.

I think the way Green portrayed the sex scene in Looking for Alaska really does support the ideas that he suggested it was meant to convey in the video, such as the fact that physical intimacy can never stand in for emotional attachment. Although physical intimacy is an important part of a relationship, particularly in marriage, you cannot simply have that physical intimacy without the emotion. It will leave you feeling empty and unsatisfied.

I believe that sex in teenage books is most definitely not a bad thing. I do think parents have a right to stop their kids reading certain books, and I also think that teenagers should be able to find books that do not have sex in them, but I really do not think that just because a book has sex in it means it should automatically be banned, as was suggested. Green is right when he says that teenagers are wiser than adults often think we are. I picked up the juxtaposing scenes in Looking for Alaska, and I think other teenagers would too.

The drug and alcohol (ab)use in Looking for Alaska are somewhat condemned by the main character, Pudge (Miles) Halter, and also lead to a tragic event. However these issues are present, and some of the messages portrayed are that alcohol can lead to having a good time. But then again, I do not believe that the prescence of drugs and/or alcohol in a book are enough to deem it 'inappropriate'. Often there is a message behind the consumption of these substances.

So overall, I do really recommend Looking for Alaska but I do not promote the issues in it. But I do think the precense of these issues in teenage books is not necessarily a bad thing, but should be looked at closely before being simply deemed 'inappropriate'.

TALES FROM OUTER SUBURBIA BY SHAUN TAN

Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan is a picture book, but it's definitely not one for children.

The book contains ten short stories, all with very different topics and dealing with very different issues, and all accompanied by Tan's customary beautiful artwork - a combination of scrapbooking, water colours and pen-and-ink drawing.

(As there are multiple stories in the book, I've decided to focus on two in particular)

Distant Rain

"Have you ever wondered what happens to all the poems people write?"

Distant Rain tells the story of these poems. It is a beautifully set out story, with pieces of paper with different handwriting on them all over the pages, some little pieces with just one word, others with a few sentences. They are accompanied by black, white and brown pencil sketches. The story really makes the reader think about how every person in the world has secrets, and what the consequences would be if every person in the world suddenly knew random secrets and emotions from other, anonymous people.

Alert But Not Alarmed

This story tells of a time when the government has forced everyone to store an intercontinetal ballistic missile in their backyard, but the people have started making them pretty and giving them other uses. The story is accompanied by a double-page illustration of these missiles in the neighbourhood, and they do look quite pretty. Through the story, Tan has made a comment about how much of an affect terrorism and war have on our everyday lives. We all know the expression "war is in our own backyards", or something like that, and through this story, Tan is saying that war is closer than we may think it is. However, by saying that the families are converting their missiles into pizza ovens and kennels and even decorating them with patterns and fairylights, Tan is also drawing our attention to the fact that we can do something about war and terrorism, and we can stand up to the government. The missiles are kept by ordinary people, and through this story, Tan is saying that war is not started by governments, but by ordinary people.

Butterflies: 8 out of 10
Recommended for people: aged 10+ if they want to read it on a superficial level, just as a story book, more like 14 or 15+ to read it on a deeper level
Warnings: nothing much... It's just not a picture book for little kids!

i'm reading a picture book...

I have started reading Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan, and it is absolutely brilliant. Tan is an amazing artist and also a fantastic storyteller.

The book is a picture book, but most definitely not for children. This is not because of anything inappropriate in the book, and I guess some of the stories in the book could be read on a simpler level, but the stories really do have so much more to them than just a simple story. They are about life in the suburbs of a city, but have remarkably strange twists in them. They deal with issues such as family, friendship, growing up (and the loss of innocence that comes with that) and so much more.

Some of the stories are hard to understand and some of them are more observations on life, but the ones that I have read so far are beautiful and haunting.

I'm just going to go finish it now, then review it, and then I'll get started on my next book, Looking for Alaska by John Green, which I bought at the shops this morning. I can't wait to read it!!

CLOUDSTREET BY TIM WINTON

I finished! Yay! Here's the review, including features you will see in other reviews.

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton is a huge, epic novel about the lives of two families, the Pickles and the Lambs as they live together in one big house, which is actually called Cloudstreet (hence the name of the book). Both families have come out of tragedy in the countryside to start their new lives in Perth. The families are both complex and fairly dysfunctional, with relationship breakdowns, affairs, and fights frequently occuring. But the families also overcome differences and change the lives of each other and of the entire community.

The book is divided up into big sections, numbered with Roman numerals, and within those sections small headings divide up the rest of the text. These small sections are anything from a few sentences to pages long, which making understanding the plot slightly easier.

One of the hardest things about the book is just how many characters and plot lines there are, which is one of the reasons I made my family representation video, to help others who read it keep track of which family the characters belong to (and to help me).

Some characters have bigger roles than others, for example, out of the kids, Fish and Quick from the Lamb family play a much bigger role than their sisters, and Rose Pickles is a much more important character than her brothers.

Overall, the book was masterfully written and sophisticated in its character development, but personally, the book did not REALLY appeal to me. I found it interesting, but not gripping, and I had no trouble putting it down. I appreciate that it is a great piece of literature, but I felt that I would have preferred a shorter story, rather than one stretched over 20 years. That being said, the book did have a natural ending, and it felt like it ended at a good time with not too many loose ends. Even while writing this review I found myself becoming more and more appreciative of just how hard the book would have been to write and how amazing a writer Tim Winton is.

Butterflies (which are like stars but for this blog): 6 out of 10
Recommended for people: aged 15 and over and with patience and a good appreciation of the triumph of writing that this book is.
Warnings: lots of sex, quite a bit of violence, lots of swearing. Not for the easily offended or anyone younger than about 15. This is a book for adults, not for kids.

Overall, I would recommend this book to another person, if they were the right sort of person.

escape!

I just escaped from going over my Science exam, and here I am in PIP in the school library, reading Cloudstreet and getting excited because I am SO close to finishing!

Excuse me for just one moment while I finish...

I'm reading so quickly but the end of the lesson has come. I am so close, but I have to stop.

SO SO SO close, yet so far...

Well, I will finish the moment I get home, and write the review. I did my best!

Also, I've been getting a few questions about the project, so I might start an FAQ page... what do you think?

i don't want to talk about it

Let's just not even mention my aim, OK? The book a week thing?

Yeah. TOTALLY not going so well.

It's been over two weeks since I started Cloudstreet, but although I quite like it, I'm not enthralled. I just don't pick it up when I'm bored the way I do when I find a book I love. Actually, when I find a book I REALLY love, I pretty much just read, all the time, without doing other vital things. When I got Paper Towns by John Green from the library, that's what I did. Just read, all the time.

Actually, I still have that book. I need to return it to the library... now I've probably got a fine...

I had an OK weekend, I watched the telecast of Jessica Watson coming home on TV on Saturday (and read a bit while I was doing that), and went shopping for clothes for work experience (which will undoubtedly be mentioned here more soon because the position I've got is really relevant and I am SO SO SO excited about it!!!). Then I watched a movie with my family on Saturday night, so I didn't read then. Sunday, I did some homework and spent time with my sister, then went to church. So no reading there.

Anyway, I've got over 30 views on my video on YouTube! And although I think a large majority of them are me, I'd like to thank anyone who did actually watch the video. I really appreciate it, particularly as it wouldn't make sense to you unless you had read the book.

Which I sort of recommend, but sort of not... It's ok, it's just not the best book I've ever read. It feels a tiny bit like it's dragging. Apparently there's a play of it that goes for 6 hours. I don't know if I could stay focussed for that long. I had trouble staying focussed in the movie of Robin Hood and that's only 2 hours!

Tomorrow, I have a PIP lesson, and I think I'll try and finish the book tonight or tomorrow morning on the way to school and write the review in the lesson. I was worried at first that the filter on the school server that blocks sites like Facebook :( and flash games would block my blog, but luckily it didn't, so I can work on that at school. I'm also planning on emailing some high-profile bloggers and vloggers to ask them to check out my project, and hopefully even endorse it for me, so stay tuned for that!

And I promise I'll get off this book soon so you can start reading my boring entries about another book :)

family fun

EXAMS ARE OVER! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! HOORAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

OK, that's out of the way and I'm not going to talk about exams again, I apologise for all my complaining.

SO what's been happening... Well *the thing that must not be named* was eating into all my reading time but that will not happen anymore. I've got a pretty empty weekend so I'll try and finish Cloudstreet by Sunday, maybe even before if I actually try and do it, but right now I just want to bask in the fact that I have NO MORE... Oh wait. Sorry. No more I promise.

The book is very very good. But what I find confusing is the characters. So the book is about two families that move in together in this one big house, and one family has five kids, the other seven, and it can get REALLY confusing trying to figure which kid belongs to which family!

So to help myself I've drawn a rather epic family tree, which you can now see me drawing in the following, rather epic (if I do say so myself) video. It took me rather a while to do. The music in the background is I've Got Nothing by the Chartjackers. Enjoy it!

mid-exam high!

I'm at that stage where more than half my exams are over, I'm finding it REALLY hard to concentrate on studying and all I want to do is relax, hang out with my friends, play guitar, watch episode after episode of Gilmore Girls and read.

Unfortunately, I cannot, because although I have done my science exam (which was actually WAY better than I expected and I am so so so relieved), PDHPE exam (which everyone finished in half an hour and was really easy) and French exam (which was just a speaking exam that I think I did quite well in), tomorrow I have Maths, which should be nice and hard and on Wednesday I have Geography.

Today while we were waiting around after the PDHPE exam for the French exam, I realised that I could be using this time to keep reading Cloudstreet (which, incidentally, I have nearly half finished!), but I was with some of best friends at the time and I REALLY didn't feel like going down to my locker to get the book and then effectively ignore them for the next hour. So I didn't read.

But looking back on that event, I've started to realise something. If I'm going to get through 26 books by October 31st, there are going to have to be times when reading comes before incidental hanging out. Like, I might be REALLY close to finishing a book and we have a bludgy period because it's raining and we're meant to have PE and the teacher can't be bothered making us do yoga in the hall (hypothetical situation, we play hockey inside when it rains and it's actually one of the better times I have in PE) and all my friends will be chatting and I'll have to say "sorry, I've just got to read for a bit, THEN I'll talk".

I know I got myself into this, and I love to read, but that situation just doesn't appeal to me. I guess if I stay on top of the reading that won't have to happen, but at the moment, when I'm struggling to finish a book in two weeks, it looks quite likely.

Sigh... Oh well, this time in 48 hours all my exams will be over! I can't wait.

doing slightly better at reading, not so much at science!

I have read quite a bit more of Cloudstreet, and I'm finding it incredibly good!

Last night I read for about 45 minutes, which felt SO SO good after studying pretty much all afternoon. Science still doesn't make any sense, and I just feel really overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I have to know. If anyone has a really good, simple way of explaining the nitrogen cycle in terms that I will understand, please tell me! I really need to learn it.

But I'll tell you what I DID learn today: I learnt that Psycho is a REALLY scary movie. We were watching it in music because we are studying film music (so much fun!) and I spent the entire "shower scene" facing the opposite direction, staring at my best friend while she told me what was going on. It was fun.

And THAT was completely unrelated to the project, but I am trying to make this blog post nice and long so I can spend lots of time writing it so I don't have to go back and revise simultaneous equations (maths is not as bad as science, but still pretty bad!)

BACK to Cloudstreet... WOW Tim Winton is good! The writing is really simple but he is such a good storyteller. I am so attached to the characters, particularly to Quick Lamb. Quick's younger brother Fish was in an accident and suffered some form of mental trauma or brain damage, and Quick is such a caring older brother, who just wishes his brother was OK again. Quick blames himself for Fish's accident, which is heartwrenching considering how much he cares about Fish. There is a particularly poignant section that tells of Quick's habit of cutting out stories of refugees and people in natural disasters and sticking them on his wall so he could remember how lucky he was not to have suffered like them, or like Fish did.

I also like Rose Pickles, a girl in the other family. She seems to have a very honest view of life, and I think, particularly as she grows older, she could turn out to be a fascinating character.

Anyway, Cloudstreet is a really beautiful book (so far) and I'm looking forward to finding out what happens! I'm also really excited about moving onto my next book ASAP, which should be The Piper's Son by Melina Marchetta, if I can get a copy by the time I need it. If not, I'll probably have to read Tales from Outer Suburbia or Wuthering Heights because I have Looking for Alaska on reserve from my local library but it hasn't come in yet (much to my frustration).

Please keep commenting, suggesting books and following!

death to genetics

I know I'm made up of cells, and I know I should be interested in how I am put together, but SERIOUSLY! I just want to READ!

So my exams are next week, and I have been studying like crazy this afternoon. Cloudstreet is sitting on my bedside table, tempting me every time I look at it, because it is so much more interesting than mitosis and meiosis and haploid cells and diploid cells and... OH NO... does mitosis happen in diploid cells or haploid cells???

Haha just kidding, I do know. Mitosis goes with diploid cells. I bet you're glad you know that!

I really would much rather be reading about the adventures of the Pickles family and the Lamb family as they move in together, but at least for now, unfortunately, exams must take priority. I will TRY and read (and blog) but I make no promises. As soon as they are over, you can expect to hear from me a lot more regularly (and in a lot more depth about the books).

Anyway, quadratic equations beckon! I have some serious studying to do, and my study timetable that I am trying in vain to stick to informs me that I am already 4 minutes late for starting to revise maths, my second-least favourite subject. (Science and PE tie for number one).

boats vs books

It's May 1st!

I woke up this morning and looked at the calendar app on my iPod, and I thought to myself, 'hey! Today is the first day of the month! I have a legitimate excuse to pinch and punch my friends!'

And then I thought 'hey, today is the launch of twenty-six stories!'

So... welcome to book one of the project: Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, recommended to me by both my mum and my aunt.

Today my family (and another family) went out to an island in the harbour for a picnic. We were on boat for 40 minutes to get there and back, and while we were heading out, I was LONGING for the book to read, because there are only so many times you can look at the Harbour Bridge and still get excited about it. In the evening things were slightly different. Everything is so pretty at night with all the lights turned on!

Anyway, I have read the first chapter of Cloudstreet and so far I'm enjoying it. The writing is really, really good, and the characters seem set to be enthralling. I am looking forward to seeing where the book goes.

I shall write again soon, updating you on my progress. I have exams the week after next so I have to balance my reading with studying at the moment, and I can't wait until after exams when I can just focus on reading! (and homework and assignments, of course... :P)

Please keep suggesting books and commenting, I have really enjoyed reading your comments!