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Post by mrspettyfer on Nov 11, 2012 0:49:22 GMT -6
It just came out earlier this year, me thinks, so it's pretty new. I've also recently bought Seraphina by Rachel Hartman aaaand I still need to finish Divergent.
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ladyavatar
Pro-Bender
Ozai Fangirls, Represent!
Posts: 418
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Post by ladyavatar on Nov 11, 2012 8:50:29 GMT -6
Some of my favorites have already been mentioned, including Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones), anything and everything Redwall-related (Brian Jacques), and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (J.R.R. Tolkien). Other random favorites from my extensive list are the Artemis Fowl series (Eoin Colfer), Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell), Elephants in Our Bedroom (Michael Czyzniejewski), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), the Warriors series (Erin Hunter), A Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket), and The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand). Talk about a mixed bunch.
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Post by magenlykszutara on Nov 17, 2012 23:48:01 GMT -6
Don't know if any of y'all are interested in coming-of-age novels, but The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chosky has to be my favorite book of all time. No doubt. The writing is just plain beautiful and the movie brought me to tears. A great novel, indeed.
A couple more of my favorites: If I Stay Where She went (Sequel to If I Stay) -Gayle Forman
13 Reasons Why -Jay Asher
Death Of A Salesman -Arthur Miller
Fahrenheit 451 -Ray Bradbury
Those are a few of my favorites; however, what I WANT to read by the end of the year is Warm Bodies and Memoirs of A Geisha. I have ALWAYS wanted to read them, but never got to it.
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Post by kathrynlacey on Nov 18, 2012 18:21:10 GMT -6
I love Lord of the Rings in case anyone couldn't tell by my avatar/signature set up...
Anyway, right now, I'm reading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I'm on book three, The Amber Spyglass. I loved The Golden Compass, and while I kind of raged at The Subtle Knife (merely because there's this really big sort of... hypocrisy thing that I'm hoping will be touched on/fixed in the third installment), but I'm enjoying The Amber Spyglass.
It's not the right sort of book for people who are easily angered/offended by books that in any way conflict with God/Christianity because Pullman has made it very clear through interviews and in these books that he's not a fan. However, it's still a very well written series, and the fantasy elements he added (like Daemons - which are basically a person's soul in the form of animal companions) are really fascinating and clever. I like how things from the first book add into the second and third book, like he had this all planned ahead of time and just teased us with what was to come later.
I liked Jane Eyre... That woman was a no-shit-taking kind of woman, and I can stand behind that in a way I could never stand behind Jane Austen's female leads. Charlotte Bronte was great for writing a woman like that in that era rather than having her fawn all over her lover of choice and feeling like she needed him to have any kind of real life.
magenlykszutara, Memoirs of a Geisha was pretty good, but the end was just... meh... to me... The book was definitely superior to the movie, and you can tell the author did a lot of research into the way of life for Geishas in that time period. It's really interesting!
Warm Bodies is a book? I saw the trailer for it, and I thought... "I bet this was a book they made into a movie." I don't know why I got that impression, but I never bothered to try to find out. Yay for being right!
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Post by manzanasverdes on Nov 18, 2012 19:23:08 GMT -6
I liked Shadow and Bone well enough, I just thought the female lead was a bit reactive, I feel like some very important things happen to her by accident/are forced on her and that peeves me. Of course, this could just be my perception, may need to re-read to confirm.
The best books I've read this year would be The Shadowed Sun, The God of Small Things, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Leviathan Wakes and Cold Magic (currently reading the second book in this trilogy, it's still great). These just fill all my personal bases for characters, plot and prose, even hit some of my bulletproof narrative kinks dead-center, so I'm pretty unconditional in my rec'ing them.
Though very honorable mentions go to The Broken Kingdoms, Divergent and The Night Circus. Not that these don't fill the quota, I just couldn't leave them out. Though Divergent may require a bit of suspension of disbelief to get into its world, the main character is one of the best ones I've read this year. TBK is just masterful (but then, I think N. K. Jemisin is a master, so) and The Night Circus feels like such a delicate, lovely thing it makes me think of blown-glass decorations, the prose gets a bit heavy when there's too much description, but the rest more than makes up for it.
Seriously recommend any and all of these. Especially The Shadowed Sun, since it has a very, very, verrrrryyy Zutara-able romance.
OMG someone else has read Eon/Eona!! I loved those two as well.
(also, I have no social life, obviously)
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Post by magenlykszutara on Nov 18, 2012 20:35:21 GMT -6
I saw the trailer for Warm Bodies and I didn't realize it was book until I saw the trailer, so I definitely wanna read that also!
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Post by mrspettyfer on Nov 18, 2012 22:41:21 GMT -6
I agree, I thought she was a bit too reactive too. I'm hoping we'll see her become more proactive in Siege and Storm. I loooved the Darkling. He's clearly in the grey area, much like Zuko was there for a while. I'm not a huge fan of Mal. Alina's character, to me, suffers more with Mal around.
Glad to see I wasn't the only one! lol I just couldn't get into the book because I found the world so unbelievable. And kind of...silly. All I kept thinking was...why are they jumping off trains and getting tattoos? Why are they even training? What are they training for? It just didn't make sense to me.
Really? See, I thought she was so dull and emotionless. Maybe she gets better, haha. I'm only about halfway through. Have you read Angelfall by Susan Ee? Hands down, my new favorite heroine.
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Post by kathrynlacey on Nov 19, 2012 0:06:06 GMT -6
boogum, yes! I agree. Even though the second and third books deal heavily with religion, I don't feel he's preachy about it, either.
I've only read the first Sword of Truth novel, and I loved it, but my boyfriend - who has read the entire series - said that Goodkind gets pretty heavy in his preachiness of his political ideals. He didn't say anything to me about Goodkind writing about religion... I still want to read the rest of the series, though... It's just... such good writing, damnit!
I agree that Pullman allows for readers to draw their own conclusions. This is my first time reading His Dark Materials, and the second book drew a really huge conclusion from me that made me angry at the whole book, buuuuut, my friend told me that while she doesn't think I'll still feel that way once I finish The Amber Spyglass, it's still a possibility. Anyway, still enjoying this book series a lot. I wonder what the gaang's daemons would be if they had them?
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Post by manzanasverdes on Nov 19, 2012 9:57:49 GMT -6
Hopefully. Seems like she has all the workings in place to assume a more proactive role, now that she's seen what she can do and stuff. As far as that goes, S&B was a good set up, of course there's still two (?) more books to go, so. And yes! I was actually a bit miffed when he showed up again, I was so sure that Alina letting go of him, was you know, Alina letting go of him. Should have known better than forgo the myriad tropes those two represent. Oh, well, still a good read, and I'll still read the next book. I thought the separations between the 'houses' thing was a bit much, though it makes a whole lot more sense once you get into the second book and realize what it all is actually about. You also get an explanation about all the training (which, ostensibly, is because they are the police/army force that protects the city from potential external threats. Hilariously ironic that these types are the ones in charge of keeping order...) at the end of Divergent, which gets deeper in Insurgent, where the divisive lines between the factions become somewhat blurred after the Ultimate Plot (heh) is revealed. And the tattooing and jumping into/out of trains and things like that I think are done because they can do them, and because it sets them apart from the other factions, is a very common psychological resource, think of teenagers following trends/rituals/etc just because it means they're teenagers, it's a marker of identity. Again this is also explored more deeply in Insurgent when we see how other factions look like from the inside. But yeah, you do have to put up with not getting stuff until Tris starts becoming sufficiently overwhelmed to make her go out of her way to get answers. Actually it's the way she deals with her emotions that I love (honestly I trudged along with all the questions and stuff that you have to wait until the final arc to understand, because Tris tugged me along), I found her so brutally honest with herself, like, finally here's a girl who is not fighting against/confused about her feelings, she's taking them as they come because they're there and that means they're hers and have to be dealt with. And I think that the mastery of her crafting comes from the possibility that she does so, because she comes from a faction that's not particularly into looking at themselves (I study psychology, this type of considerations are very high on my list of, you know Things to Consider, when it comes to motivations and characterizations). Penryn is also very cool. She too has that 'survivor mode activated' button to her, and a certain ruthlessness that allows her to carry on which I dig immensely, plus she gets a sword (personal kink: girls with swords). Hopefully we'll see more of her relationship with her mom and Paige in the next books, those are some interesting and conflicting emotions I want explored. It was definitely a good read, I just kind of wish it hadn't been told in first person-present tense POV, or that it had a couple more editing read-throughs, sometimes that jolted me out of the flow of the story... but that's the only major gripe. I will also, one day that is not today, learn the art of brevity.
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Post by kathrynlacey on Nov 19, 2012 10:23:53 GMT -6
boogum, yeah... That's a shame... I loved that first book so damned much! I wish the others in the series could have been just as good... Still going to read them, though! I'm too stubborn to be allowed to live sometimes. =D
I would wish I had a daemon but only if I was a witch in that universe or something. I don't want my soul to be severed from me just because I did something stupid or was forced to be too far apart from my daemon. However, having constant companionship would be really nice.
Aang's is obvious, but the others... not so much. I'm really curious... Maybe Toph's would be a badgermole... but the rest are lost to me.
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