Week 16 Reading (Winter Break)

            

           "Divergent" by Veronica Roth, and "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline

            Hello everyone! It’s been a while (for most of you) since I've talked to you. I've been in England/New York for a while, and there hasn't been any Wi-Fi for me to look at the blog with. I've read Divergent and Ready Player One over the break and they were both very good sci-fi books. Let’s start with Divergent- I read this to finally catch up with society. If you read my previous blog about the first half of the book you will find that I really enjoyed this, and it lived up to the expectations that everyone has set for it. The ending is very good, so I will definitely read the following two in the series in time.

             Ready Player one is the book that Kam suggested to us before the break started, and different from Divergent I will probably need to explain this one more. It is set in the future, where a lot of things has gone wrong for the human population. The planet is in the third stage of the great recession, and more than half of the population is without food. War is constant, and the environment is of course screwed up. The only thing for most people that makes life worth living is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) named the OASIS. There is a lot of history that goes with the OASIS, but what is important to the plot is that James Halliday (the game’s creator) died. When the died, he left behind his multi-billion dollar fortune and the ownership OASIS game itself, but he did not simply leave it for his relatives (he didn't have any), he created a huge hunt that was filled with puzzles and games that only can be solved by people determined to know everything about Halliday’s life.

             So, after that huge ramble (I apologize), I largely recommend both of these books to anyone that like sci-fi books.         

Week 15 Reading

       "Divergent," by Veronica Roth
       I finally decided to keep up with the culture of the class and read this book. I only read half of it, because again my life decided to be crazy and not allow me any time to read this weekend. It definitely lived up to the expectations that everyone has given it, and it hooked me very quickly, but I'm not sure why. Even though most fiction books these days are about teenage girls in a distopian world : ), this seemed to stand out to me.
       It probably wouldn't be necessary to describe what it is about, but anyway, it is about a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the far future, in a city which is divided into five factions to prevent war. The five factions are Abnegation (selflessness), Candor (honesty), Dauntless (courage), Amity (peace), and Erudite (knowledge). Tris, is in Abnegation, until she is sixteen when she has to choose what faction she will be in for the rest of her life. There is a test to see which one fit each person best, but when she takes it the results are inconclusive. This is called Divergence. She is then told that being Divergent is very dangerous.

       I will continue to read Divergent over the break, and I might start to read Ready Player One.      

Week 14 Reading

         "The Edge Chronicles: Beyond the Deepwoods" by Chris Riddell, and Paul Stewart
         This is an interesting book- I didn't actually like it as much as I thought I would. It was a very low reading level, yet it was sort of hard for me to read because I couldn't get hooked on to it at all. Being a low reading level, I think it might be better for younger kids, but at times it was kind of cool (me liking fantasy books). Something I noticed about it, is that it was making up this huge unknown world, much like the Lord of the Rings, but it doesn't captivate you the way LOTR does.That might be because the Lord of the Rings was written a very long time ago, so the writing style is different to us these days which makes it seem old and otherworldly, while the Edge Chronicles was written in the past ten years, so it doesn't have that vibe.
     
         But before I start careening off track- as you probably remember from Gavin's Book Talk, it's about a boy names Twig who lives in a world called "The Edge," and goes on an adventure into the Deepwoods to find out about his history. It is an okay fantasy book, yet I didn't particularly like it, but if you like fantasy books I would recommend trying it.

         Next week I will read Divergent