You gotta FIGHT!

And something I made earlier

by Emily Cross :)

So Proud of myself and my little symbol (yes, yes, I know I know, I'm very sad) - but I am, in no way, a photoshop/graphic person (although I would love to be) so I'm really chuffed at how this turned out.:)

YaY!

And what the hell does this symbol thing have to do with anything?


Well, someday far into the future you might find out - when you know, the planets align, world peace is achieved and I actually get published :P

The #1 Job

BBC Book challenge

The BBC said most of us only read 6 of these 100 books, which I find amazing. I've read 18 completely.

How many have you read?


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adam
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Making a Book Cover

Nifty video by Orbit on the making of a book cover!

Matched

In a future society, the officials decide everything, from what you eat for breakfast to who you should love. Cassia Reyes, is a normal teenage girl, who through a technical mishap discovers that the officials are not always in control, especially when it comes to who you love.

Matched, similar to the Hunger Games and Delirium, is a break through dystopian young adult series, which has received a huge amount of positive reviews. A well deserved amount in my opinion.

Ally Condie does an exemplar job at building her world - which in some respects has elements of our own. If we use IQ and personality tests to assess people's suitability for certain jobs, who is to say this won't develop further into who we  should love (on-line dating sites are prime example). The point being, that like all exemplar writers in this field, Condie builds a world that is not hugely dissimilar to our own, she takes elements of our world and skews them to an extreme and for this reason the story and moral of Matched has more impact. Definitely in my opinion, world-building is one of the strongest features of this book.

Regarding characters, Cassia was an alright character - she has her flaws and good qualities, however to be honest I didn't really engage with her. Not because of how she was written but just the character herself, which is no reflection on Condie's writing. My favourite characters are Grandfather and Bram as both strike me as free spirits in their own way. For instance, Cassia's eyes needed to be opened through the mismatch, her grandfather's words and Ky's lessons while Bram from the get go seems to always be pushing the barriers in his own small ways. I just found him to be delightful and a touching character especially when it comes to the antiques incident.

My feeling is that although this book centres around a match/mismatch, romance is not the main theme, which is refreshing. Now, there obviously is romance in this book, and it's nice to see both male leads on equal footing (smart, handsome, decent), although you do feel sorry for Xander at times. In some ways, regarding Ky too, I find it sad that it took the mismatch for open Cassia's eyes, but I'm glad this is explored in the book - that it is not taken as a given by the character, that Cassia questions herself regarding her feelings.
But my most favourite aspect of this book and the main theme (imo), is the use of poetry, especially one of my all time favourite poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" , as a catalyst for Cassia. It demonstrates that in the void of Cassia's world, where only 100 poems, novels and songs exist, the timeless impact of certain works remain. That, regulation of the arts and elimination of creative self-expression is the beginning of the end - a regulation on the evocation of emotion and the human spirit. Condie does an exemplar job of showing us how these forbidden poems fester in Cassia's mind, riling up her spirit, in a quiet but deep way and provoking her to questions the society and consequently  to seek out Ky more and more.

My only detraction from the book, is I felt the ending could have been stronger. Ky's disappearance and then Cassias leaving didn't leave me on the edge of my seat. However the last chapter was touching as she associates each word as bringing her closer to Ky, reiterating the importance of self-expression without restraints/monitoring.

Off topic: Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of trilogies - whether sometimes an extra-long tightly written book would be better than three?

Back on topic, this is definitely one the better Dystopian YA fictions out there, and I recommend fans of dystopian romance to have a gander. I'm giving this 4 out of 5 moons :)

Toodles for now,