Part travelogue and part social commentary and study on happiness around the world, Eric Weiner takes you to some of the happiest and least happy countries in the world. Some of them are poor and some of them are extremely wealthy. Some you'd peg as being happy and some you wouldn't. It's an interesting look into what people around the world say makes their country thrive and how THEY view happiness.
The Geography of Bliss is broken into sections by country. I found it to be a pretty interesting read although it's the type of book that I tend to read while I'm also reading a fiction book as sometimes I just need something to break it up. It's not my usual thrills and adventure type of travelogue but I really do love learning about different cultures and found this happiness study to be intriguing so I really enjoyed that aspect of The Geography of Bliss. It was thought provoking and I loved thinking about what makes me happy at the core of my being versus others in the world.
I think the one thing I wish about this book is that we would have gotten to know the PEOPLE a little bit more. We get little bits of all these people he is meeting but I find that the one thing I love about travelogues (and my own travel) is really connecting with the people that are written about. I feel like when I read travelogues and travel blogs that I connect really well when writers tell me about people and I find myself falling in love with them and wanting to hop on a plane and meet these people. This book lacked that for me. I wanted to get to know the people of these countries. I think one of my favorite people he encountered was one of his guides. That's about it.
Final Thought: If you like a travelogue that takes you on an adventure and is full of people the author encountered that just jump off the page, this isn't it one I'd recommend. If you don't mind a slower paced commentary on happiness around the world where you get to participate in a little armchair travel to some amazing places and learn some tidbits about other countries and cultures along they way, you might enjoy this one! It was a pretty good read for me but definitely not my favorite travelogue out there...which is pretty disappointing because I HAD to have this one when I saw it on the shelf.
Music. I don't talk about it too often to the general public but it's a very personal thing to me. I remember events and feelings by songs. I could give pivotal moments in my life soundtracks. Music is what soothes my soul, makes me dance and gives words and a rhythm to things in life that I feel so deeply but can't always explain. I've listened to it in the depths of my darkest days (when my mom passed) and I listen to it when I'm driving with my window down on a beautiful, sunny day and life just feels so magical. It lives within me deeply...so this Top Ten Tuesday is hard. It's personal. I have very specific reasons why songs trigger feelings or remind me of something. Sometimes people don't get my meaning. That being said...here it is
1. Ruby Tuesday by The Rolling Stones // Paper Towns by John Green
This has always been a favorite song of mine and it held new meaning after an ex-boyfriend told me that this song was the epitome of me. Don't know if that's a good or bad thing BUT I couldn't stop thinking of this song when I read Paper Towns. It embodies her spirit and SO many of the lines were just spot on. I mean, throughout the book Quentin and us as readers just learned so much about her with every "day"...she just couldn't be pinned down as to WHO Margo is.
Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, who could hang a name on you?
When you change with every new day
Still I'm gonna miss you
2. Boats and Birds by Gregory & The Hawk // If I Stay by Gayle Forman
There are so many ways you can interpret this song but the way I always think of it when it comes on my Ipod is just loving someone so much that you'd do anything for them...even let them go. And I just think of that scene were Adam pleads with her. And I cry.
3. Young Blood by The Naked and the Famous // Ten Things We Did And Shouldn't Have by Sarah Mlynowski
This song just embodies the ups and downs of youth..just being young, in love, making mistakes, learning from them, having fun..etc. It's a fabulous song (one of my favorite bands) and I feel that 10 Things We Did really did capture youth -- even if it was a bit more crazy than most of our lives!
We're only young and naive still
We require certain skills
The mood it changes like the wind
Hard to control when it begins
4. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel // Between Shades Of Gray by Ruta Sepytus
This might be an odd choice at a glance but I kept thinking of this song after reading this book. This song gives me this overwhelming commentary about how there is so much horror and sadness and grief all around us but there is that great beauty, power and inspiration in things. If you read my review of Between Shades of Gray, you know that it was a powerful book for me and I found the same sentiment to be true. The things that happened in this book were beyond horrible but there was so many things that were just a testament to the power of the human spirit. Those small glimmers of hope come in those scenes of love, selflessness and compassion. Embracing those things in the moment..embracing life.
5. Wake Up by Arcade Fire // The Beginning Of After by Jennifer Castle
While I didn't love this one as much of others, on a personal level I really resonated with the grief portrayed in this book and I couldn't stop thinking of this song. It's easy, while you are grieving, to try and pretend everything is ok..because that's what it seems like we are conditioned to..to just repress everything. Anytime I read about books with grief, I just relieve these moments of release and, as painful as it can be, it helps. Keeping things in never helps and we shouldn't be afraid to let them out and be honest that we AREN'T ok. Burying these things is just living a lie and it does turn your heart a little hard. I guess the feel of this song just resonated with me while I watched her stumble and make the same mistakes of holding it all in and having to battle with yourself until you are ready to deal with it.
6. Falling Slowly by Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova // Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Ok, I do not want to give anything away with this book. But yeah...I've loved this song for years and when I read this book last year I just put this on and laid there because that's how I felt when I finished it. It may sound strange but that's where the ending left me. I don't know what happens with Pandemonium (although I soon will!) but I remember bawling my eyes out to this song.
I've brought this up before in my post entitled "Who Are Book Bloggers Catering To?" but I'm always trying to make my blog friendly to those who aren't just book bloggers because I'll get emails and comments and tweets from readers just looking for a good book who read my blog but aren't book bloggers. While the vast majority of my readership IS bloggers, I want to know what non-bloggers think about my blog!
So..if you are a reader of this blog and do not blog about books yourself, please answer this short survey and you'll be entered to win a box of mystery books (arcs & finished copies)!! In the comments please specify if you read YA, Adult or both so I can personalize it a little bit. If you have a link to an amazon or Goodreads wishlist, please leave the link so maybe I can throw in something you really want if I have it!
Thank you!! Even if you haven't read THIS blog but read other book blogs, please at least answer the last question.
If you follow me on Twitter, you might recall me mentioning that we found a photographer! We are having Morrissey Photography -- the cutest husband and wife duo ever -- cover our wedding and we are more than thrilled! While I don't plan on having a real specific shot list, I do have specific wedding shots I do want and I totally do want to incorporate some bookish element into our wedding photos and engagement photos. So I put together my list of the cutest, most bookworm worthy engagement and wedding photo ideas. I will be for sure using some of these ideas and modifying them! Will already agreed we could do a funny bookish sort of picture of us behind books..me behind my fave book and him behind something funny or ironic..since he doesn't read. We joked that it would be the "Everybody Poops" book.
All the images are linked to where I found them!
Which ones are your favorite? Have any good ideas for a bookish wedding photo that you want to share with me?? I have a few but I'd love your brains! :P
We get some pretty great authors around the Philadelphia region on occasion but we've never gotten such an awesome tour stop here before..much less TWICE! Taking full advantage of the awesomeness, I went to both stops in Collegeville (about 45 min from my house but nearer to my fiance) and then in Doylestown (where I live!). This tour was FANTASTIC. I was live-tweeting like a crazy person because there was just so much to talk about! BIG props to Penguin Teen & the authors for such a great time!
Images From Saturday at Towne Center Books in Collegeville
The lovely Jessica Spotswood (Born Wicked) & Andrea Cremer (Nightshade series)
Love my local bloggers! Always a good time with these ladies.
I loved what these ladies had to talk about! They are incredibly talented and are really quite entertaining! One of the best things about tours like this is getting to learn about the authors as people, about their writing process & experience and see their passion for their stories just exude from them. If you followed me on Twitter, you probably read most of this but interesting things! I'm going to share with you 5 noteworthy things that each author said or that I learned about them.
Beth Revis:
1. Beth Revis is one of the funniest authors out there. Her evil laugh makes me giggle..especially when she talks about killing off characters. It's one of her favorite past-times it seems!
2. She sneaks people from her real life into minor characters -- and kills the annoying ones! :P
3. She wrote 10 novels in 10 years and was rejected for all of them. Has about 800 rejection letters. YAY for her to keep on keepin' on!
4. Her new series will be "Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds meets Game Of Thrones"
5. When asked why she writes YA- "YA is a style of writing not a recommended reading level"
Andrea Cremer
1. Gave some great writing advice: "Stop chasing all the new ideas - pick one and finish it"
2. Her new series sounds amazing!! It's set in the Middle Ages. It's called Rift and it comes out in August 2012 and it's a prequel to Nightshade.
3. "Books should be everybody books, not girl or boy books." YES YES YES!
4. She's a speed writer -- she writes first drafts in about 4-8 weeks!
5. She's writing a book with David Levithan!! THIS made my day!!
Jessica Spotswood
1. Jessica is the most adorable human being ever! Her voice..it's just so cute!!
2. Her inspiration for Born Wicked came to her in a dream.
3. Learned a really random fact about her-- she hates vines??! lol. What a random thing to hate!
4. As a debut writer, she's just been so amazed and overwhelmed! She's always dreamed of being a full time writer and now it's happening.
5. She really wanted to explore the complicated relationship of sister's in Born Wicked.
Marie Lu
1. Marie has some of the cutest outfits ever! Love her style!
2. She's had the character of Day in her head since high school. She wrote him in a few things but it never clicked like Legend did. He's just been evolving through the years and she learns new things about him all the time.
3. On why she writes fantasy/sci-fi: "You can explore issues without being preachy"
4. She draws her characters before she writes them. Another fun fact, she used to work for a video game company.
5. Marie's favorite character from Legend is surprisingly Thomas -- a character people tend to hate!
AND NOW FOR THE GIVEAWAY:
Win your choice of a signed copy of one of the following books:
I'm sitting down to write this review and I cannot reconcile in my head whether I absolutely despised this book or I think it is effing genius. That makes writing a review really hard. I don't think I've had such a strong reaction to a book in a while and, due to the nature of the book, I can't reveal a whole lot to explain to you why I did.
Liar by Justine Larbalestier is told in the first person. Our narrator, Micah, is a liar -- a compulsive, pathological liar. Right off the bat, she says she isn't going to lie to us but that seed of an unreliable narrator is already planted in our mind and continues to grow when throughout the story Micah will tell us one thing and then minutes later tell us that what she just told us was a lie. The basic plot of the story is interesting enough. Micah's boyfriend is found brutally murdered and her tangled web of lies starts to make her a suspect amongst her peers. The story shifts through the past and the present as we learn about the present investigation of Zach's death, her family history, her and Zach's relationship and some of the big lies she's told in the past.
Rather than try to sort out my extremely complicated feelings about this novel I'm just going to tell you the things about it that made me 1) really dislike it and 2) make me think it was genius
Why I Really Disliked It:
True story, if it didn't take me so darn long to load audiobooks on to my Ipod I would have not finished this one. But, truth be told, I have a sucky commute and needed an audiobook.. So, firstly Micah is really irritating and very hard to like or relate to. I mean, we are all liars, yes, but she was the Gold Medalist of Lying About Crazy and Stupid Things. I've LOVED books with main characters I've hated, so that's not a dealbreaker for me. I just couldn't STAND being in Micah's head anymore and had to curb any and all urges to drive my car off the road so I could NOT hear her anymore. But the biggest thing for me was the HUGE BIG PLOT TWIST that I won't spoil..because, well I just don't even know what to say about it. When the big "reveal" happens halfway through the book (which I was quite enjoying the book before this point despite not liking Micah in the least), I audibly in my car said WTF and I emphasis on the F. In the scope of the story, you are sitting there like "Oh dear LAWD, this has to be a lie" but then this thread of the story keeps going through the rest of the book so, like everything else Micah tells you, it becomes hard to discern if it's a big lie or if it's the truth. It changed the book for me. It was like biting into a cupcake and it taste like pizza or something. Not necessarily bad but dammit, I wanted a cupcake! Basically if you hate the plot twist, like I did, it made the rest of the novel prettttyy unbearable.
Why I Thought It Was Genius:
I always find books with unreliable narrators interesting and some are better than others. The author turned Micah into the ultimate unreliable narrator because Micah admits freely to being a liar and she strings you along and then admits to different lies just within what she has already told you. It's fascinating! You find yourself never feeling sure of what is the truth and when you think you have the "answers"...you just don't. The twist that happens really changes what you even thought this book WAS. And while I didn't like what the twist was at all, I thought it was written well, considering it could be kind of cheesy. I also thought it was genius as it challenged your notions of what KIND of book this was and actually becomes quite thought-provoking on a larger scale.
Final Thought: This is definitely not a book for everybody. If you hate unreliable narrators, back away. If you don't mind taken for an uncertain ride that might drive you crazy, give it a try! I can't say this was a great book for me but it was certainly memorable and there are so many layers to it. Like I said, I can't figure out if I really hate it or if I thought it was brilliant. I certainly didn't enjoy the ride as others might have but I can appreciate what she did.
I've become unusually aware of how much I overuse certain words lately - namely "favorite", "best", & "love"! Ask my fiance and he'll tell you that I'm always saying things like, "That's my favorite song" or "That's the best movie EVER"..and sometimes it really is A favorite song or movie or book but sometimes I think I just want to show how much I really do LOVE something but often favorite is the best designation I can think of to properly show my affection for something. Sidenote: I giggle a lot with how often I say that I "love" something. Is my love for chocolate the same love I have for my fiance? Most days no. lol
That being said, I've been on this John Green kick lately and readPaper Towns and Looking For Alaska in the past month and have read Will Grayson, Will Grayson prior to this. I have declared John Green one of my new favorite authors. And then I got to thinking, "What makes someone a favorite author? At what point does my brain start making that designation?" Is it after I've read a certain number of said author's books? Can you base "favorite author status" after only one book? Do my favorite authors entertain me? Do they make me cry? Laugh? Reveal truths that I can relate to? WHAT MAKES SOMEONE A FAVORITE AUTHOR TO ME?! And, do I overuse the word "favorite" when speaking about books and authors?
Now this isn't to say you should rigidly maintain a favorite author's list and they have to meet x, y, z criteria or anything. But when someone says "Oh, that's one of my favorite authors"..I wonder how they determine that. Not in a judgey way..but more so in a.."I wonder what YOUR criteria for favorite author looks like compared to mine" way. I think sometimes in the blogosphere I see "favorite" slung around a lot and it's hard for me to truly know what stands above the rest for some people. (I'm guilty of it too sometimes. Although I am stingy with my favorite author and book designations most of the time).
I think that most of the time, for me, I've read a few books by the author and put them on my mental "auto-buy" list. Oh, they are writing a book about watching paint dry? YEP. I'm probably going to go buy it. But there are sometimes I am a little preemptive on the favorite author status after one book. Sometimes I can just TELL that they are going to be..and sometimes I'm right and sometimes their next book is a book that falls flat. As I look at my favorite author list, I see that they are all different. Some make me cry, some just entertain me and can tell a story, some have created characters that I relate to, some make me ponder deep wonders and some just so damn memorable.
What about you? Do you think people overuse "favorite" when talking about books and authors? What gives an author that "favorite author" status in your mind? Do you think someone can be a favorite author after you've only read one of their books or would it be better to just say it's a favorite book? And because I'm curious..who are some of your favorite authors?
