Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Done reading The Hunger Games series for the second time. :)

I was reminded why Katniss chose Peeta.
I prefer Gale but I think, I can understand her better now. :p




That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. 
I have plenty of that myself.
What I need is the DANDELION IN THE SPRING.
The bright yellow that means REBIRTH instead of destruction.
THE PROMISE THAT LIFE CAN GO ON, NO MATTER HOW BAD OUR LOSSES.
THAT IT CAN BE GOOD AGAIN.
And only Peeta can give me that.

So after, when he whispers, 'You love me. Real or not real?'

I tell him, 'Real.'

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City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende

City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A children's book that already teaches about nature, politics, religion, and culture. *thumbs up*


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Thanks to Alyssa for giving me the book! :D

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



"There ain't no power in heaven or on earth that can stop people from thinking the worst when they want to."

"In those days I still believed the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man was stronger than the love of drinkin and hell-raisin -- that love would eventually rise to the top like cream in a bottle of milk. I learned better over the next ten years. The world's a sorry schoolroom isn't it?"

"...A coward is more afraid of being discovered than he is of everything else, even dyin."

"Sometimes anything a woman says to a man is bound to be the wrong thing."

"The fact is, sometimes we do have to be cruel to be kind -- like a doctor givin a shot to a child even though he knows the child will cry and not understand."

"...My mother always said you c'n catch more flies with honey than you ever can with vinegar..."

"Houses do have their own life that they take from the people who live in em; I really believe that."

"But listen to me, all three of you, n hear this if you don't hear nothing else: everything I did, I did for love... the love a natural mother feels for her children. That's the strongest love there is in the world, and it's the deadliest. There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids."


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Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A modern fairy tale. :) Inspires anyone to stay positive and faithful. :D
Because of this, I got interested with Maid Maleen by the Brothers Grimm, the story with which this book is actually based on.


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Drowned in Books at The Floating Library. :)

Welcome on board! :D

Yesterday, Al, Edmund and I went to MV Logos Hope - the floating library/book fair that docked this year at Pier 15 Manila South Harbor. :) I was a bit hesitant at the beginning because I was just planning to rest for the whole day. However, the anticipation of seeing and being surrounded by a lot of books (in one of the uncommon places) won over. It's one of my simple joys, you see. v^^

Septimus Heap Book III: Physik by Angie Sage

Septimus Heap Book III: Physik by Angie Sage

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is way more engaging than the first two books! :)



The plot, quest for eternal life, is perhaps the common denominator of all fantasy/magic books. But Physik made it unique by incorporating time travel through pairs of glasses, a Spirit Seer with a pet cat that transforms into a panther by night, a young dragon with a very good appetite, and a single-toothed creature that inflicts the Sicknesse, and many more. :)

I also liked the sort of old English language that was used to further emphasize the mood of 500-years-ago. :)

Favorite line:

"Now 'tis Despoiled," Marcellus sighed. "But the Hour is against us. It must be bound as it stands. 'Twill show that, tho' Man may strive for Perfection, he will Ever fall short. 'Tis the way of the Worlde. But a few Spottes of Ink will not divert my Purpose."



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Septimus Heap Book II: Flyte by Angie Sage

Septimus Heap Book II: Flyte by Angie Sage

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There were more action than the first book, which is nice. :)



Favorite scenes in my mind:

1. Nicko's and Septimus' escape from the wolverines - thanks to their long-lost shape shifter grandfather, Grandpa Benji, who now lives in the Forest as a tree.

2. Jenna's in the nick of time escape from a land wurm.

3. The fight in the sky while Jenna, Nicko, and Septimus ride the Dragon Boat back to the Castle and Simon pursues them using the incomplete Flyte Charm and Thunderflashes. The Dragon Boat got hit by a huge Thunderflash and it drops to Jannit Maarten's boatyard. Thankfully, Septimus, Jenna and Aunt Zelda are able to revive him using the Transubstantiation Triple spell.

4. Septimus' and Beetle's trip down the Ice Tunnels.

5. Spit Fyre's first Flyte.

6. The reassembled skeleton of Dom Daniel as it tries to reach Marcia.

Now I'm on to the third book in the series - Physik. :)

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Septimus Heap Book I: Magyk by Angie Sage

Septimus Heap Book I: Magyk by Angie Sage

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A bit draggy. I can't help but find some similarities with Harry Potter. Haha. But I think, as I read the series, I'll get used to them and look at them as entirely different but amazing books as well.

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House Trap by Mike Mauthor

House Trap by Mike Mauthor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rachel Evans is a sixteen year old overachiever who would take nothing less than to achieve her goal of getting into Dartmouth College. But Rachel’s life would never be the same once she stepped into the house of Alicia Hausefalle, the most popular girl in Wedds High School. Rachel was there to tutor her. She never expected to meet two strangers who were ready to end her life.


Background.

At first I was unsure of what I would reply to his email (which accounts for my delayed response, sorry v^^) because I really don’t know how to make proper book reviews. Eventually, I took the offer and told him that I can only say everything that I think and feel about the book. Fortunately, he told me that he actually liked it that way. =)

I am so happy that I accepted the author’s offer to give me a copy of this book so that I might make a review for it. I got no time wasted. And the book got me hooked by its first line.

So Here Goes.

The prologue has a gripping quality to it. Plus I can clearly see in my mind the setting and everything that’s happening from the peaceful-Christmassy-mood-of-the-neighborhood beginning to the traumatic-Halloweeny-aura-in-the-house ending. The scenes were playing in my mind much like a trailer of a suspense movie - the feeling that I’m not reading but watching as the story unfolds. I got so immersed that I had to remind myself that I might get late to work if I don’t stop reading.


The mood immediately changed to a lighter one as the beginning chapters introduce the characters. I met Rachel, who became a grade conscious student ever since her friends, dubbed as her closest, mocked her that she would never succeed in life because of her bad grades. I felt bad about this because my closest friends never discouraged me. Fortunately, there was Kristen, a friendly schoolmate and an active member of a church organization, who is always ready to lighten up a grumpy Rachel whenever Rachel thinks that she did badly in an exam. Of course, there’s this mean girl named Alicia, into whose house all the suspense, thrill, and a lot of breath-holding happened to me.

Suddenly,

I Won A Book Giveaway! :)

Yay! I won a book giveaway!

After hopping around to many book giveaway sites, Nocturnal Book Reviews finally picked my name as one of its lucky 100 Followers Giveaway winners. :)
I never knew that such panic and excitement can be felt at the same time while I was browsing for books at bookdepository.com. Before long, I had a lot of tabs open in my browser for each book that is on my wishlist. Haha.

The top three on my list at that time were Tales of Beedle and the Bard, Quidditch Through the Ages, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. At first, I chose Tales of Beedle and the Bard. But after so much careful thinking, I changed my choice of book to Fantastic Beasts because I thought that among the three, it is the most difficult to find in bookstores here in the Philippines. I have seen copies of Tales everywhere, and Quidditch was reportedly seen by my friend at a bookstore.

(Much to my surprise, the other winner is also a Harry Potter fanatic. Haha. :D)

Things To Do

1. Study Android game development.
2. Finish my Introduction to Databases online class lecture videos and assignments at Stanford.
3. Make poems, poems, poems for submission to different online/print magazines/books/collections.
4. Try to make another super short story.
5. Finish reading Nightmares and Dreamscapes, The Dark Tower IV, and Septimus Heap I.
6. Blog about my cousin's birthday celebration at La Mesa Ecopark.
7. Finish watching Dae Mul.
8. Update my planner.

Mr. Slint's Foreign Affair

Mr. Slint's Foreign Affair by Carlo N. Samson


My rating: 5 of 5 stars




Jardeth Slint never wanted to be a diplomat, so he was stunned to find out that the application he filled out (at his mother's suggestion) led to him actually getting the job!

Now, on a steamy Drevonian island, he goes to the Governor's Palace to complete his first mission. What happens there completely changes his life!


I stumbled upon this e-book on getfreeebooks. It is included in 6 Free Fantasy & Science Fiction Ebooks pack and downloadable at various formats. :)


It is very apt for anyone who wanted to take a break from all the hard reading he did - 
quite amusing and very easy to understand! :) It discusses slavery, "cultural" beliefs, and how much compassion could actually put one's life at greater risks but at a more satisfying experience. :)


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One Door Away from Heaven

One Door Away from Heaven by Dean Koontz


My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Bioethics intrigues me. But it also sends shivers on me. >.<




The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.

Even in the darkest moments, light exists if you have the faith to see it. Fear is a poison produced by the mind, and courage is the antidote stored always in the soul. In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph.

...a wasted opportunity wasn't just a missed chance, but was a wound to your future. Miss too many opportunities, thus sustaining too many wounds, and you wouldn't have a future at all.

Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith...

People spend more time interacting with machines, less time with other people, and year by year we're losing what little humanity we have left.

Anger was a reliable defense, but one that allowed no chance of final victory. Anger was a medicine but never a cure, briefly numbing the pain without extracting the thorn that caused the agony.

There's lots of law these days, but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?


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Anton - The Professor Never To Be

Anton - the Professor Never to Be: - About the failure of a genius - by Armin Opherden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This humourful novel tells the story of Anton’s development between his birth and his being a young father and husband. It shows how and why he fails to make full use of his enormous mental capacity.

The central theme that the novel discussed was the educational system in Germany. And this drew my attention more closely since one of my interests is on education.

It was really a worthwhile read and I had fun comparing and contrasting Anton’s experiences as a student in Germany and my experiences as a student here in Philippines. =)

I learned about the German custom of giving a carefully decorated cardboard cone filled with sweets on the occasion of a child’s first day of school. We do not have that kind of tradition in the Philippines! I think that if there were, then every child would surely look forward to his/her first day at school. =) I can still remember my cousin during her first day at school. She did not want to be left alone with the other children inside the classroom. Every time my aunt (her mother) says goodbye, tears would start to pour down from my cousin’s eyes and then finally, she would wail loudly and would strongly grasp around one of her mother’s thighs! It would take a long time before she could finally let go.

And when I was in elementary (a level of education that starts when a child reaches the age of 6 or 7 and which lasts for six or seven years, depending on the school), I also experienced sitting on uncomfortable desks for hours. And since there were at least sixty pupils in a small classroom, we sat almost elbow-to-elbow with each other. The noise was almost unmanageable especially when there was no teacher around. The class president usually assigns the class secretary to write the names of noisy classmates in the blackboard. But I never really complained. I knew I was still lucky because in other parts of the country, mostly in the very-hard-to-reach rural areas, the existence of a decent classroom with desks is a rarity, if not impossibility.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was the second time I read this book.

But Snape's love for Lily and Dobby's loyalty to Harry still broke my heart. :(

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Cujo by Stephen King

Cujo by Stephen King

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The book is awesome. :D At first, I almost got dizzy with the abrupt changes in POVs and scenarios. It felt as if there were too many things happening at the same time. There were too many issues tackled - marriage, family life, motherhood. Eventually, all of them converged to make a very excellent story.

After making me feel afraid of what might happen to the characters when Cujo tried to attack them, King got me heavyhearted at these words: "It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor." :(

The ending was tragic. I felt sad at Tad's death and at his mother's futile attempts to save him. I also felt sad that Cujo had to die. :( I also have pets and I sure don't want the same thing to happen to them. But it can't be helped if Cujo had gone rabid. :(


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James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing

James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing by G. Norman Lippert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As a whole, the story's plot is wonderful. But I really feel uncomfortable with the existence of Benjamin Franklyn and Merlinus Ambrosius. XD



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On 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' by Mitch Albom

• 'But all endings are also beginnings.  We just don't know it at the time.'
• 'Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else.  Instead, he did what we all do.  He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.'
• 'EVERY LIFE HAS one true-love snapshot.'
• 'NO STORY SITS by itself.  Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.'
• 'But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.'
• 'People often belittle the place where they were born.  But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.'
• 'People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains.  But scenery without solace is meaningless.'
• 'Take one story, viewed from two different angles.  It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily... and the other ends badly.'
• 'That there are no random acts.  That we are all connected.  That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.'
• 'Fairness... does not govern life and death.  If it did, no good person would ever die young.'
• '...all lives intersect.  That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.'
• 'Strangers... are just family you have yet to come to know.'
• 'No life is a waste.  The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.'
• 'War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too.'
• 'Time... is not what you think.  Dying? Not the end of everything.  We think it is.  But what happens on earth is only the beginning.'
• 'That's what heaven is.  You get to make sense of your yesterdays.'
• 'Sacrifice is a part of life.  It's supposed to be.  It's not something to regret.  It's something to aspire to.  Little sacrifices.  Big sacrifices.'
• 'Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it.  You're just passing it on to someone else.'
• 'ALL PARENTS DAMAGE their children.  It cannot be helped.  Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers.  Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces beyond repair.'
• 'Things that happen before you are born still affect you... And people who come before your time affect you as well.  We move through places everyday that would never have been if not for those who came before us.  Our workplaces, where we spend so much time - we often think they began with our arrival.  That's not true.'
• 'Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge.'
• 'Holding anger is a poison.  It eats you from inside.  We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us.  But hatred is a curved blade.  And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.'
• 'PEOPLE SAY THEY "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock.  But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man or woman.  What people find then is a certain love.'
• 'LOVE, LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a certain joy.  But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries from the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.'
• 'Lost love is still love, Eddie.  It takes a different form, that's all.  You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor.  But when those senses weaken, another heightens.  Memory.  Memory becomes your partner.  You nurture it.  You hold it.  You dance with it.  Life has to end.  Love doesn't.'

The Day I Turned One Year Past Twenty. Ugh.

Gumising akong puno ng notifications ang FB page ko. Hihi. Birthday ko na kasi.

Sa paulit-ulit na pagta-type ko ng Salamat, (insert name here), iniisip ko kung maya-maya pangalan mo naman ang itatype/itetext ko.

Pagdating ko sa office, binati ako ng attendance system. Gusto ko sanang i-screen shot at i-mail sa'kin. Kaso, nahiya ako. Fire drill. Exercise. Mula 31st floor hanggang ground floor. Magpapasalamat na rin ako dahil walang 14th, 13th, at 4th floor. Muscle strain after, grabe. Hindi bale, may reward namang tatlong oras na petiks time. :)

Ay naalala mo ba 'yung unang beses na nagcelebrate ako ng birthday na kasama ka? Fail kayo sa plano ninyo. Ever late kasi ang susundo sa'kin. Ayan tuloy nagpang-abot tayo. Haha. :)

On 'Wish You Well' by David Baldacci

'Wish You Well' by David Baldacci

Chapter 21

‘Number of children fathered got little enough to do with being a good daddy.’ - Louisa Mae Cardinal

Chapter 27

‘And he goes round with a fat roll of dollar bills, and got this nice farm, and all them fancy machines, and man let his family starve.’ -  Louisa Mae Cardinal

‘See, that why I ain’t go to church.  Figger I got me a church wherever I be.  Want’a talk to God, well I say, ‘howdy-howdy, God,’ and we jaw fer a bit.’ - Jimmy ‘Diamond’ Skinner

‘Miz Louisa, she believed in God with all her soul.  But she don’t subscribe to church much.  She say the way some folk run they’s churches, it take God right out cha heart.’ - Eugene Randall