#97: Feed-M.T. Anderson

Who needs to think when the “feed” does it for you? Titus lives in a time when “feeds” are implanted directly into the brain. The feeds do virtually all the thinking for those who have them. When Titus and his friends take a not-so-fun trip to the moon, he meets Violet. Violet is different from anyone that Titus has ever met. She is not afraid to question and challenge everything that the modern American teen stands for, including the feed. Part science and part romance, this modern dystopian novel will no doubt cause you to think about society and the direction that technology may take us.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award

Tags: Science Fiction

#98: Living Dead Girl-Elizabeth Scott

Alice has been with Ray for 5 years now. A vague memory of the happy, healthy girl that she once was is slowly fading. From the depths of the lonley, broken apartment that Ray shares with her, she watches the world move on, but for her time stands still. She knows that she should say something to someone, but she doeesn’t; she can’t. Ray sees and knows everything and if she even thinks about letting someone in on her secret there is no telling what Ray will do. Alice knows that she cannot make it for much longer, but what is she to do when He is unstoppable?

Read about the author, Elizabth Scott.

Tags: Ficiton, Survival stories, Teen Fiction, Y.A. Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

#99: Looking for Alaska-John Green

After spending what seemed like an eternity in the Y.A. lit. section at Borders, I finally picked up John Green’s, Looking for Alaska, and decided that it would be a suitable candidate for book #99 (I will be counting down from 99 to 1). It took a few pages, but I was totally hooked.

Miles’s whole existence has revolved around his obsession with the last words of those who have died. When he decides that he needs a change from his unexciting, nearly friendless life in Florida, he journeys to Culver Creek, a boarding school in Alabama. It is his junior year, and he is at a new school away from his parents and everything that he has ever known. He falls into a group of eccentric friends and becomes wildly intrigued by Alaska Young, the spontaneous, poetry-reading, chain-smoking, sometimes-crazy girl who lives down the hall from him. At Culver Creek, Miles experiences a life change that one cannot possibly prepare for. There is alcohol. There is sex. There is morbidity. Don’t say that you haven’t been warned!

Tags: Y.A. Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Preface

I must preface this blog with the fact that I am not terribly fond of writing book reviews, or of book reviews in general. I am a firm believer that to truly understand and appreciate what a book is about, one must, herself, indulge. While I don’t particularly like book reviews, I have read all too many. In my experience, they have a tendency to either A. build up my hopes of something beautiful only to shoot them down when the book ends up being, for lack of better words, crap, or B. deter me from reading a book that could, for all I know, be insanely good. Why am I deterred? Because either the reviewer did not like the book and has made it all-too-clear in his/her review, or the review is simply boring, and I figure if I can’t make it through the review, there is no way that I’ll make it through the book.

So, I will keep entries short and sweet. Enough juice to spark curiosity and to gently remind me of what I’ve read, but nothing resembling a 5-paragraph chronologically organized summary of what I think are the key points in a story and of what I believe the story to truly be about. I’ll leave the exploring an discoveries to the reader. My  goal, is simply, to, well, as I mentioned above, “spark curiosity.”

Oh, and one more thing. If you missed the headline at the top, I am on a mission to read 99 Y.A. books before becoming a certified library media specialist. Here, I will track my journey.