Book Title: The Odyssey

Author: Homer (Translated by E.V. Rieu)

Genre: Adventure/Fantasy

Quick Synopsis:
This follows after the Iliad where Odysseus after spending 10 years at war spends 10 years trying to get home. In essence it is a love story about a man desperately trying to get home to his wife. It describes his adventures along the way.

What was right with it?
The characters were well conveyed and the pace of the story was fast.

What was wrong with it?
Some people may get bogged down in the stories that deviate from the main plot.

Marks: 10 out of 10

Recommended Age of Reader: 17+

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Punctured bicycle on a hillside, desolate,
Could nature make a man of me yet?

Post edited at 10:36 am on April 28, 2009 by damian1

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Damin Information Review

Book Title: My Sister's Keeper
Book Author: Jodie Piccoult
Genre: Moral Dilemma
Quick Synopsis: 13 year old Anna Fitzgerald sues her parents for the right to make her own decisions about how her body is used when a kidney transplant is planned in order to potentially save her older sister Kate, who has leukemia.  

What was right with it?:
Each chapter was written by a different person in the story. That meant you got to know each character, and understand this complex moral dilemma from their point of view. You get chapters from the Anna, the mother, father, brother, lawyer, guardian ad litem and at the end, a stunningly sad but beautiful chapter from the sister, Kate. You get to understand it so well that you could completely get why they did the things they did, but also why the others were upset with them. It left you completely torn in that respect.

It is such a interesting storyline. It's one of the ones that makes you question what you would do in the same situation. The ending is absolutely beautiful. I sobbed, and that feeling of sadness stayed with me long after I put it down.

What was wrong with it?: Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. DON'T read spoilers. Honestly, just don't. The ending is a heartbreaking surprise, don't spoil it.
Marks:  10 out of 10
Recommended Age Of Reader: 13+ It contains quite complex moral ideas, probably for quite a mature teen. Some medical vocab could confuse  younger readers.
Reviewed By: ScarletsWalk  http://golivewire.com/forums/profile.cgi?p=539138132

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Feel free to start a conversation about whatever. :)

Book Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Genre: tragicomedy (apparently, since I looked it up)

Quick Synopsis:
A man tells the story of his fascination and relationship with a preteen girl.

What was right with it?
The style of the author is very rich, his writing thought-out and ingenious. He describes people - and especially women and girls - with unusual precision, aiming at peculiarities of each person, using broad vocabulary. He mentions little gestures, most often Lolita's, that I often found myself acting out to experience them instead of just picturing them in my mind. It was maybe the second time I ever did that. Nabokov's writing reaches through to the reader.

What was wrong with it?
The book is full of references to literature, so unless you're well-read or happen to have read the particular books the author alludes to, the meaning of most allusions will be lost on you. Another thing that makes the reading harder is the usage of French here and there. My copy had annotations at the end and it was bothersome to turn the pages to see what the author meant. Nabokov also tends to fall into enlisting things that don't contribute to the story much and are tiresome to go through.

Comments
I have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, I really appreciated the way it's written. On the other hand, it took me a month to read it and probably would've taken longer had I not borrowed the book from my teacher and felt obliged to give it back without long delay. Lolita would be more enjoyable in an abridged version, I think, with the mentioned enlistings cut out, and some of the references reduced. They alienate an ignorant reader.

Marks: 8 out of 10. A very good read. Still, I've seen people praise the book here - an attitude I don't share. An eight and nothing more.

Recommended Age Of Reader: when you're mature enough to deal with the topic of the book without inner turmoil.

Reviewed By: me

Post edited at 1:31 pm on June 5, 2009 by save the world

During his studies in Germany, Victor discovers a way to vivify a corpse, and he animates a hideous creature which - instead of filling him with pride at his achievement - he finds terribly repulsive. The creature then escapes, but later seeks out its creator and makes his life insufferable. Consequently, the only path left to Victor Frankenstein is to pursue the monster and destroy it.

What was right with it?
First and foremost, the author's core idea, on which the whole plot is based, deserves credit and praise. The Frankenstein's monster has become an icon, a character few do not know. Other than that, the storyline is sustaining and fascinating throughout, keeping the reader immersed in the book from the very first page to the very last one.

The novel is not simply a Goosebumps story; the characters are developed psychologically and the anguish through which Victor Frankenstein has to go is palpably conveyed. What is more, the monster is not portrayed in a shallow way - it deserves sympathy because of its banishment from the company of men, which it desires but cannot obtain due to its horrifying appearance. The part of the novel in which the creature relates its story after having left the laboratory is extremely interesting and evokes pity.

Lastly, Frankenstein is filled with vivid imagery and pretty descriptions of nature. These reflect the Romantic character of the book. The reader gets a chance to experience natural beauty along with Victor Frankenstein, whose soul is soothed by the splendid views.

What was wrong with it?
Well, nothing. I do not give the book a 10 only because I keep tens for a few chosen pieces.

Comments
When I decided to read the novel, I was guided by sheer curiosity and I did not expect it to be anything more than a horror with a well-known villain as one of the main characters. It turned out to be an excellently written book and I am certain I will reread it one day.

Marks: 9 out of 10. An excellent read. Frankenstein is a very recommendable classic of English literature and in its case the word classic stands for the very opposite of tedious.

Recommended Age of Reader: 16 (that's my rough estimate of the average age when one's able to appreciate the psychology of the characters)

Reviewed by: me

Book Title: The Nature of Jade

Book Author: Deb Caletti

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Quick Synopsis: Jade is a seventeen (almost eighteen) girl with a panic disorder who lives with her dysfunctional family. She loves watching the elephants at the zoo and has screens in her room live from the zoo. One day, she sees a boy about her age who seems to love the elephants as much as she does, and her life is never the same again.

What was right with it?: You learn to get into the character development of each character, and you love reading about Jade and her life. You feel yourself getting into the book very quickly and finding it hard to put down. The author went in very deep with Jade's thoughts and there was a lot of description going on there. You get to know Jade a lot.

What was wrong with it?: Some areas of the book were either too dragged out or very disappointing. You always find yourself wondering exactly where the author is heading with the plot in the middle of the book, because there is a lot going on in it.

Marks: 7 out of 10

Recommended Age Of Reader: Over 10 because of several references to sex.

Reviewed By: Ally deAth trAp  

Post edited at 9:07 am on June 27, 2009 by deAth trAp

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Is it too much to ask that you don't toy with my emotions?

The central driving force of capitalism, according to Marx, was in the exploitation and alienation of labour. The ultimate source of capitalist profits and surplus was the unpaid labor of wage laborers. Employers could appropriate the new output value because of their ownership of the productive capital assets—protected by the state. By producing output as capital for the employers, the workers constantly reproduced the condition of capitalism by their labor.

Title pageHowever, though Marx is very concerned with the social aspects of commerce, his book is not an ethical treatise, but an attempt to explain the objective "laws of motion" of the capitalist system as a whole, its origins and future. He aims to reveal the causes and dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labor, the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital, competition, the banking and credit system, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, land-rents and many other things.

Marx viewed the commodity as the "cell-form" or building unit of capitalist society—it is an object useful to somebody else, but with a trading value for the owner. Because commercial transactions implied no particular morality beyond that required to settle transactions, the growth of markets caused the economic sphere and the moral-legal sphere to become separated in society: subjective moral value becomes separated from objective economic value. Political economy, which was originally thought of as a "moral science" concerned with the just distribution of wealth, or as a "political arithmetick" for tax collection, gave way to the separate disciplines of economic science, law and ethics.

Marx believed the political economists could study the scientific laws of capitalism in an "objective" way, because the expansion of markets had in reality objectified most economic relations: the cash nexus stripped away all previous religious and political illusions (only to replace them, however, with another kind of illusion—commodity fetishism). Marx also says that he viewed "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history". The growth of commerce happened as a process which no individual could control or direct, creating an enormously complex web of social interconnections globally. Thus a "society" was formed "economically" before people actually began to consciously master the enormous productive capacity and interconnections they had created, in order to put it collectively to the best use.

Marx's analysis in Capital, then, focuses primarily on the structural contradictions, rather than the class antagonisms, that characterize capitalist society—the "contradictory movement [gegensätzliche Bewegung] [that] has its origin in the twofold character of labour," rather than in the struggle between labor and capital, i.e. between the owning and the working classes. These contradictions, moreover, operate (as Marx describes using a phrase borrowed from Hegel) "behind the backs" of both the capitalists and workers, that is, as a result of their activities, and yet irreducible to their conscious awareness either as individuals or as classes. As such, Capital, does not propose a theory of revolution (led by the working class and its representatives) but rather a theory of crises as the condition for a potential revolution, or what Marx refers to in the Communist Manifesto as a potential "weapon," "forged" by the owners of capital, "turned against the bourgeoisie itself" by the working class. Such crises, according to Marx, are rooted in the contradictory character of the commodity, the most fundamental social form of capitalist society. In capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of this wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit—a tendency that leads to the paradox, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of "poverty in the midst of plenty," or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.

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http://www.resimyukle.co.nr/ - (Free Image Hosting)

Book Author: Markus Zusak

Genre: Drama, Historical

Quick Synopsis: Death is the author, death follows a young girls life throught a book she left behind after a tragedy. Her life is told by death from the start to end.

What was right with it?: Illustrations

What was wrong with it?: A bit long, some bits dragged out.

Marks: 8 out of 10

Recommended Age Of Reader: 16/17 +

Reviewed By: Kitty Kiska

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¯\(°_o)/¯
DeeznutzFYC

(I don't know how to post a pic here so here's a link instead) http://www.umanitoba.ca/cm/vol15/no21/hellshotel.jpg

So the book is about a girl named Tara who has a friend named Jenn. Jenn spends her nights panhandling for money and sleeping in an abandoned warehouse because she has a troubled home life. One night Tara is introduced to her friends life and she begins to realize how hard life is for Jenn on the streets.

So this book had amazing potential at the beginning. When I first got the book I thought I would be reading about why teens run away from home and why they choose to live on the streets. Unfortunately I was highly disappointed. I thought the book would get into stuff about child abuse, substance abuse (both in teens and their families) and similar topics. Instead most of the characters don't live at home because they don't get along with their parents. At one point in the novel Jenn goes home to sleep but her mom starts yelling at her. Jenn finds this completely uncalled for but the truth is her mom hasn't known where she has been for a month. Also it's explained that all the teens who sleep in the abandoned warehouse could go to group homes but they choose not to because of the rules. Overall I don't find this to be a very realistic book these teens risk being murdered, mugged and raped because they don't want a curfew or their parents set down too many rules. Not once in the book do we meet a teen with a very real reason to not go home (again because of abuse).

Overall I give this book a 3 out of 10

Book Author: Danial Waters

Genre: Young adult, Fantasy, Romance

Quick Synopsis:  It follows a girl named Phoebe and her best friends, Margi and Adam. Strange things started happening around the world where teenagers dont stay dead when they die but come back for another chance as zombies or living impared as they are called. The story follows phoebe as she falls for the football playing zombie, the cute Tommy. Not everyone is happy to see this and some do very nasty things to keep them apart and stop their love for good.

What was right with it?: Captured how views of society can be unfair at times.

What was wrong with it?: Far fetched fiction.

Marks: 7 out of 10

Recommended Age Of Reader: 14/16 +

Reviewed By: Kinky Kitten

Book Author: Danial Waters

Genre: Young adult, Fantasy, Romance

Quick Synopsis: After Adam sacrifices his life to save phoebe she wants to spend every minute with him to try and revive him to the maximum that she can. Love mixed in with guilt doesent change the fact that she is still confused about her feelings towards tommy who has disappeared from her life. With the zombie haters still out there, they make a massive offence blaming it on the living impared who will now get haunted but where can they run? and who will stay to fight for their innocents?

What was right with it?: Captured how views of society can be unfair at times.

What was wrong with it?: Far fetched fiction, just want to shake the girl and say "make up your mind about what guy you want"

Marks: 6 out of 10

Recommended Age Of Reader: 14/16 +  

Reviewed By: Kinky Kitten

Post edited at 3:42 am on Nov. 12, 2009 by Kinky Kitten