Summer

I feel guilty that haven't posted here since ages. I am actually going through a bit of a crisis with this blog. Lately I have been feeling that when I started this blog I wasn't the same person I am now. ( Who was I then?) My biggest peeve, however, is that I didn't really make any friends here.  None at all. What was the point of blogging then? Sure I came across plenty more books and got some wonderful comments on my reviews, but it still sucks that I didn't become close with a fellow blogger. Turns out I am as terrible as making friends online, as I am in real life. ( Isn't online real life?)  Nevertheless, this socially inept fool is done with her internship which kept her busy these past two months, and is ready to blog more often, more thoughtfully, and with more hope. ( Hope is the thing that lies in the feather. I shall wear them in my ear. They'll grow into the brain.) 

I haven't been able to complete my summer reading list ( What a fail! ), and neither have I read a whole lot of books this summer (:O). I did work at a publishing house though, so I forgive myself. 

Books I did read, The Fault in our Stars by John Green. I didn't really fancy it initially since it was so different from the other JG books I love and cherish and eat and drink. But it grew on me. I still like Paper Towns and Alaska more. Maybe I even like Katherines more. Nevertheless, John Green is my hero, and TFioS made me cry like an elephant ( Big Fat Tears). So overall, that was a helluva good book. 

Then I read two life-changing books. 

The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. 

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson. 

My heart grows quiet when I think of ways to describe them. It knows, I can't do them justice. 

Someday I'll read a book that will make me fly. (Where?) 

Till that day arrives, I'll have my imaginary friends, and I'll laugh with them and smell their hair and bite them and they shall be creatures and beasts and water and forests. 

My love to everyone. 

Top Ten Favorite Quotes From Books

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.” 
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.”

― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” 
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony...Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product.” 
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Only a fool is not afraid.” 
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” 
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.” 
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Self-defense is an act that implies you have something valuable to defend. After the instinct, you begin to wonder. What, specifically, was I aiming to save? What, beyond instinct, makes life worth saving?” 
― Emily Arsenault, The Broken Teaglass

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.” 
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“Resist much. Obey little.” 
― Walt Whitman

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Can Cameron find what he’s looking for?

All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school—and life in general—with a minimum of effort. It’s not a lot to ask. But that’s before he’s given some bad news: he’s sick and he’s going to die. Which totally sucks. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure—if he’s willing to go in search of it. With the help of a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf and a yard gnome, Cam sets off on the mother of all road trips through a twisted America into the heart of what matters most.

 Going Bovine was like a drunken teenager. Crazy, reckless, fun, shockingly poignant and above all, undeniably unreliable.

Cameron is a slacker/stoner. I loved his character. I could totally relate to it. He was very Holden Caulfield-esque. Cameron basically doesn’t like anything. At all. His parents live a dull life. His dad is possibly cheating on his mom. His sister is a pod person (Read: Cheerleader) who is dating the quarterback or something like that. His best memory is when he almost died at Disneyland when he was 5 years. He loves listening to this lame Portuguese singer, just to be ironic. He sometimes hangs out in the stoner bathroom having eloquent and sensible conversation about Schrödinger's cat* and such. I’d give an inch of my hair to go to that bathroom. It sounds like a glorious place. But never mind, this is just the start of the book and it only gets better.

Cameron gets Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is simply mad cow disease in a human. And hence, the cover.  It's genius really. Symptoms of this disease: Hallucinations, muscle twitching.

The rest of the book Cameron is either lying on a hospital bed or on a psychedelic road trip with a paranoid dwarf who loves to swear, a punk angel, and a yard gnome who claims to be a Norse God, or possibly both. It's really upto the reader to decide what is really happening.  The road trip is eccentric, they run into a jazz musician who is supposed to be dead, mardi gras folks, dumb reality-TV obsessed teens, CHURCH OF EVERLASTING SATISFACTION AND SNACK-’N’-BOWL AKA Future serial killers, physicists on the quest to enter parallel universe and much more.

This book is very surreal, very very funny, very Alice in Wonderland meets On The Road meets Don Quixote. And mostly, it begs the question, what exactly defines reality.  Till the box is opened is Schrodinger’s cat dead or alive or both? 

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

Similar books: Paper Towns By John Green. 
Other road trip related books on my reading list: Road trip books.

It's Monday! What are you reading? #5

It's Monday! What are you reading? is a weekly event hosted by the wonderful Shelia at Book Journey. It is where we share what we read this past week, what we hope to read this week…. and anything in between!

Ans. Several books, simultaneously. 

This book was The Shizz. 
Review:  http://oopsireadthatbook.blogspot.in/2012/05/going-bovine-by-libba-bray.html

Now, I don't really read non-fiction. Ever. But I came across this photo of a page in the book, and I was in love. Also, Jonathan Safran Foer is brilliant. 

Nevertheless, I doubt it's gonna turn me into a vegan or whatever. 

Herman Melville sure loved his whales. 

I didn't really love this one. The protag is a female and the main guy is not your typical John Green character. *sigh* But, maybe it gets better. 


Watch out for the reviews. Let me know what you are reading this week? 


P.S- My Summer Reading List Part 1 and Part 2 ( Road Trip edition.) 

In My Mailbox/ My Summer Reading List Part 2/ Stacking The Shelves/ Mailbox Monday

IMM is hosted by The Story Siren
Stacking The Shelves is hosted by Tygna's Reviews. 
Mailbox Monday is hosted at Mailbox Monday. 
This is the Road Trip list! ^^ 


When I read Paper Towns by John Green and loved it, I realised I had barely read any books about road trips. Then I read Going Bovine and it was all kinds of awesome ( Review: http://oopsireadthatbook.blogspot.in/2012/05/going-bovine-by-libba-bray.html ) , and so I am now gonna read a whole heap of books about road trips. 

1) On the Road  by Jack Kerouac

Is it kind of embarrassing that I have not read this book yet? Yes. It is. And that must be changed soon. 

2)  Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Okay well, accepted this is more of a sea voyage than a road trip book, but it's an exception I made for this book because it's about a Tiger. And, I have a soft corner ( Translation: Obsession) for the Felines. Not to mention, much like the time when you are on the lookout for the perfect Woody Allen meets Jesse Eisenberg meets Seth Cohen hyper intellectual, neurotic guy, but you get totally distracted by a super hot french musician; well, this is like that time. A Man Booker Prize Winner being much like a super hot musician. French one. Stupid analogy. Because  I'd totally prefer the dork. 

3) The Least Awesome book by John Green

I started reading. Didn't like it as much as Paper Towns or Looking for Alaska. But whatever, John Green is John Green. This book is third person though. Meh. 

4) Saving June by Hannah Harrignton

I really didn't wanna read this because I had made up my mind it was a quintessential romance book.  But then a lot of people recommended it and I heard the main guy is like a hipster-ish dude who loves Neutral Milk Hotel or something. Anyways, I remember liking the music he likes, and it is a a road trip book, and the cover isn't shabby either so whatever, I'll check it out.  

What's in your mailbox?

Check out my Summer Reading List Part 1 

Teaser Tuesday and Top Ten Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of  Should Be Reading.

My teaser:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." - Moby-Dick

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish.

All time favourite literary characters

In no particular order

1. Esther Greenwood- SO ME! 

2. Holden Caulfield- SO  ME! 

3. Amy March- Not really me but she was always my favorite March sister. 

4. Mia Thermopolis- SO ME!

5. Michael Moscovitz- I WANT TO MARRY+DO him  

6. Sirius Black- I can't get over his death. He can still come back from the Veil, guys. 

7. Ron Weasley- Come on, he is so nice and funny and just generally LIKABLE. 

8. Harry Potter- Childhood hero. 

9. Becky Bloomwood- Only because she is funny and dumb and I sometimes feel dumb so it's nice to have company. 

10. Humbert Humbert- How a child molester ended up on this list is the beauty of Lolita. 

This isn't really the only Top 10. Just the one that came to my mind right now. 

Send me your links too. :) 

And don't forget to stop by my Summer reading list! and check out the 10 things I love about Paper Towns by John Green