Hello, Steemheads. Welcome to book reviews day 2. Every week, I will be talking about one or two books I enjoyed reading. I call myself ‘irregular bookworm.’ I love books like that, I can’t help it. Bibliophile and nerd sound too serious. LOL. The books I’ll be talking about maybe your best or worst books, so read with an open mind.
Today, I want to start with two of my favourite books. I’ll give an overview and my thoughts on the books. Enjoy!
The first on the list is Every Day by David Levithan.
The book is about a passing spirit, A, who wakes up as different person in a different body everyday. He’s neither a boy nor a girl. Everyday, when he wakes, he will take some minutes to scan the memory of the body he’s in and go with the person’s daily routine. When the day ends, he takes the memory of the day with him before he pass on to another person. He doesn’t choose, he doesn’t know where or how he will wake up. The bodies he inhibits have no idea that something is wrong. They go about their normal day to day activities. This continued till he woke up in the body of a sixteen year old high school boy, Justin. He met his girlfriend Rhiannon in school, spent the day with her and fell in love. He couldn’t let her go, so he told her everything. While this was going on, he was in the body of another person. She accepted him but he made some mistakes on the way, and because people were asking questions, he gave Rhiannon a gift and moved on.
Every day a different body
Every day a different life
Every day in love with the same girl
One of the things I love about this book is the prose. It’s beautiful and very easy to understand. The writer’s imagination is something I admire. This is the kind of book that makes you want to write something beautiful after reading it. I finished it in two days. I just couldn’t drop it. The book also makes you question a lot of things. It makes you wonder if some things you actually waved aside were possible.
Here’s as excerpt:
I wake up. Immediately I have to figure out who I am. It’s not just the body—opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I’m fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you’re used to waking up in a new one each morning. It’s the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp. Every day I am someone else. I am myself—I know I am myself—but I am also someone else. It has always been like this.
The information is there. I wake up, open my eyes, understand that it is a new morning, a new place. The biography kicks in, a welcome gift from the not-me part of the mind. Today I am Justin. Somehow I know this—my name is Justin—and at the same time I know that I’m not really Justin, I’m only borrowing his life for a day. I look around and know that this is his room. This is his home. The alarm will go off in seven minutes. I’m never the same person twice.
The second book is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.
This is about Hazel Grace, a seventeen year old girl diagnosed of thyroid cancer when she was a child. She stayed in doors, read one book over and over, and woke everyday with the knowledge that she might die anytime. Her mother, convinced that she was depressed, made her start attending support groups. There , she met Isaac who was almost blind and his friend Augustus who had osteosarcoma and already lost one leg as a result. She and Augustus fell in love. In the end, Augustus, scared of oblivion, later gave in to the cancer and died.
There's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.
This book is too beautiful, not just the prose but everything about. You feel what the characters are feeling. Everything is pure fiction but it will make you question life and it’s meaning. Just like the name – the faults. It addresses what people who have incurable diseases go through everyday, and at the same time, shows they can actually have a life. Hazel is probably the strongest character in the book. She carried Augustus along, with his fears and all till his heart gave in to the disease.
Take a look at an excerpt:
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death. Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group.
If you’ve read any of the books, tell me your thoughts on it. If you haven’t, still tell me what you think. You’re welcome.
What are you reading by the way?
Both images are from my e-books gallery.