tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7158946442831141992024-09-16T14:56:31.480-07:00My reviews for books and movies.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-57452299508515660972011-11-18T09:52:00.000-08:002011-11-18T09:58:41.946-08:00

2011, 373 pages Marina Singh, a scientist in a pharmacological company, is sent from the comfort of her lab in Minnesota to the Amazonas rainforest to check on a revolutionary research done by an eccentric scientist, Annick Swenson, who refuses to give any timetable or progress report. The last person sent to this mission, Marina’s lab partner, died of fever in the research camp, and Marina has

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-2726975505852904832011-08-22T15:57:00.000-07:002011-08-22T15:57:22.946-07:00

2011, 432 page 29 years old Alice is happily married to Nick and they are expecting their first child. One day she wakes up after apparently hitting her head, and she finds out that 10 years has passed since her last memory, 10 years that were completely erased from her head. And it seems like her life went in a completely different direction than where she thought they will when she was 29.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-66159560262209724662011-05-16T11:01:00.000-07:002011-05-16T11:01:16.737-07:00

First published 1936, 1037 pages The book tells a bigger than life love story with the American civil war in the background. Scarlett O’Hara is the 16 years old daughter of a successful planter in Georgia. Though the first words of the book state that she is not beautiful, seems like every man in her radius thinks differently. She is spoiled, surrounded by “beaux” (what a cute word for suitors)

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-50225195206122829332011-04-30T20:23:00.000-07:002011-04-30T20:23:34.442-07:00

2009, 304 pages Before I had kids, I knew I am going to be a perfect parent. My kids will behave wonderfully, they will love each other, they will be very happy, and of course, they will adore me. Not that things were anything like perfect at any time, but there’s nothing like the teen years to show the huge gap between fantasy and reality. This book talks about the aspects of raising teens from

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-16141460931000547982011-04-20T18:33:00.000-07:002011-04-20T18:37:03.832-07:00

2009, 359 pages In 2005 the hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. After the storm the levies broke and the city, built mostly below sea level, got flooded, in one of the biggest disasters in the US history, with more than a thousand dead and damage of billions. After the storm anarchy ruled the city with group of criminals looting the abandoned houses and businesses. The Bush administration got a

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-67885048744677972532011-02-09T09:51:00.000-08:002011-02-09T09:51:43.949-08:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2005, 600 pages The Girl Who Played with Fire, 2006, 630 pages The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, 2007, 576 pages These three novels were originally written in Swedish, and were published after the death of the author, Stieg Larsson. They take place in Sweden. The story follows Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist in his 40s, and Lisbeth Salander, a strange young

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-66235404721168339272011-02-03T09:48:00.000-08:002011-02-03T09:53:39.613-08:00

2006, 475 pages Valentino Achak Deng was born in a village in south Sudan. When he was a young boy, his village was attacked and destroyed by the northern Arab militia as part of the second Sudanese civil war. Achak had to flee to the forest to save his life. He joins a group of boys, all fleeing for their lives, evading wild animals and soldiers from both sides, reaches a refugee camp in

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-3871833903143321532011-01-13T19:15:00.000-08:002011-01-13T19:17:13.393-08:00

2011, 336 pages. Sarah is living a hectic life. She is a vice president of a big company, working around the clock, and a mother of three young children. She and her husband, who also works many hours a week and is never really away from his job, are trying to keep up with mortgages and loans, the price of studying at top universities, living at top neighborhood and owning a vacation home. All

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-37081418599771270292011-01-10T12:19:00.000-08:002011-01-10T12:19:46.856-08:00

2010, 656 pages ** Spoiler Alert: contains spoiler to the book “Blackout” ** This is the second half of the story that started in the book “Blackout”. We find Polly, Mike and Eileen where we left them at the end of “Blackout”, trapped in London in the middle of the Blitz, their drops back to Oxford of 2060 do not open, and Polly has a deadline, later during the war she visited for another

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-6204419376766712102011-01-03T18:55:00.000-08:002011-01-03T18:55:10.950-08:00

2005, 368 pages. One night, sometime around our time or in the very near future, the stars disappeared. Tyler witnessed this event when he was 12 years old with his best friends, Jason and Diane. They were the children of a wealthy businessman living in the big house, gifted kids who were going to a private school. He was the son of their housekeeper, living in a small house on their estate,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-77112180853323086052011-01-02T17:36:00.000-08:002011-01-02T17:36:47.862-08:00

2010, 345 pages. When Rebecca Skloot was 16 years old, she heard about the HeLa cells for the first time. She took a biology class in a community college. Her instructor told the class about the sample of cells that were taken from a woman in the 50s, cancer cells, that became the first cells to grow in the laboratory. These cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-2733177985620565382010-12-29T19:42:00.000-08:002010-12-29T19:42:20.966-08:00

2008, 352 pages Jonathan Safran Foer played with the idea of becoming a vegetarian ever since his babysitter told him where his chicken came from when he was a child. Though he tried many times, it never worked out. He, and later he and his wife, were vegetarians, unless they felt like eating meat. When they were expecting their first child, he felt this is a time for some important decisions in

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-91644580687489557052010-12-15T10:59:00.000-08:002010-12-15T10:59:15.563-08:00

2007, 300 pages Alice has a good life. She just turned 50. She is a professor at Harvard and so is her husband. She has three children in their twenties and she loves them and very proud of them. At least of the first two. She is a little frustrated at her third and smartest daughter’s choice to skip college and go to LA to become an actress. But other than that and some other small things, like

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-25967536187480305142010-12-10T12:26:00.000-08:002010-12-10T12:32:13.516-08:00

1986, 415 pages Book two in “The Ender Saga”. *** Spoiler Alert: May Contain spoilers to the first book of the saga “Ender’s Game” ***This book takes place 3000 years after the events in “Ender’s Game”. But Ender is only 35 years old. Since he travels in almost light speed between the stars, telling the story of the dead buggers, time passes in a different paste for him during travel while many

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-58906869270294527812010-12-06T07:16:00.000-08:002010-12-06T07:16:24.126-08:00

2009, 592 pages In Elantris, the previous book by Sanderson that I read, there were humans who turned into gods, and there were a prince and a princes going to get married for political reasons. But the plot prevented both processes from happening. Sanderson explains in his website that after writing completely different things – a few fantasy series – he decided to write another stand-alone

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-55507781164203156962010-11-19T09:23:00.000-08:002010-11-19T09:23:34.353-08:00

Written in Italian in 2008, 271 pages. Two kids in Italy go through a trauma that changes their lives forever. Each kid and his own trauma, there is no connection between them back then. They grow up scarred and lonely, each one of them tries to find solace by physically harming oneself. They meet in high school and drawn to each other, but their internal scars don’t let them get really close to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-5256000047511655162010-11-17T18:02:00.000-08:002010-11-17T18:02:17.660-08:00

2005, 656 pages Raoden is the prince of a kingdom called Arelon. He is going to be the king after his father, he is going to get married to a princess from a nearby kingdom, and it seems like everything goes well in his life, until one morning everything changes, and nothing will ever be the same for him. Sarene the princess of Teod arrives to Arelon to get married. A political marriage, to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-23380506960881923992010-11-15T11:16:00.000-08:002010-11-15T11:16:32.310-08:00

Del Rey Books, 1982, 258 pages, US Many years ago, a family of gods created the world. They divided between themselves the nations that worshipped them. But one of the gods became greedy, and almost ruined the world in a war between the gods over a magical object. The gods decided to abandon the world in body and leave a powerful sorcerer to watch the magical object and the royal family who keep

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-8377722565410219152010-11-05T15:27:00.000-07:002010-11-05T15:27:09.831-07:00

2004, 352 pages Eight short stories by the Canadian writer, all take place in Canada, and tell the story of a woman. The woman can be very young, very old, or in between. Sometimes and old woman goes back to some event in her past, long time ago. Many times this single event changed their lives. The chance has a very important role in these events. If things had been a little bit different, in

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-62835707424777984982010-10-26T13:02:00.000-07:002010-10-26T13:02:42.213-07:00

2009, 352 pages When Judd Foxman’s father died, he had a peculiar last wish: he wanted his family to sit Shiva after his death, the Jewish traditional seven days of mourning together at the same house for the deceased’s close family. The wish is peculiar because Mort, the father, was known as a non-religious man. But Judd, like the rest of the family, agrees to gather in his childhood home and

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-72631753568373078772010-09-27T21:49:00.000-07:002010-09-27T21:49:39.654-07:00

2005, 352 pages. Sequel of “Wicked”. *** SPOILER ALERT: contains spoilers to the previous book “Wicked” **** “Wicked” is one of my favorite books ever. Very few heroines touched my heart like Elphaba. Unfortunately, Elphaba died at the end of the book. I wasn’t too compelled to go on to the next book in “The Wicked Years”, “Son of a Witch”, because I knew Elphaba wasn’t there, but I decided to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-27878405507182553232010-09-04T12:22:00.000-07:002010-09-04T12:22:33.897-07:00

2010, 390 pages The third and final book of “The Hunger Games” trilogy. *** Spoiler Alert: contains spoilers to the first two books in the trilogy: “The Hunger Games” and “Catching Fire” *** Unlike the first book, which ended in a relatively closed manner, the second book had a cliff-hanger ending. I am glad I didn’t read the second book until the third book was available. So many surprises at

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-75614077880754117362010-09-02T12:45:00.000-07:002010-09-04T13:24:03.155-07:00

2009, 391 pages Second book of “The Hunger Games” trilogy. *** Spoiler Alert: contains spoilers to the first book in the trilogy “The Hunger Games” *** This book starts a short time after the end of the previous book, “The Hunger Games”. Against all odds, after tricking the Capitol, both Katniss and Peeta won the hunger game. We could think they reached the “happily ever after”. They are alive.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-64952097150544749072010-08-16T19:32:00.000-07:002010-08-16T19:32:30.201-07:00

2005, 320 pages This is not a book I would usually pick to read. Descriptions of wars and combats bore me. But after I started reading this book, I thought this is something completely different. John Perry is going to join the army at the age of 75. Not a regular army, but the Colonial Defense Force (CDF), that fights for humans living in distant planets. Joining the army at the age of 75

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-715894644283114199.post-78976272148894936302010-08-09T20:31:00.000-07:002010-08-09T20:31:22.115-07:00

2010, 312 pages Book 10 in the “Sookie Stackhouse” series. *** SPOILER ALERT: contains spoilers to the previous 9 books in the series *** After reading the previous 9 books in the series, plus the short stories collection “A Touch of Dead”, I am completely hooked on the series. I knew no matter what’s in this book, I’ll enjoy meeting all the well known characters again, like old friends,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0