"Age Appropriate"

Hello! Today I'm going to talk about something I really care about: books. This whole train of thought was inspired by a long list of books I saved from a Page-A-Day calendar of book reviews from 2013. I figured it was time to go through the list and decide which ones I still wanted to read-then figure out if my school and public libraries have them, make color coded lists, and plan which ones I wanted to read first. You know, just normal, bookworm stuff.

I ended up going on Goodreads to get a sense of what regular readers thought of these books, and also to see which of them would be (for lack of a better term) age appropriate. I've been reading at a college level since second or third grade, so I've never encountered a (fictional) book I didn't understand, but if I'm going to read an "adult" book, I want to know if it's rated adult because of its complexity or the gratuitous and graphic sex scenes.

I didn't really think this was an unreasonable request, but after poking around on the Goodreads site for a while, I found that the idea had been discussed by users years ago and (as far as I can tell) scrapped. In fact, a lot of people on the forum seemed extremely offended at the thought of people telling them what they can and cannot read. I was kind of confused by this, so I went and looked at other sites. I couldn't find a single website that offered useful appropriateness ratings for books. Basically, everything said either "Adult" or "Young Adult," with no explanation for the rating.

Then, I understood. People seem to think that the only reason a human would want to know what kind of content is in a book is if they are a parent trying to prevent their child from being exposed to the world. Has it never occurred to anyone that there are teenagers who aren't interested in reading about sex, violence, and half the other things these reviews are telling our parents about? Why not just tell us?

As I looked even further, I started getting a little frustrated. After almost an hour of searching, I hadn't found any useful information about the content in any of the books I wanted to check. It's done with movies, isn't it? Not only are there official ratings assigned to movies, I can also go on hundreds of different websites to get information about exactly what kinds of potentially inappropriate material is in a movie I want to watch, then make my own, educated decision about whether or not to watch it. Why isn't there that much thought and effort put into rating books in a similar way? (End rant.)

So, what do you guys think? I'd love to continue this conversation in the comments, and if anyone knows of a website like I'm describing, please let me know! Also, if anyone knows how to design a website so we can just make this happen on our own, that would be great.

What is My Life?

Hello! Today's post is just going to be me filling you in a little on my life, so you can have some context for all this crazy. (I thought the title was appropriate, because I've been saying that a lot recently.)

First, and most excitingly, school ended on June 13th. Lucky me, the math and science program I'm in only gives one exam a day during exam week, so we all got to go home earlier than everyone else. Including picking up my sousaphone from my base school, I was home over an hour earlier than my brother (and you can bet I lorded that over him, because maturity). Although I've spent a lot of time just relaxing, I've also been pretty productive (mostly on the stuff from yesterday's post), and I'm planning on keeping it that way. Since I'm apparently incapable of having fun. It's fine.

Speaking of sousaphones... marching band! I mentioned that our show is Latin, but I thought I'd give you a little more detail. (Yay, details! Come on, at least pretend you're excited!) Our show doesn't have its performance title yet, but right now we're just calling it A Celebration of Mangione. Chuck Mangione is a composer who was apparently big in the '70s. None of us had ever heard of him, but he composed the music for the movie Children of Sanchez. For those of you (like me) who haven't seen it, let me tell you, the music is fabulous. Or we got a really amazing arrangement. Probably both. Both is good. There are way too many sixteenth notes, but I really like the music, and I'm really excited about our upcoming season!

A lot of my time this summer is going to be spent on band and crafts and other fun things, but I also have a decent reading list. My priority is something that was assigned to me for school, called Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History. Something I want to read for myself is The Count of Monte Cristo. Because of the weird way we did our foreign language exams this year, my French class finished about three weeks before the school year did. My teacher decided to use all the extra time to show us the seven hour movie version, starring Gerard Depardieu. Then she challenged me to read it, so I'm going to do that. It's apparently over a thousand pages, but I've read Lord of the Rings, so how bad can it be? I really enjoyed the story, so hopefully I'll feel the same about the book. I also have a few smaller things I'd like to read, which aren't really as interesting. And finally, my dad is continuing his quest to get me to read the Bible and the Koran. Neither of us are religious, but he thinks it's important to be well educated in other people's beliefs. He has a point, so if I get around to it, I'll probably do that.... I don't really know.

I think that's enough of a look into my boring life. At least now you'll have a vague recollection of what I'm talking about in future posts! Speaking of which, I'm going out of town for the next couple of days, so I don't really know when the next post will be, or what it's going to be on. Yay, surprises, right? Right? Well, in any case, I'll talk to you soon!

And now, your question for today: What are you doing this summer/over the next few months? I'd especially love to hear about books you're reading or have read recently, since I'm always looking for new stuff to try. Let me know in the comments!

An Update on My Life

Hello again, everyone! I hope you're having a great New Year's Eve, and that you have fun plans for tonight! Today I'm going to give you an update on some stuff in my life (I know, so interesting), which will hopefully be a bit of an excuse explanation for my recent radio silence.

1. School: I am really liking high school now, even though I kind of hate one of my classes. Nothing particularly interesting has been happening lately, unless you actually go to my school, though. It's mostly just been me drowning in homework, mostly for science, and, oddly, English. One cool thing I'm doing is making a French cooking show, which is my big project for, you guessed it, French. We're doing a cooking unit, so everyone has to make a video in the style of a cooking show showing how to make an actual French dish. Pretty cool, no? OK, on to more interesting things...
2. Extracurriculars: Marching band sadly ended on November 8, so I have nothing to do.... Obviously, I'm kidding! Winter guard started a week after that, so I've ridiculously busy with that. Our practices were from 7-10 on Tuesdays and Fridays, and 9-4 on Saturdays, until a week or two ago. Then we split into JV and Varsity (I'm a rookie, so I'm on JV) and now I'll be practicing 7-10 Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So don't expect any kind of brilliant writing during the week! (That is, if you get anything at all...) I'm really excited about the stuff I get to do in our show but I'll probably do a whole post on that some other time.
3. Fandoms: I'm so behind on Doctor Who, since I still haven't finished Series 7.2, so I haven't seen the 50th or the Christmas special. But I'll catch up eventually! (Spring break, anyone?) I'm anxiously awaiting January 19, and also considering sneaking on to a plane to England so I can watch Sherlock on Wednesday. On an unrelated note, I will be hiding in a safe, nonspoilery section of the Internet until the 19th. I'm slowly working my way through Supernatural, and I'm now just a few episodes away from Season 7. I'll get there eventually, although it would help if I just didn't get any science homework until February.....
4. Other Stuff: I got all of John Green's books for Christmas, and I have to admit, I kind of freaked out. I read TFiOS in two hours on Christmas, and I started AAoK last night. I don't have a problem, I swear.

I hope that didn't bore you too much, and kudos to you if you actually read it all! Hopefully I'll be back with another post soon, but no promises, right?

Thoughts on Allegiant (Some Spoilers)

Hello everyone! I'm still off from school today, so I'm going to try to write a bunch of blog posts so I have some for when I'm busy. Last night I stayed up kind of late finishing Allegiant by Veronica Roth, so I'm going to talk about that right now.


Just a warning, I will be talking about spoilery things in this discussion. For the most part, I won't be using names, but if you're ultra-sensitive to spoilers (like me), you should probably read the book before you read this.


My best friend is completely obsessed with Divergent, and she got Allegiant the day it came out. She read it in a week, then asked me if I wanted to borrow it, with the warning that it was kind of a let-down after the first two. She also made a point of saying she hated the ending. I had also read some negative reviews online, and I think that gave me the advantage of lower expectations.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. There were times I laughed out loud, times I was on the edge of my metaphorical seat, and times that I cried. A lot. There were a lot of big ideas and emotions in this book, some of which I will discuss further below. I also thought it was interesting to be able to see the story from Tobias's point of view as well. Since there was so much involving Evelyn and Marcus, I think it was important to know what their son was thinking. (And also towards the end it was obvious why we really needed two story lines.) The one thing I didn't like was that some parts were a little overly predictable (especially to my friend).

So if you've read Divergent and Insurgent, you know that they both have a lot of death in them. It makes sense, seeing as they take place during war/rebellions/chaos. That trend is continued in this book, with the death of a significant(ish) character fairly early on, culminating with the deaths of two main characters towards the end. Of course, it's never fun when characters you like die, but I think the deaths were dealt with very well, and that they obviously weren't just random Veronica Roth Was Feeling Sadistic deaths. They each had a meaning, and that is the kind of death that I can handle and even sometimes enjoy reading about. (Sometimes. Like I said, I cried a lot last night, and I'm not really over it yet.)

There were a few other things that stood out to me while I was reading. First, the relationship between Tris and Tobias. I remember telling my friend (when I was at about page 50) that I was happy that they were obviously still in love, even if they had had some issues with honesty and trust in the past. As the story progressed, I think that remained the case, all the way to the end. Sure, they fought sometimes, sure, there was a major problem (again), but I really liked what Tris said about Tobias making her sharper. It wasn't a "boy saves girl" relationship, it was a "boy and girl make each other better" relationship, and I think that's the only kind of relationship worth having.

Another thing that I really got into was the relationship between Tris and Caleb. I have an older brother, and while he didn't betray my entire community or lead me to my execution, I was still able to relate to a lot of the emotions that Tris was feeling towards him. (I'm going to be honest here, most of my tears were during the last conversation between Tris and Caleb.) Tris was right, that wasn't why Caleb was doing it, and it just gave me a lot to think about.

Finally, I want to talk about some of the morals in the book. I thought the whole GD vs GP argument was very interesting, especially since, in one sense, I would be our society's equivalent of GP. I'm white, and that gives me a very basic advantage over people who aren't. I have always found this annoying and wrong, but it's still true. Hopefully other people that read Allegiant will be able to draw similar parallels and will see that in some ways, the prejudices in our society are just as ridiculous as the prejudices in theirs.

Whew! That's all I'm going to say about Allegiant, but I could probably write pages about it. I think I would give this book a 5 out of 5 for writing quality, and a 4 out of 5 for plot. It was an awesome book, and I would definitely recommend it! (Unless you haven't read the first two. You should read those first.)

Congratulations for making it the end of this extremely long post! Now I have a few questions for you, so leave your answers down in comments. Have you read Allegiant yet? If so, what did you think? Also, do you cry often when you read? If so, does that make you think the book is better or worse?

A Saturday Thing?

Hmm, maybe I'll just try to post every Saturday, as that seems to be working out right now! :)

My week was...... kind of weird. I don't actually remember most of the stuff that happened, which probably has something to do with, oh right, I'm going to States today! Ahh!!! It's sort of totally consuming me...


Ok, so I started writing that before I left, but then project and other craziness, so I'm finishing it now. (First I just want to say that I'm in my school's marching band, and we had our biggest competition of the season today. This should make more sense now.) I just got back from IHOP, which is a thing our band does after each competition. Since it was our last competition today, more people were there than have ever been, and we were all in very good moods. Why, you ask? Because at States today, we got..... straight 1s!! (For those of you that aren't music geeks, that means we got the highest score in every category: music, visuals, and overall effect.) That's right, seven different judges thought we were superior (the official name for a 1)! I am so excited, I don't even know how to put it into words, but believe me, it's an amazing feeling!

As I mentioned above, I had a little project craziness this morning, but now it's turned in (my science class does everything online, so we can have weird due dates and times) and I am free! Well, not quite, since our second quarter project is to get it ready to enter into the contest we're doing them for, but I am free for now! Since it's a four day weekend (remember to vote if you're eligible!) I am looking forward to sleeping a ton, catching up on Doctor Who, and reading Allegiant, which my best friend was kind enough to let me borrow. (She's just a little totally and completely obsessed with the Divergent series, and although she did say Allegiant was a bit of a disappointment, I am really enjoying it so far.)

Enjoy your long weekend if you have one, and I will talk to you soon!