For The Love of Books

For The Love of Books is a blog that I dedicated for my love of books, my everyday journey of reading books, sharing recommendations on books to read and just share a review of what I thought of the books that I've read. And occassionally, there will be some things unrelated to books, but it will mostly be about my love of books.. Enjoy..

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Movie Crisis

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This weekend is pretty much the same as any other weekend. I get to get up late, not having to go to work over the weekend, read a book accompanied by a cup of "home brewed" instant coffee and do the occasional DVD marathon once I get home from hanging out with friends and family.


And living in Jakarta has its limitations for activities that we can do over the weekend. Most of Jakartans hang out in the malls during the weekend, as we don't have parks and other outdoor activities that we can enjoy, especially not in this hot and humid and polluted air of Jakarta.

But lately we are faced with an even more limited activities to do over the weekend: going to the movies. Jakartans, or Indonesians for that matter, can no longer enjoy watching those Hollywood box office movies that everybody else around the world can enjoy at the movies. This is because THERE IS NONE of these 2011 box office movies released at the Indonesia theatre up to this day. How sad. Normally at this time of year, I usually get quite excited to go to the movies, because May usually marks the start of releases of summer blockbuster movies from Hollywood. I was looking forward to watching Box Office movies such as Transformers, Thor and Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part II... But I can no longer do that.

And as a result, this makes the mall a lot less crowded at Friday and Saturday night in Jakarta, because we have nothing to do after dinner. This is what I experience yesterday. We did visit the movies but we went out the door in just 3 minutes... There's just nothing worth seeing.

Luckily we can still get those box office movies on DVD, although at a much later date, usually 3 - 6 months after the movie was first released. But, for the sake of the continuity of the cinema business in Indonesia, I do hope that this matter will be resolved soon. We seriously do not want to watch the Indonesian local movies, because it's just not worth paying money to watch them.

First Posting in 2011

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I haven't been posting in this blog for a long time. So this would be my first posting in 2011. I know it's a little late, but I would like to wish everyone a wonderful New Year and may this year brings luck, peace and happiness and I really really hope that my wish will come true this year.

Last year, I set up a goal for myself to read 50 books in 2010. Since then, and because of Goodreads, my reading have improved substantially. I usually only managed to read 1 - 2 books a month, which makes a total of 24 books a year, or 30 books at the most, so it was good to challenge myself to get me back to my reading speed to my college days.

And yet, I managed to close the goal for 2010 with 76 books... :) Thanks to Goodreads for keeping me motivated to read more books and buy more books. Now I have a ton of to be read books.

So that's quite an achievement for me last year.

This year, Goodreads have a section on each reader's reading challenge for 2011 and as for me, this year I'm challenging myself to read 100 books.. This is part of my new year's resolution to read more. And I would like to end this post with a quote from Dr Seus:

"The more that you read, the more things you'll know.
The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."

Book Review: The Most Wanted

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Title : The Most Wanted
Author : Jacquelyn Mitchard
Ratings : *** (3 out of 5 stars)
Synopsis:
Arley Mowbray is young, smart, and lonely. Very lonely. And then she strikes up correspondence with a prison inmate -- and under the spell of his poetic, seductive letters, falls helplessly. stubbornly in love.
Annie Singer is a tough, dedicated Texas Lawyer hired to help Arley unite with her beloved. She does so, but against her own better judgment -- and soon she's caught up in this disturbing and dangerous romance.. and in her feelings for Arley, who's become the daughter she never had.
When Dillon LeGrande comes after the girl he loves. Arley finds herself both aching for his touch and fearing for her life. And Annie begins to question her own choices -- and to wonder what price she would pay for passion...
What I think of the book:
I think this book has an interesting story. This shows us the power of love. Reading this book makes me feel like watching a good drama movie aired on the Hallmark channel. In a way, I think this book is a bit controversial, as we have the main character, who's only 14 years old, start communicating with a 25 year old man, who's in prison for a crime, and ended up falling in love with him and we then have a 14 year old teenager, who's married and is having a baby. I can't help but thinking that this would be classified under an illegal relationship or something, but apparently this book shows us that love knows no boundaries. Age doesn't matter when love comes calling.
This book is told in two different point of view, of Arlington Mowbray, the 14 year old teenager and of Annie Singer, a 40 year old lawyer that Arlington hires to help unite her with her husband who's in prison. Lack of her own child, Annie starts to get real connected with this girl and is feeling particularly maternal towards her. I can definitely sympathize with Arlington's situation and feel that she could have done a lot better, if dangerous love doesn't come across her path.
The ending of this book is a little bit predictable, but I think that it would be the appropriate ending to this story.
Overall, I think this book is quite interesting and I would recommend it to those who loves reading drama stories, with a bit of romance and a touching story, more like Jodi Picoult books.

Book Review: K is for Killer

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Title : K is for Killer
Author : Sue Grafton
Ratings : ** (2 out of 5 stars)

Synopsis:
Laura Kepler was beautiful and wilful, a loner who couldn't resist flirting with danger. She had also been found dead in mysterious circumstances and her death pulls Kinsey Millhone into a netherworld of deception, betrayal and unavenged murder.

Grafton writes a series of book about a private detective, Kinsey Millhone, who's solving mysteries in each case in the book. Grafton's books are all titled with alphabet and is published alphabetically. Her first book in the Kinsey Millhone's series is A for Alibi. This is my first book by Grafton.

In the 11th book in the Kinsey Millhone series, Kinsey is approached by a mother, whose daughter is dead and is part of the unresolved murder cases. She then hired Kinsey to find out what actually happened to her daughter. In this investigation, Kinsey unveils another side of Lorna Kepler's life, which might contribute to her death.

I like Grafton's writing and the flow of the story. The only flaw in this book is the ending of the story. I didn't particularly like the ending and would have given it a higher rating had the ending been different.

Book Review: The Awakening

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Title : The Awakening

Author : Kelley Armstrong
Rating : **** (4 out of 5 stars)

You don't have to be alive to be awakened.
Chloe Saunders is a living science experiment - not only can she see ghosts, but she was genetically altered by a sinister organization called the Edison Group. She's a teenage necromancer whose powers are out of control, which means she can raise the dead without even trying. Now Chloe's running for her life with three of her supernatural friends - a charming sorcerer, a cynical werewolf, and a disgruntled witch - and they have to find someone who can help them before the Edison Group catches them.

As soon as I finished the first book in this series, I immediately made a trip to the local bookstore, hoping that they still have a copy of this book and they do!! So I bought it straight away. I like the first book enough to got me running to the bookstore and get the second one.

The story of Chloe Saunders continues in the second book. She finds out that she not only can see and speak to the dead, but she can summon and wake them out from the dead. This book follows Chloe's adventure together with her three friends escaping from Lyle House to find relatives of one of her friend, who can help them.

The second book is as good and as fast paced as the first one. I enjoyed it as much. This book kept me up reading at night, just to get as much of the story as I can and because it's very difficult to put the book down :) I would definitely recommend this book.

Unfortunately I have as yet could get my hands on the third book. I don't really like hardcover edition, because not only it's expensive here, but it's also very heavy to be carried around everywhere. So I have to wait for the paperback edition to come out in the US in April 2011..

Book Review: The Summoning

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Title : The Summoning

Author : Kelley Armstrong
Rating : **** (4 out of 5 stars)

I've been slacking on posting my review on this blog. Sometimes with work, traffic, other activities and me catching up on my reading to finish the challenge that I have with my friend who lives in Denver, there is just not enough time left to concentrate on putting stuff in my blog. I've been meaning to learn to "beautify" this blog, but just haven't got enough time and energy to do it, so my first attempt at blogging will have to stay this way for the time being.

Anyway, as for the book review, I thought of posting a synopsis of the book for each review, so for those of you who haven't read the book, you can at least get an idea of what the book is about:

She sees dead people - and they see her.
Chloe Saunders used to have a pretty normal life. But that changed on the day she met her first ghost. Locked up in Lyle House, a group home for troubled teens, she finds out that there's more to the home's teen residents than meets the eye. Will Chloe be able to uncover the dangerous secrets of Lyle House... or will its skeletons come back to haunt her?

This is my first encounter of Kelley Armstrong's book and I gotta say that I really enjoyed this book. I picked this book up accidentally. I was travelling and have finished the book that I brought with me, on the second last leg of the journey home. So I went to a bookstore at Changi airport in Singapore during transit and stumbles upon this book which is the first in the series. All the others are at least the second, or the third in a series and I can't buy that to read on the plane home. So I picked up this one and it seems interesting enough, reminds me of the movie Sixth Sense with Haley Joel Osmond.

But I got hooked on this book from the start. It's interesting and fast paced. Chloe Saunders can see ghost but in normal society, she's considered as having some mental disease, which puts her in Lyle House, a sort of psychiatric hospital. She then encounters other teens with the same "problems" with her. As the story develops, Chloe began to find out more about her power.

I like this book because it's different and it brings a different topic, although still in the paranormal-supernatural genre, but at least I get a break from all the Vampire stories that's been clogging the bookshelf, both adult and young adult.

Social Networking

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Saturday is always a good day for me. I start my Saturday morning with breakfast, a cup of coffee, and continue reading what book i'm currently reading at the time. For this particular Saturday morning, it was re-reading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Then, I always logged on to my favorite social networking site, Facebook. I've tried Friendster, I've tried MySpace and a few others, but Facebook is the site that I used the most and that I've come back to almost everyday. My time with my facebook page is mainly not to look at other people's activities and status. Only as a glance when I first opened the site, but I go to the site mainly to play games and check out stores and find good stuff to buy at a great price haha..

Anyway, this particular Saturday, I promised myself that I would reward myself with a trip to the bookstore, and allow myself to splurge, because my friend gave me shopping vouchers to be used at Kinokuniya for my birthday,so I got a few books from there. And, to further succumb to my addiction, I got 3 more books from Periplus, another local bookstore in my town. So, in total I got about 6 new books, which made me a happy girl that day.

I also went to the movies to see Social Network. This movie has been playing at the theatre here for 2 or 3 weeks I think, but I just haven't got time to go and see it yet. It is interesting to see the movie about the social networking site that I've spent a lot of time in. The movie is indeed about Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. To date, Facebook is the most widely active used social networking website in the world (well, i used it at least 2 - 3 times a day ha ha) and has 500 million members worldwide.

It's interesting to find, watching that movie, that the site was originally intended to connect Harvard students alone, and then it developed to connect inter-universities, until it become the Facebook that we know and use today.

The length of this movie is 2 hours. Although there's minimal actions in this movie and mostly conversations and dialogue, I did not find it boring and restless waiting for the movie to end. I actually enjoyed it. There are some funny scenes as well, when Eduardo Saverin is being accused of animal cruelty and canibalism because he's feeding chickens to his chicken. That was stupid, but hillarious I think :) But overall, I think it was a good movie. It's not something that you would watch over and over again, but it's an informative experience for me to find out the origins of the most popular social network in the world and found out that Mark Zuckerberg, is the youngest billionaire in the world and he's only 26 years old. How about that, right?

Not a big fan of Mondays...

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This is what I typically look like on Mondays. I don't like Mondays at all. It's the start of the week.. The weekend has just finished.. But I'm not liking it at all and I find that I get easily grumpy on Mondays.


A friend of mine sent me a forward email, with pictures of what a typical work week look like and the picture on the left is what Monday looks like.


Everything is always harder on Monday. It's harder to get up in the morning on Mondays. Traffic in the morning (and sometimes in the afternoon AND evening) gets harder and more difficult on Mondays. It's harder to concentrate on Monday and there's always so much work to do on a Monday. All I want to do on a Monday is to turn off the alarm and go back to sleep, which is sooo not happening..


But come Friday morning, my facial expression completely changed 180 degrees. It has that air of happiness, excitement and no matter how much work was put on you that day, nothing can get you down, because it's Friday!! But I realize that in order for the day to become Friday, you have to put up with Monday, otherwise you won't get to Friday!!!
Happy Monday..... :)

Book Mooch

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I recently became a member of http://www.bookmooch.com/




Book Mooch is a an online book exchange community, where you can exchange books with members of the community around the world. It's another way for you to interact with other book lovers in the globe.


The reason that I joined Book Mooch is to share some of my book collections to people who can enjoy the books that I've read, and due to the recent influkes of To-Be-Read books, I need a lot more space on my one and only bookshelf.


Since a few days ago, I have managed to put in 52 books in my inventory, and have received requests to send out a few of them.


The way Book Mooch works is by points system. You can earn points by doing the following:

1. You'll get 0.1 points for every book you entered into the inventory

2. You'll also get points for sending books. 3 points if you're sending the book outside of your country and 1 point if you're sending it to someone in your own country


You can then use your point to mooch a book that you like from members of the Book Mooch community. You need 1 point if you mooch the book from your country and 2 points if you mooch it from someone in another country.


So, if you're a book lover who may have some books that you're not going to read again and have no space on your shelf to keep it anymore, Book Mooch is a great site for you to share some of those books.


Lazy Sunday

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What better way to enjoy a lazy Sunday than to curl up with a good book, accompanied by a steaming cup of good coffee while listening to soft jazz music in the background? Sundays are almost always a lazy day for me. I don't tend to go out of the house on Sundays, preparing for what lays ahead in the next busy 5 weekdays.

My favorite thing to do on a Sunday is to read a book. I have a lot of to be read books and it feels like it would take a lifetime to finish them, but I'm happy with it.

Another way to enjoy a lazy Sunday (if I have to go out of the house) is to make a trip to the bookstore. Luckily, the largest and most complete English bookstore in my town is in a mall near my house. I can spend hours and hours in the bookstore, browsing and seeing what other people buy in the bookstore, and of course at the end of the trip I came out with a book or two (or sometimes more LOL).

As for today, I am enjoying re-reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for the second time. It's as good as reading it the first time and even better I think. So, for now, I'm going to make a cup of coffee and curl up with my book and hope that Sunday doesn't end too soon.

Happy Sunday reading everyone..