comments on other peoples blogs

Here are the peoples blogs that I have commented on:

1/8/09: emily rose

1/8/09: kira powell

1/8/09 david erdall

1/8/09: caitlin duggan

1/8/09: emily brinkman

1/15/09: maya s

1/15/09: daria b

1/15/09: kelly thotland

1/15/09: tess r

1/15/09: brooke jones

WITHOUT A MAP POST #2

I haven't really had that much time to read lately and I wanted to finish this book before our last blog but sadly I didn't. So anyways I started reading Without A Map and it's surprisingly good. It starts off with her when she's 16 years old. She's at the beach alone reading a book when this tall, dark, handsome stud (ACTUALLY SAYS THIS IN THE BOOK) walks up and lays down next to her on her towel. He starts to ask her questions but she is speechless and can't say a word because she thinks he is so amazing. Finally after a couple of minutes of trying to talk to her he gets up and leaves with his friend Skeet. As he runs across the road he yells to her and tells her his name is Anthony. She can't stop thinking about him and in the process of a couple weeks she has seen him about 7 or 8 times. This is as far as I've gotten but it is such a good book. I thought that it would be super boring but in fact it is actually very descriptive and intriguing. The way she describes Anthony is amazing because he seems really mysterious and almost dangerous. Well he obviously is dangerous because he gets her pregnant but I haven't read that part yet!

WITHOUT A MAP

Each Christmas my mom gives me a couple books, it's not very exciting but I usually enjoy the books. This year one of the books she gave me was Without A Map by Meredith Hall. I had never heard of the book or the author before so I was interested greatly. It's a memoir which is different for me because I don't usually read  memoirs so I'm excited to start reading. The book is about Meredith who in 1965, when she was 16, got pregnant. From just reading the first couple of pages I can tell that this is going to be a very emotional book. The first chapter is called "Shunned" which is a hint. She explains how one dramatic moment changed her life completely and how she was instantly kicked out of her family, her church, her school, and her community. She was forced to leave her home in New Hampshire to live a life locked up in a house. All of this was said on the first couple of pages so I am now very excited to keep reading!

Fearless Fourteen

On the way home from Wisconsin I read the fourteenth book in the Stephanie Plum series called Fearless Fourteen. In this book Stephanie is sent to find Loretta Rizzi who robbed a liquor store because she was really thirsty. Two days later Loretta is missing and Stephanie starts to investigate. 10 years ago Loretta's brother Dom robbed a bank with several others. He went to jail for a number of years but the money was never discovered. Dom and his three other partners are now back together trying to find the money. One of the partners how ever gets greedy and starts killing off the others and captures Loretta so that Dom will have to tell him where the money is located. Turns out the money is buried under Joe Morelli's garage, who is also Dom's cousin. Also during the book Stephanie and Ranger are hired to protect a very demanding and annoying singer named Brenda. Brenda finds out that they are bounty hunters and decides to start her own bounty hunter show were she follows around Stephanie. This adds a huge amount of humor to the book. People from all over the city find out about the money buried in Joe's garage so they start digging up his yard looking for the money. Stephanie's old friend from high school, Mooner, shows up with his friend Zook and they decide they'll act as security for the house. Also Stephanie has an insane grandma that likes to wear spandex, dye her hair crazy colors, carry a gun, and open closed caskets at funerals. 

Lean Mean Thirteen

Over break my family and I packed up and drove to Wisconsin. I love car trips but they get boring so I usually read. During the car ride there I read a book called Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich, it's the thirteenth book in a series. The series is about a crazy around thirty-two year old woman named Stephanie Plum. She lives in Trenton, New Jersey and the books are about the insane and hilarious situations she gets herself into. She needs money so she becomes a bounty hunter for her cousin Vinnie. Her sidekick is Lula, a really fat former 'ho that wears really small animal print spandex. In this book Stephanie's ex husband Dickie Orr has gone missing. No one knows what happened to him or if he is dead or not. Stephanie has two men in her life, Joe Morelli who drives all of the ladies crazy and is also a plain clothes cop, and Carlos Manoso (Ranger) who is another very mysterious bounty hunter. Turns out that Dickie's partners in his law firm were trading drugs from South Africa in exchange for guns which they then sold to other countries in exchange for money. Long story short, one of the partners goes completely insane and starts killing the other partners. This series is a very comical murder mystery. Many crazy things happen which leave you laughing out loud. I would highly suggest this series for someone looking for a good laugh.

19 MINUTES POST # 6

Last night I was sitting on my bed getting ready to go to sleep, for a first it was 11:30, which I think is the earliest I've gone to bed all year, BUT then I looked down on my floor. What did I see? 19 Minutes just sitting there, I hadn't read it in awhile so I thought it was a good time. I ended up finishing the whole thing... all 137 remaining pages. I'm not even sure what I should say about the ending, I'm still so shocked. The ending makes zero sense to me and it honestly makes me mad thinking about it. Anyways, the book ended with Josie confessing that she had been the one that killed Matt instead of Peter??? At first I actually wanted to hurl the book across the room, go to sleep, and pretend I just never read that book. But of course I started thinking about it and I guess I've started to understand it a little better. 

Throughout Josie's younger years she had been best friends with Peter who was labeled a "nerd", a "freek", and a "queer". When she was in about 7th grade she became friends with the popular girls and in 9th grade Matt Royston, the popular varsity hockey player asked her out. Her life completely changed. Josie wasn't like the other popular kids but she needed so bad to fit in that she left Peter standing in the dust alone to fend for himself against the bullies. As Josie said, she wasn't strong or brave enough to be friends with Peter. I do believe that Josie and Matt loved each other. Even though Matt was verbally and physically abusive to Josie and to many others, I think that she loved him, but most of all she saw Matt as a way to be popular. There's a passage from the book that says that Josie loved Matt but she hated that she loved him. I think that she was just under so much pressure she saw shooting Matt as an escape from him, the peer-pressure, and even as a way to show Peter that she was sorry and was still deep-down inside his friend. I don't think that shooting Matt makes Josie a cold hard criminal, I think that she was just a confused girl who spent all her energy trying to be someone she was not and trying to impress everyone. I've read four of Jodi Picoult's books so I understand that her endings are extremely surprising and meant to make the reader think beyond the words on the page. This was the second best book I've ever read, the first being My Sister's Keeper. As much as I love this book I can't help but hate it at the same time. I guess this shows that not all stories end with happy endings. 

19 MINUTES POST #5

By now I think I'm quite old enough to understand the usefulness of a book mark but apparently not. Well of course when it came time to reading 19 Minutes... I couldn't remember what page I had left off at, which is extremely annoying. So I spent a good amount of time just trying to find the exact spot to start up my reading up again. While I was rereading I started to catch small details I had missed the first time. I have a tendency to read really fast because of the urge to get to the ending and find out what happens but I usually end up missing important details along the way. One very important detail that I missed reading the first time was that Peter's mother and father have a really tough relationship. It is now clear that the death of their first son, Joey, who was the golden boy and the all-american perfect son, greatly affected their relationship with Peter. At one point during the book Peter's father even makes a comment about how he wished that it had been Peter who had died not Joey. AH HA! And looks like this is where I left off before. From my new reading I learn that Peter's father hasn't been going to visit Peter in the prison like he's been telling Peter's mother. Peter's mother finds this out one day while she is visiting Peter at the prison and he makes a comment about how his father never comes. This surprises Peter's mom so the next time the dad leaves to "go see Peter" she follows him. She then discovers that the dad has been going to Joey's grave site the inter time!! I was shocked at this and almost mad at the father because I thought that it was selfish to go visit the dead son while he should be visiting the still living one. That's about all the new information that I learned so far.