Yippeeee! The Girl with Dragon Tattoo has been made into a film! I absolutely love this series and have just started the third in the trilogy today. If you haven’t read these books yet – YOU MUST! They were some of my favourite reads of 2009.
The film is out in the UK in March and I will definitely be buying tickets for that.
This book is amazing, incredible, breathtaking. It was recommended to me and once I started it I was barely able to put it down. This book earned a place in my top 5 books of all time and deservedly so.
The story starts with a man in his car at traffic lights who goes suddenly blind. He is helped home by a stranger, who a few hours later also goes blind. Within a few days the blindness has spread round half the city and also those afflicted are herded up by the government into a disused mental assylum and left alone. The wards quickly become overrun with filth and chaos ensues. In the middle of this, though, we get to know a handful of characters very well and it is really their story that we follow through the neverending days, lack of food and riots. The whole story is told through long paragraphs of uunbroken text. There are no quotation marks, hardly any punctuation and none of the characters are given names.
I admit to being concerned that I would find it difficult to overcome the lack of punctuation, but for commas and fullstops, and the lack of names (characters are referred to in such ways as the girl with dark glasses, the boy with the squint etc) but not only was it very easy to get used to this it actually added to the story. Also, although the characters don’t have names, I found myself identifying with and caring about these characters far more than I have done in other books as Saramago writing drags you in and you find yourself unable to let go. It’s as though I was “there”. Genius!
If you read nothing else this year, make it this. It is astounding.
What a quirky little book this is! I had great fun reading it. It even has its own website – yeah it’s aimed at teenagers but I still had a blast reading it.
Invisible I is the first book in The Amanda Project series. It starts with three pupils – Callie, Hal and Nia who are all in the same grade but have nothing in common – being summoned to the Principals office and accused of knowing where Amanda Valentino has disappeared to. They all claim ignorance to even knowing Amanda but it turns out that they had all been picked as “guides” for Amanda when she joined the school and nobody else knew about their friendships with the quirky, independent Amanda.
Although Callie, Hal and Nia previously had nothing to do with each other, especially Callie who was a member of the I-Girls (think Mean Girls), they find themselves teaming up to find out what happened to their secret friend, Amanda Valentino. Who was she? The plot thickens as they discover that they had all been told different things by her (where she was from, where she lived etc). They all discover that Amanda had each given them an animal totem that represented who they are too.
This first book in the series is narrated by Callie Leary, who has major problems of her own and is also trying to cope with the disappearance of her own Mum as well as her friend. I believe that the second book is narrated by Hal (which leaves me to guess that there will be a third by Nia). In this first book Hal’s younger sister, Cornelia, sets up a website called The Amanda Project to help them find out where she is. This website actually exists and is great fun. I did the totem test and it turns out that my totem is a Raven (which means I am an intellec – oh yeah!!). Also, the book itself has the cutest illustrations in the pages:
Amanda's totem is a coyote
I did really like this book and will definitely pick up the next ones in the series. Have fun!
Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Boof and I am a bookaholic. I have a very serious book-buying habit that I have yet to find a cure for (phew!). In this blog I read, review and discuss books - the good, bad and the downright ugly. I love all books and read from most genres. All reviews are my own thoughts and feelings about a book. I am not a literary critic so all a book needs to do to get a rave review is make me happy and glad that I've read it. Simples!
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