Movies and Book Reviews

I signed up for Amazon Prime. I have one free month before I take the plunge.  $79 gets to streaming of movies (older) and TV shows.  Not unlike Netflix streaming. But now they have the Lending Library, from Amazon.  You can borrow one book a month and keep it as long as you like.  I thought it would be worth $79 for the year to give it a shot.  I already have the Roku box for my Netflix streaming, and I can watch the Amazon streaming on that too.

I plan to buy the Kindle Fire sometime next year.  My Kindle, though still working, is just getting old.  I have a Nook too, but as much as I read, I really do need them all.

This weekend I officially start watching my Holiday Movies.  I have a few Thanksgiving movies to watch, some of them are actually re-watches, but I liked them the first time, so I want to watch them again.  “A Family Thanksgiving” and “An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving” are on the list.  After a few hours of cleaning the house (tidying up for Thanksgiving) I am going to do nothing but watch movies.

I finally got “Lost December” by Richard Paul Evans from the library, they took forever to get it in.  No not really, in actuality, it came out later than usual.  His books usually come out in early October, this one came out in later.  But I was one of the first requesters, so I got it. That should take me a minute to read.  It is too early to use it for any Christmas reading challenges, but I don’t care. I read all of his Christmas books, whenever I get them, and that is usually October or November.  And since there is always a waiting list, I don’t have a choice.

Most Christmas books aren’t very long, so I would like to say I’ll get through one every other week in between my other reading.  And the fact that “11/22/63” by Stephen King is coming out on November 8^th, it might take up much of my time as it is 960 pages long.

Nano started four days ago.  And as of now, I’m on track.  1,667 words a day is all that is needed to make it to the endon November 30^th.  I hope to be done before then, however, I am not as ahead as I usually am. I am literally right on track.  But I will finish this year. Last year I didn’t even participate.

REVIEWS:

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

I read this because it was long listed for the Booker Prize.  The synopsis sounded interesting to.

Lying in front of Harrison Opuku is a body, the body of one of his classmates, a boy known for his crazy basketball skills, who seems to have been murdered for his dinner…

I thought this book was pretty awful. I have to say, I haven’t disliked a book in a long time.  It is told from the point of an eleven year old boy. Which in itself is a turn off for me.  However, I’ve read books narrated by young people, “Room” by Emma Donoghue comes to mind, and it was fantastic.  There was something about the language this boy used. It wasn’t endearing to me.  When the boy cursed, the writer would use f----- instead of spelling out the whole word. What was the purpose of that?  He may have been eleven, but a curse is a curse and if he said it, write it.  I also felt the protagonist seemed a lot younger than eleven.  He was talking about super heroes and such.  I think back to when my son was eleven and my daughter even, and they seem more mature than that.  Basically this book didn’t grab me until literally the last two pages.  Then it got good, and then it ended.

The most interesting parts to read were when the Pigeon talked. This was some of the most fluid and captivating language I’ve ever read.  I don’t know what happened with the rest of this book, it was a mess.  I give this 1.5 out of 5 stars.

The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

I found this book through Pigeon English if you can believe it.  Some how, this book came up in my search for Booker List books. It is not a British book, but it sounded good so I gave it a shot.

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire , teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again.  For seventeen-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with her own home, every day.  Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world….

I LOVED this book.  The synopsis does not even do it justice. There is no way they could put all that happens in this book into a short blurb.  This girls parents are absolutely whacked, her aunt has a secret, the guy she works for has a secret, the kids in her school tease her about the way she talks, she’s worried about a serial killer….OMG, how does she manage?

This was a super book.  I highly recommend.  I gave this 5 out of 5 stars.