Becoming Animal

I myself never really had the gift of understanding nature. I use it for familiarity, but beyond age ten or so, I didn't really bother. This book significantly brought me closer to the great outdoors and closer to finding out, what is it that makes us human? And how are we connected to all the other animals? Why is it that we are so close to and yet so different from all of the life forms around us?
Nor did I like non-fiction that much. It was just a ton of facts and statistics that I wouldn't really need. Or so I thought.
What's in this book can really be applied to everyday life. It's not uncommon to hear a thrush singing in your backyard and wonder if you can ever understand it or think about what makes your pet attracted to you. So it's not really a bunch of boring statistics as you find in a stereotypical non-fiction book.

The cover-

My thoughts-

I think it's got an extreme amount of content (in a good way) and that you really won't understand it unless you are really into this kind of study. You'd have to be extremely passionate about anthropology (like me), sociology or ecology in order to understand the logic behind the complex theories and ideas he presents.
And honestly, the way the content is ordered seems a little off. The chapters on one topic are a bit spaced apart. The parts on materialism were broken up by parts on language. It's an interesting way of ordering chapters, but it got awfully confusing at certain parts.
To anyone who normally doesn't read very intense non fiction books, you'll probably have to sit there with a dictionary. I wrote down the vocabulary words I didn't understand and looked them up whenever I got the chance in order to get the full meaning of the text.
There are a lot of jumps in ideas. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you can just make the logic jumps and understand what he means when he references to something else, you'll be just fine.

What really made me want to read it more was that the author connects bits of the book to events in his own life that are relateable to anyone. There were two such moments that really brought the idea that what he was saying was applicable to anyone.
The first was when he detailed how lonely the house was when his daughter went to Belgium to meet her grandparents. He said that he missed her more than ever because even though it was subtle, everything in the house had her fingerprint on it. Like the house was much more alive when his daughter was there. And that those ten days without her were like agony because the house seemed so dead.
The second moment that really made me think was when he discussed one of his kayaking trips where it was just him and the wilderness. Seeing a bunch of sea lions sitting lazily on a rock, he began to whistle loudly to get their attention. When all eyes were on him, he swayed his hands back and forth in a rhythm. They just stared at him for a while, but soon the sea lions were swaying their heads to the beat of his arms as if they understood that he was just playing with him. Soon the sea lions started to get in the water and follow his kayak because they were curious about him.

Now that I think about it, I had a similar moment of connection with an animal during one of my trips to India. My connection was with a crow as I was getting down from the terrace on the house in the morning. I watched it fight with another crow over an eggshell and was debating whether it was worth or not to swing my legs over the railing on the stairs and climb on an overhang of the roof to see it closer. We just exchanged eye contact, but it regarded me as some sort of friend and flew closer, perching on the neighbor's terrace slightly out of my reach. And for a moment, I thought I could actually connect with it. I actually thought that the fact that I was a human and it was a crow were just inconveniences and that we could become companions. But then it flew away, distracted by something else and I was left alone.

These kinds of memories are priceless things that we can relate to when we see that others have similar experiences. I can definitely think of many more moments like this throughout my life that have inspired me in small ways. They all have made me look myself in the face and say "See that? That was priceless!" Even writing this review, I'm being flooded by memories that I want to write about, but then my conscious mind tells me that I don't want to bore the reader. And okay, I will listen to my conscious mind and shut up soon.

Honestly, you don't need to be a hardcore non-fiction buff in order to pull something out of this. The wording can get a bit complicated at times and some of the links he makes require a little bit of research, but almost everyone can learn something from this. That's why I recommend that you go check it out! My excuse to keep reading non-fiction! Happy Reading!

((Finally, my first non-fiction review. It wasn't too different from any of my other ones, so that's a relief. It came out much better than I thought it would. And if anyone likes this, I have yet to read his other book, Spell of the Sensuous. It covers the language portions of this book in much greater detail. When I do get it, I'll write a review ASAP! Now to read a good science fiction book and cool down from my intense rant mode.))

The Angel Factory

I never do back to back reviews because I usually have something or the other going on that same day or the next day. But I finished my homework early, practiced my instrument and currently have nothing to do. So why not write another review? It's better than many of the other things I would've done.
This book reminds me of a movie I started to watch (but stopped because it was getting too weird and too hard to understand) a week or so ago. It's a drama about an alien coming to Earth from outer space to observe humans. He finds it very hard to get accustomed to his new life of being human because it's so different from his regular life. But it is his job to report back to his planet whether this race of beings is worth becoming friends with or not. And his observations are so much like what a child would think that everyone thinks that he's insane. That's immediately what I thought of while reading this.

The cover-

Thomas Wisdom is one of the normal kids. He gets good grades at school, is pretty popular and has a loving and supportive family. What could ever go wrong with his life?

When he and his best friend Gip find a suspicious looking file on Thomas' father's computer and send it away to their deranged math teacher to decode, Thomas learns about things that he would never have known any other way.

He's actually an adopted son and his mother is still alive. This sends him out on a quest to find her and understand who he really is.

But at home, things are getting tense. When Thomas follows his parents to a strange building to see where they work, he gets thrown the weirdest curveball ever. His parents and many others in his community are "Angels", humanoid robots designed to help keep humanity on the path to peace and justice for all. They adopted him because it was their duty to acquire a human child and teach him how to be a good person.

Now the choice has come to Thomas. Should he play along with the Project like a good boy or rebel and get the life he wanted?

My thoughts-

This book did a very good job of actually making me like the unexpected plot twist. Usually I've had problems with books that throw the weird plot twist in. That's just because it makes a lot less sense once you and the main character are caught up with everything. 

Once Thomas found out where his mother was and that he was adopted, it was only natural that he'd try to find her. And also, he wasn't sure whether to believe that his "parents" were aliens or not. It took him half of the book to make up his mind on whether he would follow Gip and become his true self or follow the Project and help the weird aliens in making sure that no more humans fight.

What I found weird was that there was no clear cut ending. It just ended with Thomas seeing Gip deactivate himself (because he actually was an angel used as the demon on his shoulder) and feeling depressed because he lost his best friend. And then Thomas just moved on. The End.

He also didn't really make a clear cut decision on whether he was going to join the Project or not. He kind of wavered in both directions. For a time he said he'd join it and then later he said that he was never going to join it even if they forced him to.

But the story was very interesting and Thomas was an incredibly likeable  main character because we've all felt like he has. That the grass is always greener on the other side when we just ignore all the things that we have good that we take for granted.

((Next up will be my first ever non-fiction review! I've never done it before, so don't blame me if the style is bad and a little confusing. But I'm taking new strides and that's awesome! Happy Reading!))

Partials (Partials Sequence Book #1)

It's finally here! The New Year has begun! I guess this is my first review of the new year then! As I said in the previous one, I'll be updating a lot more frequently so you guys don't think I went off and hibernated for the winter. Although I wish I could because I don't want to go to school. Just me and my books forever and ever.
As you all now know about me, I somehow read a lot of books about the world ending. I don't know why. It just happens. Because of my now best friend introducing me to Ender's Game and the rest of that series, I began to love science fiction with a crazy passion.
And that's how I got here, reviewing a lot of science fiction stuff just because I like the themes in it and the recurring problems and solutions.

The cover-

During the Isolation Wars, a company called ParaGen provided both sides with the ultimate weapon called the Partials. They were virtually indestructible humanoid robots that only do their master's bidding. They could be outfitted with any human weapon and learn to use it in seconds. Give it a gun and enough bullets and a team of them could kill everyone in a whole city.
But as a side effect of being exposed to them, the Partials supposedly released a deadly virus called RM. It mostly affects newborn babies, taking over their bodies and killing them within days of birth. So the Senate passed the Hope Act. A law where any woman over the age of twenty and still in her child-bearing years had to become pregnant as frequently as possible. And the age limit has slowly been dropping. All in hope that one day, a child will be born immune to RM.

Kira is an apprentice to a doctor at her settlement's only hospital. She's sick and tired of just watching little babies die because they can't handle the disease. There are books and books filled with the names of babies that all have the same outcome. They die between the first day to first week. It's like they're all going nowhere in the battle against RM.
Kira has this very dangerously crazy idea that the Partials are the only hope against RM. Maybe there's something in them that can help in finding a cure. She wants to catch a Partial so she can study it and if not find the cure, learn something new about how to deal with this epidemic.
So she chooses the finest and most trustworthy team- her adopted sister Xochi and her best friend Marcus to come with her to Manhattan Island to capture a Partial and bring it back to Long Island to study.

But there is a force that has been halting their journey and it's not even on the side of the Partials.
There have been the systematic destruction of water towers, power plants and other vital resources that can only be attributed to a mysterious organization called the Voice. They want to scare the settlements into believing that the Partials aren't to blame for RM. And they couldn't be more correct.

When Kira, Xochi and Marcus bring back a live Partial, within a few days he begins to tell Kira that his species is dying too. Partials were programmed sterile, so they can't reproduce. And they were each given an expiration date. Each Partial was to live for exactly twenty years after its birth. This means that the ones programmed at the beginning of the war have already died and the others have probably five or less years to live. This makes her even more determined to find out what is the connection between RM, the Partials and humans. Whatever RM is, it's killing everything.

But once the Senate finds out that she is housing a Partial in the hospital, they give her a hard choice. Either they kill the Partial and she destroys her research or the Partial is kept in custody and they return to the way things used to be. Neither option seems particularly nice, so Kira breaks the rules and goes at it her own way.

Movie Rating- PG-13 for violence, brief bouts of strong language, some disturbing scenes

My thoughts-

The layout is very interesting. I couldn't stop reading it because this is the kind of thing I have thought about time and again. "What would humanity do if faced with extinction?" The Hope Act seems like a very logical choice, but I also would've gone about it Kira's way. Even though Samm (the Partial) would've killed them right away, he was fortunately understanding enough to help her keep both species alive.
It also shows the pros and cons of creating these kinds of super weapons. On one side, it may help win the war, but with something like RM, it could also jeopardize the entire human race.
I had gotten this book for a school thing and within the first night, I had read three quarters of the way through it. Just because the concept was so interesting.
I'm going to try and break away from this particular idea now, just because I want to expose myself to new things and not get hung up on only one idea. And I think I should have left this statement to my next review which is about a book that has a similar idea but a very different approach. And the funny thing is that I didn't even know about it when I picked up the book. I guess our minds always look for familiar things when selecting new books.

((There are two more books in the series. Ruins and Fragments.  There is also a parallel novel called Isolation which I would also like to read.))