Atlas Shrugged - A Bi-chapter Commentary

So far I've been reviewing books I've found on Amazon, which are usually not exactly the most popular books on Kindle. Now, however, I'm going to try to read a much bigger, much more famous book: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

I've decided that I'll give a review every two chapters for this book. They'll be short updates, and they won't stop the regular book reviews from coming in every Monday and Friday. These reviews will always be under a read-more, and they will contain spoilers. If you've read Atlas Shrugged and you want to join me in my commentary, I'd love to share this conversation with you.

That's all; I just wanted to update on a new goal of mine. 

The Paparazzi Project - Kristina Springer

Livvie Peterson thought taking Interpersonal Communications her junior year would be an easy A. But when the first assignment is given, her world flips upside down. Here’s the deal: the class is assigned a six-week project and is split into three groups— Paparazzi, Tabloid, and Celebrities. The Paparazzi follow around the Celebrities taking pictures and grabbing any kind of quotes they can. The Celebrities try to navigate being tailed on a daily basis. And the Tabloid receives all the information collected by the Paparazzi and decides what makes the weekly summary report. Sounds harmless…and it’s all just pretend anyway, right? 

Livvie Peterson has just been assigned a project - to be a part of the paparazzi.  For school, of course.  Her junior year Interpersonal Communications class's first assignment is to recreate the relationship between celebrities, paparazzi, and the tabloids.  So she follows around the selected celebrities, taking pictures, and sending them to her tabloid contact, the cute Chas, to spin several articles a week, just like regular tabloids.  It starts off innocently enough, but exactly how much can someone take their personal life being broadcasted to the school?

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Arrival (The Maddy Young Saga) - Nick Pirog

Maddy Young is dead. Or at least that's what they tell him. Imagine that when you die, you have a 1 in 3 chance of having another life; same body, same age, same place as when you died. But for Maddy, everything is not making sense. He was just a week away from his Bar exam and starting his life as a Public Defender, when he made a grand entrance into this second life of his—a place they call Two.

TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR THIS STORY:  Mentions of death and various ways to die throughout; brief rape mention, lesbophobic language and general homophobia

This story is about Madison "Maddy" Young, a young man who has died jerking off in the shower before the story has even begun.  But he doesn't find himself in your typical afterlife, but instead a facility with other people, who all have died too.  They've found themselves in a rehabilitation center in a place called Two, a world were one in three people arrive to in the afterlife.  It's just like the living world, Maddy finds, only with people who have died.  However, some things are not quite as they seem.  They surround the conspiracy of the 'Borns', people who are supposedly born in Two.

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Crying in Colour - Sally Sorrell

George definitely got off at the wrong bus-stop. Either that, or he's having a really bizarre dream. Probably both, as he wakes up in a tree with two strangely-dressed men staring up at him.

Crying in Colour is a story about modern Brit George, who lands in this medieval land one might hear about in old tales. This story combines medieval fantasy with modern wit. George plays the straight man to Lord Farley and his hodge podge crew: Oberon, the voluntary servant to Farley; Chancy, the long-haired, beautiful gentleman with an aversion to violence and bloodshed; Mackerel, a jack of all trades and his younger brother Koi; and Benjee, an Australian woman. This unlikely group bands together on a quest to find the magical Tear-Stone.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

Update

Not a review in itself, but just an update saying that I'm going to be importing my reviews from my previous blog onto here.  Not all at once, but I'll schedule them to come in about once a week.  Thanks!

Blur (Night Roamers) - Kristen Middleton

Seventeen year old Nikki and her twin Nathan have moved to Shore Lake to start over after their mother is brutally attacked. When Nikki starts seeing shadows outside of her bedroom window and hears whispers of vampires in town, she realizes that there are worse dangers than what they left behind in the big city.

TRIGGER WARNING FOR RAPE

Nikki, her mother, and her twin brother, Nathan, move to Shore Lake after her father sexually assaults and rapes her mother. However, what originally looks like a great place to at least start getting their bearings turns out far more deadly than anyone could have foreseen. A dead body the first night, and mysterious figures outside at night cause fear in both Nikki and Nathan.

My rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Botanicaust - Tam Linsey

After genetically altered weeds devastate Earth's croplands, Dr. Tula Macoby believes photosynthetic skin can save the human race. Her people single-mindedly embark on a mission to convert the cannibals roaming what's left of Earth. But when Levi, a peaceful stranger, refuses alteration, Tula doesn't think the only options should be conversion or death.

It's a futuristic, crapsack world. The earth has experienced the Botanicaust, in which foreign weeds have overtaken almost all plantlife, leaving no crops or the like for humanity. Most have resorted to cannibalism in order to survive; other humans have found a way to survive without much sustenance: by inserting chloroplasts into their skin and photosynthesizing like plants do.

In Levi's case, his community does neither. A heavily religious, tightknit town, using electric fences to keep out the dangerous weeds and the cannibals, the Holdout has been able to survive the Botanicaust. However, his son, Josef, has cystic fibrosis, and there is no way of curing it, except for maybe contacting the Fosselites, advanced people who have also survived the Botanicaust and have discovered eternal life. His journey begins when he searches for them.

Tula is a Haldanian doctor, a Conversion Psychiatrist who aids cannibals in converting to Haldanians, people with chloroplasts implanted in their system.  However, when the Burn Ops capture a person who might not actually be a cannibal, Tula takes off on an adventure that will change her life.

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars