After the First Death

This is the second time I’ve written a review for this book because my mum thought I didn’t understand the book. So now that it has been explained to me the parts that did not make sense to me before now adds to the general awfulness of the book. We have three main storytellers or four. It’s kinda hard to explain. 


Anyway the story focuses on three points of view during a terrorist hostage situation. The first is Miro the terrorist. I am supposed to feel pity towards him but after a while all I am thinking is

“Dude, get sniped”

He is just so sick in the head and his decisions and logic make me want to throw the book in the fire.

Then there was Kate, the bus driver. This girl is the only reason I did not throw this book into the fire. She acts like someone would in her situation and her logic is sound and most importantly she is actually well written. I can picture her very well in my mind. She is the only pro of this book.

And then we have Ben. The most pointless, useless annoying character, who is not supposed to be all of these things, I have ever read. He spends half the time he is given moaning about how he is afraid of his dad and the other half moaning about how this one random girl didn’t like him. He deserves that torture he had to endure. Then there was the sniper thing. The whole time I was thinking

“Please snipers just shoot the bad guys and end this book. It says that they go out in the open a lot. Just kill them. Please.”

There was also Ben’s dad who I give the same description as Ben. Just replace the word pointless with moronic.

4/100 for plot holes and Ben.                

The Hobbit

The Hobbit

This was one of the books in this challenge that was much more to my liking. Unfortunately my brand new game Skyrim (EPIC!) had arrived and a lot of my spare time was going into that. But I finished the book all the same and managed to enjoy it as normal. I really enjoy the sci fi and fantasy genre and this book was not a let down to its relations.

The story focuses on a group of fourteen, thirteen dwarves and a hobbit. The hobbit Bilbo Baggins is the hero of the story and discovers many things about himself and Middle Earth on his journey to the lonely mountain to claim the treasure of Smaug the last of the great dragons.

My favourite character in this story is Gollum. When he talks to himself and how he says it, he creeps you out to no end. He and Bilbo have a competition where they take turns to tell riddles and whoever cannot answer the others riddle first, loses.

All the characters in this book are brilliant the story is fantastic and the ending is well written. I hope everyone who reads the book enjoys it as much as I did 99.9/100             

Wild Card 1

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

This was a very hard book to read because everything was described at a very different pace to what I am used to. For example in many action scenes the author is describing the scene as if it is a poem. Another thing that made it hard to understand were the way the characters talked and expressed themselves, I had to reread many pages to even comprehend what was going on.

While I know that this book inspired many other stories such as the Hulk, the fact is, is that I couldn’t find that story in the jumble of words. But in the end I got the story out and thought it was really good. I am going to give it 59/100.        

Jay Writes - 

Luke chose to cash in the first of his wild cards rather than read I Capture The Castle.  I think this was a good choice - I love Dodie Smith's book but I am not an adventure-loving 12 year old boy.

We chose Jekyll and Hyde as a replacement because, as Luke observed above, this is one of the most influential horror stories we know.  From episodes of Scooby Doo to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and beyond, Luke's seen cartoons and films inspired by Jekyll and Hyde.  Reading the source material is a cool thing to have done.

Revisiting The Challenge

Jay Writes -
The more eagle-eyed among you (or anyone who's looked at the masthead lately) will spot that Luke's 50 book challenge was to read and review them by Christmas, and it's now the end of January. So what's the story, morning glory?
Luke was really upset not to have finished the list in time. He's tried so hard and persevered with some books he'd hated - as well as those he loved - instead of reading his normal style of books. It was so dispiriting to have read 41 (and reviewed 39 of them) but not achieve his goal.
I told him not to worry: do what students and professionals have been doing for centuries when faced with a deadline ... request an extension.
Before we started this project, there were loads of books we were unfamiliar with on the list and we weren't entirely sure what we were getting ourselves into.  Now we've had a look at what Luke's achieved (which I hope you'll agree is LOADS) and what is feasible for him to achieve in the coming months and we've made some changes.
1. Timescale - Michael Gove's comment, which sparked this whole thing, was to read them over a year. So, the challenge will run until the end of March, a year from starting it.
2. Substitutions - There are some books on the list that Luke has really hated.  In general, they've been an unhappy combination of a literary style that doesn't suit him and a subject matter he doesn't care about.  To give him 3 wild cards seemed fair.  He could chose 3 books from the list that he really couldn't face and swap them with books his dad and I agreed would be suitable alternatives
3. Tolkien  - The original list featured The Hobbit and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy as one choice.  Luke ploughed through over half of The Fellowship Of The Rings with little enjoyment. We agreed, in the face of more elvish poetry than one could shake a stick at, to go with just reading The Hobbit. That's still 400 pages and a rollicking good read to boot.  We'll leave LOTR til he's a little older.

Luke's made a good start. He's reviewed the 2 books he'd read before Christmas and he's tackled one of the book he was most dreading. He's also a fair way through The Hobbit. He's got 8 books to do in 8 weeks, which will be hard, but I've got faith in him.
And anyway, he played a Wild Card to ditch Little Women, so I know he can do this!

Swallows and Amazons

I cannot say with all honesty that I was looking forward to reading this book. It was big, it was in that time where everyone is perfectly delightful and worst of all it had that thing where instead of writing tomorrow like a normal person they write to-morrow with doesn't make any SENSE! But as it turns out it wasn’t that bad. 

How were the characters? OK. How was the storyline? OK. How was the ending? OK. 

If someone asked me “Hey Luke can you sum up the quality of swallows and amazons in one word?” I would reply “Eh” The book overflows with mediocrity. Nothing is noticeably horrible yet nothing makes me fill with happiness or burst out laughing. 

This is the kind of book that you read when you just got nothing better to do. I hope that in future this book will mean more to me but for now it will just sit on my shelf until I lie on the floor groaning with boredom. 50/100.             

Carry On Jeeves

The Jeeves and Wooster series is a fantastic set of small stories written by PG Wodehouse about a rich man named Bertie Wooster and his new butler Jeeves and their experiences in New York and London. 

These stories are very entertaining and interesting. The character design is excellent, the story lines are great and the made up words that the author uses are really weird and yet very good. But while the made up words are funny they really have to said out loud in order to understand them. 

As well as that there is also the continuing joke that Jeeves always throws away one of the items of clothing that Bertie has. At first it was pretty funny but after that it got a little repetitive. 

Over all it is agood book with funny jokes and strange words but to really get the feel of the book you have to read it aloud. 79/100           

how to be topp

I found how to be topp:
stupid, insane, badly spelt, really not funny, boring, ridiculous, brainless, deficient, dense, dim, doltish, dopey, dull, dumb, foolish, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, ill-advised, imbecilic, inane, indiscreet, insensate, irrelevant, laughable, ludicrous, meaningless, mindless, moronic, nonsensical, obtuse, pointless, puerile, rash, senseless, simpleminded, slow, sluggish, stolid, stupefied, thick, thick-headed, trivial, unintelligent, unthinking and moronic. 

I must thank thesaurus.com for the majority of these words.

I HATE THIS BOOK EVEN MORE THAN THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, AUTHOR? WHY DID YOU MAKE ME READ THIS? DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE!

 Ok, taking deep breaths. Listen people: this book is terrible! It tries to be funny but it isn’t. Curse It! The little rich brat telling the story cannot spell. The bad spelling is supposed to be a joke but when he does it I just think “?” All Molesworth does is say weird stuff about his posh school for boys and pretends he is a spaceman/cowboy/hero. What kind of a storyline is that? In order to even understand this book I would have to be in the upper class 5 generations ago.  Makes stupid jokes and has a horrible story line. For pure stupidity and suckiness this book is cursed with
0/100.