Archive for the ‘Reading level: age 12 and up’ Category

Review: Arrival/The Story Of Your Life

Sunday, November 20th, 2016

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Following are my thoughts about the movie, Arrival.

Despite my efforts, it’s possible that reading this post will spoil the movie for you. I’m not intending to, but would hate if I did …

So, maybe, watch the movie, or read the novella The Story Of Your Life by Ted Chiang before you read further? Watching the film and especially reading the novella – well worth your while.

By the time I turned 10, I could distinguish between the dreams that were predictive and the ones of that are mere processing.

It’s not as if those early portents were of much consequence.

The structure of those early Knowings was part of their message.

Every one of those early dreams would begin with me in a place I’d never been in before.

First, I’d see every detail of my surroundings, as if the camera were panning around the place so I’d remember it when next I saw it. It was as if the Universe were announcing, “Stay turned for the following important Message.

But then what would come next would not seem to me to be an important message at all. In the dream, I’d participate in an innocuous conversation with someone, sometimes someone I already knew, sometimes not.

Sometimes, the conversation would be a disagreement, but it was not usually something I cared about very much, in the dream at least. Usually, I had very little context. These messages were not very long – maybe a minute or two of talk at most after the scene had been set.

Despite my resentment that the Universe was instructing me to store such a ridiculously uninteresting tableau, I would remember these Messages.

Then, sometime later – a day, week, month, or year later – the exact conversation that I’d dreamed would take place in my waking life in precisely the place I dreamed it would. Every word that I’d dreamed would be spoken. Every item I’d dreamed of would be on every shelf; every leaf would tremble just as it did in the dream.

Every time one of my dreams played out in my real life, I wondered, at the end of its reiteration, if I should tell the person I was talking with that I had already had the conversation we’d been having. Usually, I didn’t. Once in a while, if I were talking with someone I knew would just honor my honesty and not argue with me, I’d say something like, “You know, I dreamed this conversation a few weeks ago. I was thinking of trying to deliberately deviate from the script I dreamed, but felt bound to relive it as the dream instructed me to.” What would you do if you were talking with an 8-year old who told you something like this, or even a 20-year old? You’d move on to other topics, wouldn’t you?

Much later on, some of my dreams would predict real, consequential events in my life. These dreams would be less specific as to exact location and words spoken. After all the dreams, all the training, the Universe knew I was familiar with the drill.

In these later dreams, I’d dream the thing happening and Know it would happen and that I could not stop it. In these cases, when I’d startle awake from the dream, I’d usually tell the person I was with what I’d dreamed would happen. And we would agree, because we were grown-ups, that I could not renege on my commitment on the basis of the dream.

So, for example, on the morning I awoke to lightning flashing after a dream in which I was a passenger in a car that crashed on a wet, windy road in Princeton Junction, NJ, I got on the train that took me to Princeton Junction (should I have canceled the trip), seated myself in the passenger seat (should I have insisted upon driving), my mother driving, and the car was hit head-on by an idiot who took a curve too wide and totaled it (should I have suggested an alternate route?).

As we sat on the side of the road, I did NOT tell me mother I had known since I’d awoken that we would not be driving in that car ever again.

Needless to say, I am not good at sleeping. But now, my Messages don’t only come in dreams. Often, I just Know things that will happen. And, as even the Greeks have told us, the world does not appreciate hearing dire predictions, and resent people who say “I told you so.”

Knowing things without any basis for Knowing them is, if anything, even worse than dreaming them. In particular, with close family and friends, I often Know what will happen (sometimes very specifically) as soon as they describe some path they are considering. It is only rarely that I tell them what I Know.

There’s a movie out now. I think it will not be in theatres for long. It’s called Arrival, and it’s based on a novella called “The Story Of Your Life” by Ted Chiang that I recognized as a Message from the Universe when I first read it in around 2002.

The first time I saw Arrival, I went alone to a free Women Who Code showing. With my foot in a cast, I walk slowly and I got into the showing 15 minutes late.

Although I enjoyed the film, I felt that if I had not read the story first, I would not have been able to understand it. But I thought that maybe this was because I’d missed the beginning.

So, last week, I dragged my husband and daughter with me to see it again, beginning to end this time.

Turned out that DH, who has a terrifying ability to grok any movie plot no matter how confused, understood every single thing about Arrival.

My daughter, who is brilliant in general and a very savvy watcher of movies, was indeed confused. Also, I misunderstood when I thought she had asked me what exactly Arrival was about, and when I told her, she was extremely miffed with me.

Given its thoughtful pace and meditative mood, my feeling is that Arrival is not going to be a blockbuster. But it’s a film that adult children ought to take their parents to. The kids are unlikely to get it; the parents will on first watch.

Then, you all, read the novella. The novella avoids a lot of the silliness of the movie and gives the complete Message.

(Based on my recent Knowings, the endings of both the movie and the story feel inappropriately optimistic, but then Chiang was writing just after 9/11 and before the Iraq Invasion, when the world was a very different place.)

In this very cool piece, a linguist reality-checks the process Amy Adams’ character used to learn the alien’s language.

Book review: Song of the Lark

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

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Author:Willa Cather
Reading Level (Conceptual):Children 12 and up
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:Fiction
Year of publication:1915

I am always blown away when a novel that is nearly 100 years old speaks to me as compellingly as Song of the Lark did. The story of Thea Kronborg, one of many children in a family

Recommended.

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Book review: Going Postal

Monday, March 21st, 2011

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Author:Terry Pratchett
Reading Level (Conceptual):Children 12 and up
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2004

This book is super satirical, funny, and enjoyable. The main character is an ex-thief who ends up working in the government as the Postmaster.

I just love how Pratchett mercilessly mocks how stupid and horrible people can be, and still makes this into a great book, and is able to slip in some big moral problems.

Very enjoyable if you love highly satirical, sarcastic, and just plain WEIRD.

-- Fizzy


In this particular visit to Pratchett's confusing city of Ankh-Morpork, we meet Moist von Lipwig. Moist, once a petty criminal, has been hand-picked by Lord Vetinari to be head of the city's postal service. Hilarity ensues.
As with most of Pratchett's novels, it's not the plot that counts. For example, here just in passing, is how Pratchett builds us a time-machine. It is slightly rickety, but it does move the plot along:

"I never learned jommetty, sir. Bit of a hole in my understanding, all that stuff about angles and suchlike. But this, sir, is all about pie."

"Like in food?" said Moist, drawing back from the sinister glow.

"No, no, sir. Pie like in jommetry."

"Oh, you mean pi, the number you get when," Moist paused. He was erratically good at math, which is to say he could calculate odds and currency very, very fast. There had been a geometry section in his book at school, but he'd never seen the point. He tried, anyway.

"It's all to do with . . . it's the number you get when the radius of a circle . . . no, the length of the rim of a wheel is three and a bit times the . . . er . . ."

"Something like that, sir, probably, something like that," said Groat. "Three and a bit, that's the ticket. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson said that was untldy, so he designed a wheel where the pie was exactly three. And that's it, in there."

"But that's impossible!" said Moist. "You can't do that? Pi is like . . . built in. You can't change it. You'd have to change the universe."

"Yes, sir. They tell me that's what happened," said Groat calmly. "I'll do the party trick now. Stand back, sir."

Groat wandered out into the other cellars and came back with a length of wood.

"Stand further back, sir," he suggested, and tossed the piece of wood on top of the machine.

The noise wasn't loud. It was a sort of slop. It seemed to Moist that something happened to the wood when it went over the light. There was a suggestion of curvature. Several pieces of timber clattered onto the floor, along with a shower of splinters.

"They had a wizard in to look at it," said Groat. "He said the machine twists just a little bit of the universe so pi could be three, sir, but it plays hob with anything you put too near it. The bits that go missing get lost in the . . . space-time-continuememememem, sir. But it doesn't happen to the letters, because of the way they travel through the machine, you see. That's the long and short of it, sir. Some letters came out of that machine fifty years before they were posted."

"Why didn't you switch it off?"

"Couldn't, sir. It kept on going like a siphon. Anyway, the wizard said if we did that, terrible things might happen! 'Cos oh er, quantum, l think."

"Well, then, you could just stop feeding it mail, couldn't you?"

"Ah, well, sir, there it is," said Croat, snatching his beard. "You have positioned your digit right on the nub, or crust, sir. Nyle should've done that, sir, we should've, but we tried to make it work for us, you see. Oh, the management had schemes, sir. How about delivering a letter in Dolly Sisters thirty seconds after it had been posted in the city center, eh? Of course, it wouldn't be polite to deliver mail before we'd actually got it, sir, but it could be a close-run thing, eh? We were good, so we tried to be better . . ."

And, somehow, it was all familiar.

Moist listened grimly. Time travel was only a kind of magic, after all. That's why it always went wrong.

That's why we're postmen, with real feet. ... Come to that, it was why farmers grew crops and fishermen trawled nets.

Oh, you could do it all by magic, you certainly could. You could wave a wand and get twinkly stars and a fresh-baked loaf. You could make fish jump out of the sea already cooked. And then, somewhere, somehow, magic would present its bill, which was always more than you could afford.

-- Emily

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Going Postal

Book review: The Blue Girl

Monday, June 14th, 2010

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Author:Charles de Lint
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction

This is a book that can be placed under the category of "Urban Fantasy" : fairies and other fantasy creatures running around modern day cities...

Picked this up as a quick read. Not gripping per say, but interesting.


It's about a girl who befriends a ghost and then becomes tangled up in the inner workings of the hidden fantasy world. I thought that this was a stand alone book, and have not read the 14 previous books, which I just learned existed, so it is definitely a fun fast read for those who enjoy fantasy.

--Fizzy


If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Blue Girl, The

Book review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Monday, April 26th, 2010

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Author:Muriel Barbery
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction

This book is remarkable, in that with every page I read, I was more captivated.

For one thing, the author tells the story in a very interesting way: The story is narrated by two very different, but also very similar, characters. One is a 12 year old genius and the other is a 50-something year old concierge in the fancy hotel she lives in.

So that's cool, but the writing style is what really got to me. Barbery gets very deep into some philosophical questions, that at many points I found confusing at first, but once I got into my "elegance of the hedgehog mood", I really enjoyed it.

The way she uses language is just so PRETTY that I easily got sucked in. My only warning is that the ending is super surprising, although very satisfying nonetheless. I had to wait awhile to write my review because a) I didn't know what to say, and b) The ending got me pretty emotional, because the characters were so believable (I was almost crying on the bus when I finished it).

-- Fizzy

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Book review: Among Schoolchildren

Monday, January 18th, 2010

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Author:Tracy Kidder
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:Non-fiction
Year of publication:1990

My first comment on this book read: "So far I am really captivated by this book, which is interesting because I didn't really expect to like it so much..."

This feeling lasted for the entire book. The writing style pulled me in so much that the story didn't even matter, although it is really cool as well. Kidder basically shadowed a fifth grade class in a poor, rundown, public school for an entire school year and wrote about the experience.


He really got to know the teacher (Mrs. Zajac) and her students and so the reader really knows them by the end too. The difficulties that Mrs. Zajac encounters with teaching the kids range from students three years behind, to shyness, to racism.

Great book, I recommend it for anyone. (5 stars)

--Fizzy


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Book review: Feed

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

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Author:M.T. Anderson
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction-dystopian

This review seems like a spoiler, but it really gives nothing away, at all...

This book really got me worried about how horrible human beings are and what we're going to do to the world... It gave me a very depressing feeling while and after reading. It is set in the (near??) future, and most people are basically controlled by their "feeds" implanted directly in their brains, which are used mostly as an excuse to constantly show them thousands of advertisements. I guess the ending is supposed to be a little hopeful, in that the main character is considering fighting the feed, when he sees its awful power over humanity, but... I think hopeful is not a word that anyone can truthfully apply to this book.


The writing style was very distracting at first, because it is VERY informal. I will explain with a quote: "I was like trying to sleep for the last few minutes of the flight, because... when we're goin hard i get real sleepy real easy, and I didn't want to be null for the unettes on the moon, at the hotel, if any of them were youch."

SO: Interesting. Very cool. Spooky. Makes you think. But definitely not cheerful. At all.

--Fizzy


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Book review: A Step From Heaven

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

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Author:An Na
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2003

I'm not sure how to rate this book, because the narration ranges from a five-year-old's perspective to that of an 18-year-old one. This is really interesting, but leaves most of the book as a very easy, lower-level read. However, this story about abuse and immigration is intense and scary.

Yung and her family emigrated from Korea when she was five to find a better life. But her dad ended up drinking and life got very hard trying to keep their heritage while living in America...

--Fizzy


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Book review: Graceling

Friday, January 1st, 2010

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Author:Kristin Cashore
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2009

This is a super fast-paced, easy read, which was great since that was what I had expected. The book is about a girl, Katsa, who is "graced", gifted with a special talent that no-one else has... She basically has to save the world, and on the way lots of other exciting things happen too.

I was very satisfied by this book, it was a fun read, and best of all, it's a stand-alone book, so I don't HAVE to go finish the series.

Note: There are some very explicit sex scenes in this book, even though the book is labeled "young readers".

-- Fizzy


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Book review: My Sister’s Keeper

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

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Author:Jodi Picoult
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2004

I am not very satisfied with the ending to this book. The whole thing is very sad, and Picoult just HAD to add one more horrible twist... ANYway, this book is good, but as I said, horribly depressing, as you may expect from a book about cancer. The idea is that 13-year-old Anna has always been just a vessel of bodyparts to contribute to her leukemic sister for various surgeries, and she decides to sue her parents so she doesn't have to donate a kidney.

The book is narrated by different people, including Anna and her parents, so it gives the reader a nice mix of perspectives. It gets a little bit mushy at times, and is full of tears and yelling and stress, but I really couldn't put it down to finish my math homework til I was done.

Note: Definitely a "mature" book, couple brief sex scenes, swearing...



-- Fizzy

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