All of John Green’s books are wonderful but this one is one of the best. It’s unique in that it is not really a love story and is more about a young boy’s journey to “seek a great perhaps” or a great life. “Looking For Alaska” is John’s first novel and has won numerous awards. Many list it as their favorite for its unique chapter styling and intelligent protagonist.
Cry, laugh, smile; that is what you will do when you read The Fault In Our Stars by John Green. John Green is my favorite author of all time. He writes the greatest young adult books I have ever read. He makes you feel like he understands you. Some adults treat teenagers or “young adults” like they are not equal and that everything they feel is silly. But John Green does not treat teenagers that way. His writing shows you that he sees all humans equally and that everyone’s feelings are valid. His writing and stories are so wonderful that adults will enjoy them as well.
A week and a half ago I went to the LA Times Festival of books with my daughter Jessica, my son-in-law Roy, and my "adopted" son Antonio. We hadn't been to one of these in years but decided to make the trek this year from the Fresno area because my daughter's favorite author, John Green, was going to be speaking there.
As I was planning our Earth Day issue, and planning to focus again this year on ebooks, it seemed a perfect time to interview Jay Hartman. Jay is one of the founders of Untreed Reads, a company that focuses primarily on ebooks, and even in their print division uses print on demand because it is more Earth friendly.
Readers of all ages understand how attached we can become to the books we love. We hang on to them for decades, rereading them over and over again whenever we feel the need to reconnect with old friends or glean inspiration. Even in this day of online reading and tablets that can store tens of thousands of titles, there's just something about a physical hard copy of a book that feels like home.
This review was inspired by a list of movies coming out in 2014 that are based on books. Having seen a few trailers for the movies on the list, I saw Winter’s Tale and thought, “That seems like a nice, romantic story–perfect to review in time for Valentine’s Day.” Based on the movie trailer, I expected an easy read, with sentimentality to rival any Nicholas Sparks books and a dash of fantasy. What I got was a 768-page mammoth of a novel by Mark Helprin that proved a very challenging, and at times frustrating, exercise of the mind.
Quite possibly the first hippie in California, eden ahbez, better known as Nature Boy, was born on April 15, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, but according to ahbez, he was adopted by a family from Kansas when he was nine years old. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, where he hung out at the raw-food restaurant and health-food store Eutropheon, on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.
Richard Kadrey, best known for his Sandman Slim urban fantasy series, enters the world of YA fiction with Dead Set. Not a completely unexpected thing, as YA fiction has become an incredibly popular genre, with almost every popular urban fantasy author writing a YA novel. However, Dead Set strangely does not read or feel like a YA adult novel. It doesn’t focus on a lot of the current YA tropes such teenage romance, someone finding their destiny and or trying to save the world. Kadrey avoids these trappings by making Dead Set all about dealing with grief– specifically the grief of the teenage character, Zoe, who is still mourning the loss of her father.
KRL reviewed a lot of really good and great books in 2013, but we decided to give our best shot at choosing our top 5 of the year--some of us cheated a little, but here are our choices! And if you are an author who is not on the list, take heart--like I said, they were all good books!
Lony Ruhmann is one of those rare people who decided to nurse an adopted pup with distemper back from the brink. Lony’s first dog, Juve, was that pup. Many people would have given up in the face of such a deadly disease, but Lony chose not to do that. Instead, he spoke, read and sang to Juve, sending reassurance that no one was going to give up on him. “Seventy-five percent of puppies diagnosed with distemper do not survive”, says Lony. “Juve did.”
