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Post by Chao on May 21, 2010 15:21:33 GMT -5
Looks like all those business trips which I am suddenly faced with are really good for the Reader's Challenge. Finished "The White Queen" by Philippa Gregory on the flight to Warsaw and bought/started "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver on the flight back home. It's the second non-fiction book by Penguin which I bought this year, so perhaps I should check out their whole program
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Post by M is for Morphine on May 21, 2010 17:36:04 GMT -5
Looks like all those business trips which I am suddenly faced with are really good for the Reader's Challenge. Finished "The White Queen" by Philippa Gregory on the flight to Warsaw and bought/started "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver on the flight back home. It's the second non-fiction book by Penguin which I bought this year, so perhaps I should check out their whole program Oh, Three Cups of Tea looks really interesting. You'll have to let us know how it is!
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Post by Chao on May 31, 2010 15:50:06 GMT -5
Not yet two weeks and I finished "Three Cups of Tea". And it is a great book which I never regretted buying/reading and which I can definitely recommend as non-fiction book. Truth be told, had I not read "Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad" in April and had the shop at the airport in Warsaw had a larger collection of English books, I might never have even considered buying "Three Cups of Tea". I was more than hesitant to read about a region which (western) world news had stamped as home of 'Muslim based' terrorism, though of course logic told me, that certainly not everybody living in this region is a (potential) terrorist, rather that the majority is ordinary people and that like with any war you have soldiers fighting and civilians suffering. But subconscious feeling wanted me to act like a small child: What I don't see, what I don't know can't be really real. A rather ostrich-like mentality. Or as the book states plainly as one chapter titel: "The Enemy is Ignorance". And though the originator of this phrase meant his own kinsmen in northern Pakistan when saying this, I guess the phrase also can apply to the 'western' world.
The book tells the story of people who are thirsting for education, as they see that education is a way to better their circumstances. It needs training to be a health worker or nurse, it needs training to be a teacher, it needs training to be an engineer to build a bridge that will connect a village with the rest of the world. That education brings honour to a village and especially education for girls strengthens a community. But though government might promise schools, even to remote parts of a country which are as far away from the capital as possible, money is always slow to travel and fast to trickle away. Add to this the conflict of Pakistan with its eastern neighbour India and you can imagine how little money in this area is really spent on schools. And then there are fundamentalists, willing to sponsor religious schools where boys can obtain some kind of (much biased) education. It is not that the majority of people don't know right from wrong, they do, it is rather a lack of opportunity, which can result in their dreams of a better life through education be exploited.
In this wild mix is now thrown a single American, a mountaineer who had tried to summit K2, taking a wrong turn on his way back, only to find the path his life was meant to take: To find a village where he can heal from his experiences on the mountain, a wise old man who teaches him the valuable lessons of letting life dictate the pace and not the other way round, and a prospect for his own future - building schools to offer a balanced education to the children, especially the girls, of northern Pakistan and eventually northern Afghanistan.
Of course there are struggles as it is a true story about true people with true faults as well as true dreams. It is a story of sacrifices, it is a story of gaining new perspectives, it is a story of triumph. And it is definitely worth reading.
If you consider purchasing this book online, visit www.threecupsoftea.com first as it provides a link to amazon.com, Books A Million and Indiebound where, if purchased this way, it will generate up to 7% of proceeds to benefit Greg Mortenson’s non-profit foundation, Central Asia Institute (CAI) (without making your book one cent more expensive for you).
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Post by Deleted on Jun 4, 2010 21:25:40 GMT -5
Three Cups of Tea sounds like an absolutely amazing book, Nifen. Is it written like most nonfiction (rather dry and uninteresting), or is there enough character and skill in the writing that it reads as beautiful as it sounds?
Travel has also helped me to get a couple books read, and I was very pleased with both. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was a witty and extravagant delight, and it was even more amazing to read having recently seen both movie versions of the story (neither of which compare to the book, but with how much Tim Burton's sounds instead like Through the Looking Glass, I'm eager to read that one now as well). I recommend it to everyone, without a doubt, especially to those who love sheer randomness and child-like curiosity. And even though it is a children's tale, there's still plenty in it to pleasure people of all ages.
The second book I read was Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. It's marked as teen fiction and was a very easy read, taking me only a little more than a week to read, and it, too, is simply delightful. It follows the story of Paul, a teenager caught in as much drama as on any TV show, but this drama, although genuine, is certainly not contrived. On the contrary, it feels closer to truth in this zany world created by Levithan than most drama on TV these days. Paul's forced to struggle with teenage crushes and life-long friends and overbearing parents--and as a gay man myself, I can attest that every issue touched upon is done so with such sincerity and such truth that if not for the craziness that abounds in this story, it could easily be the life of any gay teenager in today's world. I recommend this story to anyone interested in quirky love stories and stories about true friendship; gay or straight, you'll be glad you read this book.
...And I suddenly feel like I sound like the Reading Rainbow. >.<
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Post by Rikku on Jun 5, 2010 1:10:30 GMT -5
Oh, hey, David Levithan! =D He spoke at this thing I went to a week or two ago. He was quite a compelling speaker, actually, wry and amusing, enough so to make me immediately rush to buy one of his books. >.>; Will Grayson Will Grayson, by him and John Green, which I got because I liked the name and the concept, and because I haven't read many collaborative books, or that many young adults books that aren't all fantasyish. It was decent, with some nice sweet bits, but I felt vaguely unsatisfied after reading it. I'm not sure why; the ending was okayish. Maybe I'm just not that fond of the genre. xD I should seek out some of his other books, I guess.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 5, 2010 1:31:14 GMT -5
I'm suddenly very jealous of you, Rikku. > Nonetheless, the book I know him for is Boy Meets Boy; his others, at least, don't leave the same legacy that led me to him in the first place. No less, though, I'm interested in reading that book as well now. I've never read a collaborative book before either, at least that I can recall (oh, wait, yes, yes I have, now I remember), but that one book was an adult sci-fi piece, so I'd be interested to see other collabs as well. (:
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Post by Chao on Jun 5, 2010 15:07:49 GMT -5
Three Cups of Tea sounds like an absolutely amazing book, Nifen. Is it written like most nonfiction (rather dry and uninteresting), or is there enough character and skill in the writing that it reads as beautiful as it sounds? It is definitely not dry and uninteresting, as it portrays the people around which this story evolves. You get quotes and rewritten dialogues, making a scene come alive, as well as the facts. You can feel the anxiety of the people, especially of Greg, as he struggles to get his first school built, you grin at the triumphs, you smile at small ways to phrase things, yet which in the context are simply the most natural way to phrase things. Like 'A Village called New York'. I still have to smile at this, yet it couldn't have been called differently by that person. Or the first person to donate a huge sum of money (the person who eventually bequeathed a fortune to found the CAI), on his deathbed, seeing the photos of the first school, then grabbing his phone, calling an old friend, he hadn't seen in ages, saying: "What have you done in the last 50 years? I have built a school in the Himalaya!" Boy Meets Boy? I should look it up, as it is a genre I like to read (and sometimes write), so I should expand my horizon there, to make my story become better. ^^
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Post by Deleted on Jun 18, 2010 11:04:37 GMT -5
oh jeez. I need to read some more. D: to the LIBRARY!~
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Post by Shadaras on Jun 18, 2010 18:28:53 GMT -5
So... I just hit 30 books. As I said at the beginning of this year, not really that difficult, for me. :3
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Post by Rikku on Jun 18, 2010 21:02:51 GMT -5
=D Yay Shade!
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Post by Chao on Jun 19, 2010 3:41:48 GMT -5
Congrats Shade. ;D
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Post by collecter on Jul 13, 2010 20:52:54 GMT -5
I hope i can remember a lot of them. Here it goes
1: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever: Lord Foul's Bane 2: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever: The Illearth War 3: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever: The Power that Preserves 4: Angels and Demons 5: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 6: A Short History of Nearly Everything 7: The Ghost King 8: Mistborn : Final Empire Series 9: The Tommyknockers 10: The Hobbit 11: The Fellowship of the Ring 12: The Two Towers 13: The Return of the King 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: 21: 22: 23: 24: 25: 26: 27: 28: 29: 30:
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Post by insanepurpleone on Jul 13, 2010 22:41:52 GMT -5
I just recently finished Girl, Interuppted, which I really liked. Now I've started on Fellowship of the Ring, and am planning on reading through the whole LotR trilogy. I've tried to read it before, but never made it all the way through, so I'm hoping this time is different.
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Post by Chao on Jul 15, 2010 14:41:40 GMT -5
Good luck, Purple. I once tried it and got through more than half of it, but eventually lost the battle against two boring Hobbits and too much landscape. (Though ironically the book which preceded it, about the silly two Hobbits was perhaps the one I read fastest.) I have finished 'Boy meets Boy' (a few weeks ago actually, but forgot to update my list) and while in some parts I perhaps failed to see the extraordiness and found it at other parts just a bit over the top (especially the part about Drag Queens in school), it was a very entertaining book, which also included a few phrases I'm not likely to forget soon. Like the explanation of why one would want to blast the music one is hearing in one's car all over the neighbourhood. By describing it as 'spilling over' it becomes much less annoying and even enjoyable.
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Post by collecter on Jul 21, 2010 19:57:05 GMT -5
Update: 14. The Legacy
I will be reading the other three in the series soon.
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