Books: The Hunger Games

Our mother has been reading books with our Uncle Chichi in a sibling book club over the summer. They finished their first book recently, and we picked it up when our mother was done, and we loved it! The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is a young adult fantasy genre of book, which can frighten off some people, but not us dogs!

The Hunger Games is an exciting, enthralling book about a futuristic dictatorship community where they send two children from every city every year to compete in a fight to the death. Katniss volunteers to go for her sister, and finds herself in a more complicated situation then she ever could have expected...


Quick vote: This book was a lot of fun, a well written science fiction/romance/action novel. Pick it up!

Books: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

We have been reading a lot of incredible books lately, and haven't been very good at posting. So to make up for it, we're going to post all week about awesome books that we have loved reading lately. Enjoy!

Our mother's book club picked up the novel The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield this month, and we picked it up out of solidarity. We thought it would be a slower book to get into, but we couldn't be more wrong.

The Thirteenth Tale is an intriguing mystery about a reclusive author's hidden past. It's a story about love, loss, reading, and most of all, sisters. The author wrote about people we knew and events we had experienced first hand, telling qualities of a great author.

Quick vote: We love this book, it's awesome. We recommend it to anyone interested in a good mystery, or is looking for a great book for a winter's night.

TV: Mad Men

We have heard some interesting things about AMC's television show, Mad Men. The show follows Don Draper, and his life as an important man at a high-powered ad agency in downtown Manhattan in the 1960's.

We were intrigued by the idea of a period television show with authentic sets and costuming. The show is about nearly nothing, except that the people in the sixties were dirty drunks who knew nothing about health, and who treated the women in their lives like pretty slaves.


Quick vote: The idea of this show is intriguing, but the morals are tiring. We don't want to watch tv to be patronized.

Music: This is Blue by Trevor Hall

We stumbled across Trevor Hall in a bar a few years ago and we have been ardent fans ever since. We were excited to hear his single make it onto the most recent Shrek film, and were thrilled to hear that he was coming out with a new album, This is Blue. What we love most about Trevor Hall is his fervor, his raw emotion, and his captivating voice. We expected a lot of his newer works, and though the album is of excellent quality, it doesn't quite live up to his previous work, and we were disappointed. If you've never heard him before though, we think you'll like it.

"Well a couple of mystics have described your form,
Saying you can never die for you’ve never been born,
Telling me you’ve come to kill all superstition.
Put the needle upon the record,
Show me what I’ve been missing.
I need a love that’ll swallow me whole;
This ain’t the first time I’ve tried to save my soul."
- Jago Ma

"I guess you got to know the target before you aim
I guess you got to treat pleasure and pain the same
If you’re lonely darling sing my name
I shall follow your voice through the sun and rain."
- House of Cards


Quick vote: This is a great album, but not quite as good as we had expected.

Books: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

We have always loved the works of the author Jane Austen, so we were intrigued when we heard about the exploits of Seth Grahame-Smith. He took the immortal words of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and added gory zombie scenes.

No one can come close to the passion and feeling in Jane Austen's classic work, but Grahame-Smith does his best at turning it into a comical facade. He changes the way that Elizabeth Bennett thinks and behaves, turning her from a hard-headed woman to a cold-blooded zombie-killer.


Quick vote: This book was funny and surprising. The zombie scenes were fun, and we enjoyed it, but we wouldn't recommend this book as a critical read.

Books: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

We try to read most of the big award winning books, so when Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, we ordered it without reading a single review. This can go wrong from time to time, but it worked out well for us this time, we really enjoyed Olive Kitteridge.

The book at first seems a disjointed series of stories that all implicate, though some very minutely, the woman Olive Kitteridge. As we read further though, we found the book was really a portrait of a complex woman, an attempt to convey the futility in writing one story about one woman with one lesson to learn. It was a beautiful book, one that touched us and made us think.


Quick vote: We loved this book. It was beautiful, deserved the Pulitzer, and we recommend it to you.

Aunt Izzie's Whiz-ord: Yo yo yo! Pulitz-what?!