Cameron Recommends: The Book Thief

I usually don't get very emotional. It is rare, very rare, that I get teary eyed. I shed a tear over this book. It was beautiful.
I am usually a fantasy reader. I read this because I trust the opinions of a few people when it comes to books. I'm glad I did. This book is historical fiction. The characters, while fictional, felt more real to me than some people I know. The descriptions of people, places and emotions are poetic and, given the narrator, prefect.
The story is told from the unique perspective of Death himself.  He has a very visual voice, describing things in interesting ways.  The story revolves around a young girl named Liesel during the height of World War 2.  The story is very compelling and a perfect balance between sweet and bitter experiences.  The story is mostly about the goodness of people, which is even brighter when held against the backdrop of evil that prevailed during this time in history.  When talking about the human race, Death describes it perfectly  ". . . the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."
I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

Cameron Recommends: Goodreads.com

Ever since I read Mistborn (see Cameron Recommends: Mistborn for my review of that), I have become an avid reader.  My Kindle e-reader helped a lot, increasing my books read per year from 10 to 25ish.  The other tool that I have used to help out my reading hobby is Goodreads.

Goodreads is a social site for people who love to read, and the designers made it great.  First of there are the bookshelves.  You can look up books you have read and rate them, this adds them to a shelf labeled "read".  You can then go to books and assign them to custom bookshelves that you create and you can write your own review of the book.  This makes it super easy to organize what you have read.  Then there is the "to-read" shelf, a true wonder.  With this shelf you can list and prioritize books that you'd like to read once you finish gobbling up your current book.  Have a friend mention a book at a party that sounds intriguing? Use the website, or the handy mobile app, to save it for later.  

Then there are the book look-ups.  Heard about a book that sounds interesting? Look it up on Goodreads.  It shows you the average rating the book gets, a short description of the book and then below that it lists the ratings and reviews of any of your friends that have read that book, followed by the most popular reviews of the book.  SO NICE!

Speaking of friends, that is the penultimate point I'd like to make. You can add friends on Goodreads (I use facebook to sign in to Goodreads and used it to see what other friends also use it).  You can look at your friends favorite books (which is simply a list of their highest rated ones) and their reviews.  Then you can compare books, to see how your tastes mesh with theirs.  It is super useful.  Have a book club? You can create or join groups on Goodreads and see what others are reading.

The last point I'd like to make in Goodreads' favor is the challange.  They have a challange on there to set goals for # of books read in a year.  With that you can look at how many total pages you have read in a year that you did this challange and what books you read.  It has some other cool plotting tools.  

So all in all, I love Goodreads.com.  I highly recommend it to the avid and casual reader.

Happy reading, 

Cameron

Wow it has been a while, probably the longest I've gone without writing in this thing.  Sorry about that to the whole 5 people that might read this.

So I have made a decision about this blog.  It will now be entirely a "Cameron Recommends" or "Cameron Doesn't Recommend" style blog, with maybe an occasional insert of news on my end.

Mostly these will be books, movies, television or products that I like or dislike.  I guess that is one way that people can get to know me better.  I have often thought what the purpose of a blog like this is, where I don't do any advertising.  I think I want to use this for just getting my thoughts out of my head, as a kind of winding down exercise.  So let me know what you think.  I'm going to make an effort to do this more.