Twilight - not just for "young adults"

Got them as a birthday gift and read them on the birthday week itself.
Pure, unadulterated indulgence :)

Who would have thought that "young adult" teenage-vampire-romance novels could be so exciting! I live for these kind of surprises.

Happy New Year! /Book/Movie Review

Happy new year everybody!!! Sorry for the delay but I was busy with work :)

(This post is last year's which I never published. Just something to salvage by but a profound book and movie nevertheless.)

The Freedom Writers is a movie based on the 1999 non fiction book The Freedom Diary Writers by teacher Erin Gruwell. The movie is about how a teacher can make a difference and in many ways personalized for me of what a real teacher should constitute; someone who teaches from the heart. It's a movie about how a set of different students with much of a bitter past and difficult upbringing are placed in one classroom with a very misplaced teacher.


Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning chronicles his journey through various Nazi concentration camps. The journey reading the 100 pages were memorable; each page for me was a celebration of being alive; even when you have lost everything; even when every ounce of what humanity is, was taken from you.


After more than 65 years of the testament of the brutality of mankind, Erin Gruwell asked her class, if anyone of them has heard about the holocaust. Many of these students had grown up in rough neighborhoods of Long Beach; a mix of African-American, Latino, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Caucasian students. Only one white hand is up in the air. She asked again if anyone of them had been shot; All, except the one white hand is up in the air.


There in that one instant I came to understand why Frankl says that pain is relative to every man. I could have been callous and unashamedly thank God that I was not the one tortured in the many concentrations camps had I not seen All the hands raised who were shot at. They might not have heard or realized the tragedy of holocaust but their life has been their own holocaust. They have seen, felt and tasted pain.


To say, we just need real love to heal the world sounds feeble and unrealistic. But, if I am sure of anything is the fact that we do need real love to heal the world. Nothing else will work.

Eats, Shoots And Leaves

Personal opinion says that it’s (notice the punctuation please) a crime to write a review for a book without reading the whole book. I read half last night and will definitely finish it tonight. But my Oku says TODAY is the day I post one and also I 'm itching to post the back cover! So here it goes...

It’s phenomenal! (Please notice the punctuation again and kindly excuse my enthusiasm :))

I came across Lynn Truss’s (mind the punctuation yet again; it would have been different if her name were Jesus) book, Eats, Shoots And Leaves a year ago. I read the back cover hurriedly, frowned and moved on with life. Now, I am kicking myself for not reading it a year back! I would have at least known where to use my “it’s” and “its”!

This is in the back cover and it wonderfully illustrates why/how she chose her title:

A Panda walks into a café. He orders a Sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air."Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.
This is the zero tolerance guide.

Grammar/Punctuation classes were always dry, boring and a sore in school. This book is about that but so far, I have never enjoyed reading a grammar book, if you will, like this.

My grammar/punctuation does go haywire, which showed in most of my assignments' reviews from my second-most favorite professor. His comments always went like this: “Good work(ahem!)….but watch your grammar….” Maybe this is why, even though I slogged and slogged, the highest grade I got from him was A-. Well, but he was known to be picky with his grades and a stickler for Perfect Grammar :)

I am NOT going to look back through my blog to see where I went wrong . If I did, I’d kill myself. Actually, I should be Hacked as Lynn Truss points out. She says that “No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, ‘Good food at it’s best’, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” A bit extreme huh?
There are lil' instance like these in the book and you can't help but chuckle.

Quiz

Q: Why were the kids afraid to go to Giant Kid’s Playground?
Answer: ?

You’d probably know the answer if you are not as ignoramus as me or if you have read the book OR if you look it up in the net.

Hint: A friend's answer: "....becos he said Trespassers will b Persecuted" :)

Who is he?

Believe me, I would have answered the Q point-blank if someone told me that it's something to do with the apostrophe!

A few years ago, this did make me sit up and realise the importance and greatness of Punctuation!...er for a while :)

"A woman without her man is nothing."
"A woman: without her, man is nothing."

Disclaimer: My smiley, wherever applicable, is my period :)