thaliasbooks

Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

I'm Thalia! I run a book blog called Pictures in the Words and I hope to be an editor for YA fiction. I'm a GoodReads refugee!

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The Martian
Andy Weir
Progress: 31/369 pages
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter
Progress: 193/432 pages
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
J.K. Rowling
Progress: 43/766 pages
The Children of Húrin
J.R.R. Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien
Progress: 313/313 pages
Battle Royale - Koushun Takami, Yuji Oniki This book was a huge back and forth with me. Sometimes I despised it, sometimes I loved it; sometimes I wanted to give it one star and sometimes I wanted to give it four. Although this is a pretty famous film, I’d never seen it, so I was able to go into reading this for the Underrated Bookers group with a clean slate. I’d been warned about the violence by a friend (thank you for the warnings, Skyla!), but violence in books or movies has never really bothered me. (I guess it’s the result of having brothers who are ten years older than you are–you might be five, but they’re thirteen and fifteen and they want to go see Jurassic Park in theatres, dangit.) So, I dived in headfirst.The first thing that hit me was, This is probably a lot better in Japanese. The translation is pretty bad–it’s mostly accurate, I’m sure, but it’s so wooden and unemotional that you can barely stand reading it. The descriptions are bloody and violent, as promised (though I’m starting to guess there’s something wrong with me, since I didn’t feel squeamish once while reading this), but everything else is so staccato and ridiculous that you hardly want to read. The only thing that kept me going was that at least the action-y parts of the story were interesting. Everything else…bleh. There were tons of typos and grammatical errors and I wanted to band my head against a wall.On the plus side, as sadistic as this might sound, the battles between the students were rough and intense (mostly). I was captivated by fight scenes, and I could almost, almost, forget how terrible the lapses were. By the end, I was on the edge of my seat, and the ending of this book was so intense that I almost totally forgot about everything I had disliked about it previously. So, hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen–this really was a wild ride.Read more?http://thaliasbooks.tumblr.com/post/56816900010/battle-royale-review