Reading Wishlist (Best Sellers)

 

 

Book Talk Presentation (Best Sellers)

Book Review (Best Sellers)

(Angle #1) Uglies by Scott Westerfield

     Uglies is a dystopian novel about a future society in the ruins of the world where everyone is ugly.  From the moment you are born to your sixteenth birthday, you are considered an Ugly and must live in Uglyville as such.  Everyone dreams of turning sixteen where they’ll get a life-changing operation to look like all the Pretties in New Pretty Town.  But Tally makes a friend named Shay, who doesn’t really want to become a Pretty, which is absolutely absurd, and Shay runs away just before her sixteenth birthday to an old place almost unheard of by the citizens of Uglyville called “The Smoke” to meet a boy named David whom Tally isn’t sure even exists.  Tally isn’t comfortable with the idea of leaving the Society with Shay, so she remains in Uglyville as she awaits her Pretty operation.  But when that day comes, the Specials had found out she knew about Shay’s illegal leaving of the Society and blackmailed Tally into betraying Shay and the possibly make-believe people of The Smoke.  Tally is so desperate to become pretty that she follows through, but when she arrives and finds out something so horrifying about becoming pretty that she’s not even sure she wants it anymore, and has to make a choice.

     The book is riveting and you can’t put it down for multiple chapters at a time! The plot was great because it was unique; Tally chose not to betray Shay and the other people who live in The Smoke, but actually betrayed them anyway (on accident) because the Specials had chipped her (it was unexpected for sure).  The main character, Tally, for most of the book was not likeable because she had such different views than almost anyone nowadays would; she knew and embraced that everyone was ugly before they got an operation that made everyone look almost exactly the same.  No one really understands her point of view while reading the book, but later on they do because Society really changes people and has a huge influence on what they think of themselves and others, and that’s really all Tally was being impacted by. 

     “Why can’t tally understand how messed up her society is?” That’s simple.  It’s because she doesn’t see it from somebody else’s shoes, all she sees is the inside of her society: she’s like a puppy in a store; she hasn’t considered that there’s any other way to live besides this one yet.  But that all changes when she goes to The Smoke and reads into their lifestyle.  The novel’s purpose is really to show people that everyone’s beautiful, and you can’t let society change how you feel about yourself and other people.  Westerfield was strong in developing Shay and David as characters, but Tally was a bit weak because she is basically only modeled by the society and doesn’t really have any specifically different character traits than anyone else (it might have been more interesting had she really had a love for one thing, like a hobby or something).  Also Tally was weak in the scene where she realizes she fell in love with David, and throws her necklace (it was something a Special gave her with a button on it that she could press whenever she wanted them to come and get everyone from The Smoke, and that would be the time when she could become a Pretty at last) into the fire.  That was really stupid, because if that were me (she’s about as smart as me I think, they still go to school in their society) I would have just stuck it to a bird or something and sent them off the guard, rather than damaging it in a fire which I would have known would’ve sent the Specials swarming to the area!  That was a weakness in the author’s plot, but beside that the plot was really strong.

     This book deserves 9/10 stars because it was really fun to read and you’ll get excited  whenever it tells you Tally’s thoughts because with those you can predict what will happen next (the fun part is sometimes you’re wrong and will be shocked by it).  It doesn’t get that last star though because of the hooked ending (super annoying) and because of the scene I described above; Tally’s not dim-witted, but that action was so it was really out-of-character.

Character Reflection (Best Sellers)

Likeability -

     The narrator of my book is not very likeable in the beginning, but as the story progresses she becomes more likeable as she begins making better decisions.  She does fit some of the arguments Claire Messud made in the article we read, because she's not likeable in the beginning for how she's making all the wrong decisions like leaving Uglyville to betray her friend Shay even though she promised that it wouldn't happen, and doing all of that just to get the operation to become pretty and live in New Pretty Town.  But even with this, like Messud said, we still 'like' Tally (main character) in a different way because she is so interesting and BECAUSE she makes such decisions that we wouldn't.  Their society is so different from ours, that we are intrigued to see how people think based on their growing-up environment.  There is a connection between the book's genre and the narrator it has because if the book's genre is 'dystopian', for instance, the narrator tends to be the one person that is or becomes different from everyone else in their futuristic society, (ex. The Hunger Games Trilogy, Divergent Trilogy, Uglies Series), and we like that.  Or maybe in the instance of 'fantasy' the narrator tends to be someone going on a journey to find / save something / someone and using interesting powers or fantastic creatures (ex. Eragon Series, The Hobbit, Harry Potter).
    

Book 2 Trailer (Best Sellers)

Truth in Memoir (Best Sellers)

I don’t think a book has to be completely true to be considered non-fiction; we all know that you aren’t ever going to be 100% accurate when it comes to things like dialogue and small actions / setting descriptions, so I don’t see a problem in changing the circumstances around a little as well.  I do think, though, that if it has a ton of insanely exaggerated or untrue points in it they need to say somewhere that it is based on a true story so people don’t assume that it is entirely true if that’s not the case: like Oprah did when she credited the author of A Million Little Things to having everything that happened in the story to have happened to him.  She got that impression by how he called it a memoir, and if he had said “based on a true story” she could have already understood that it couldn’t be entirely true; only based on things that happened to him in his lifetime.

Half-Truths are okay if it is still a good story I think because we don’t beg people to take our money for the book just because we heard it was a true story, we pay for the book because we think that it will be interesting and inspirational for the fact that it is a true story.  Even if some of the story may not be true, we still got what we wanted with an interesting and inspirational story that didn’t occur to us so doesn’t matter to us anyway where there are half-truths.  We just want to believe that things as amazing as these can happen; lessen the significance on what did happen.  So it doesn’t really matter to me (and shouldn’t to anyone else) that these authors bent the truth in their stories.

I think David Shields is right in the sense that a story is just a story, doesn’t really need to be labeled as true or untrue, but I disagree with the genre labels as in comedy, romance, etc. not being necessary because when I want to read something funny or sad or inspirational I think they need to be labeled as such so I don’t just search through a library in a giant section called “books”.  It ruins efficiency.