Saturday 24 August 2013

Quærite et Invenietis: Sese


“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

One of the most clichéd quotes of history, and also among the most misunderstood ones.

Why? Well, books are not people but people are books. You can read them only when you understand the language they write themselves with. If, for example, you took out a book to read, which happens to be written in Latin, and you don’t know the language, you can’t really read whatever is written in it.

People are books written in their own unique languages. Not everyone knows their language and not everyone is willing to know. We all have covers that don’t really reflect or express the true content of what we’re made of. We are seen and judged by our covers. We even do this with real books in a bookstore. We pick out the ones with the best covers, not knowing that what’s inside could really suck.

How does the world see us? How do we see the world? What does the world see in us? What do we see from it? But seeing is not knowing, and to know something does not always require sight.

Humans are built to be selfish and judgmental creatures. Face it people, we have never-ending wants and needs and we are never satisfied with what we have. We are content perhaps, but never satisfied. We all love being on top. We all love how it feels to be better than everyone else. But just because you’re better at something than anyone else, it doesn’t mean you’re a better human than they are. It just makes you different.

No matter how big of a crowd we make, we would always be divided. There will always be the fat one, the pretty one, the nice one, the naughty one, the troublesome ones, and the angelic ones that hold a precious place in our hearts. There are other names for those people in high school: the geeks, the nerds, the flirts, the jocks, the rebels, the Goths, the misfits and so forth. We condemn ourselves with such titles, not knowing if these make us who we are or not. Most of us are unaware if we are hurting ourselves by letting ourselves be called and treated by how we are branded, or hurting those whom we brand.

These do not make us ourselves, but these can change the course of our lives. It is our own choice to have our lives run on by titles, or to run our lives on them.

High school is the most tumultuous stage in life. This is period when we discover the things we are capable of, and how well we are at them. It is a period of awareness, that we all have different faces and different dimensions in their initial stage of creation.

Perhaps, we are not yet seen as who we truly are because we are not ourselves yet. We don’t even have shapes yet, just profiles. But even an outline can already define us. Being a geek doesn’t make you a geek, nor does being a nerd make you a nerd. The common perception is not always right.

Max Ehrmann wrote, “…for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” People at the top know how rough the road to getting there is. People at the bottom understand that life can get even harder. But for people who have always been where they’ve been and have remained there; they don’t know how it feels to be at the top and have the ground taken from their feet, nor do they know what it takes to build themselves from the ground up because all they’ve known all their lives was how good life could be.

We are all individuals who are misunderstood and misinterpreted. It is rare to find someone who can perceive you completely, if not perfectly. We can’t wait for the world to define us. We have to tell the world who we are. We are the only ones capable of speaking our personal language, and we’re the only ones capable of making the world understand it.

We are all books. God may be the author of our lives but we are the author of our own selves. There is only such a small difference between living and existing. We are breathing, sensing, and feeling when we live but we mean something when we exist. What our existence means is something the world has to know before we are perceived as something else we are not.

People are books with their own specific genres. We are usually seen as groups but what makes us individuals is what matters most. We shouldn’t let the world define us. We should define ourselves to the world.

Monday 5 August 2013

My review:

Shades of Earth is the last of Beth Revis's Across the Universe trilogy. The plot begins with the Contingency shuttle(Cryolevel) of Godspeed, along with the frozens and 2/3 of Elder's people on board, landing on Centauri-Earth. Well, considering that this planet can support life, it's expected that there is life existing on the planet. The crash-landing isn't exactly a "We come in peace" message for the *cough* uhm.. *cough* aliens. But the aliens aren't exactly, well, aliens. Let's just say that in some distant future where humans are greedier than they are now, and because they're so greedy they're running out of this to take HERE so they're looking for other places to TAKE FROM. Get it? Anyway, the plot has more twists and tangles especially when unexpected things happen and the ones you've come to love and trust cannot be trusted at all. The real monsters aren't always what they seem. The scariest ones are always close even when you don't know they are.

Shades of Earth is an enthralling, fast-paced and hopelessly romantic sci-fi thriller and I doubt anyone could ever get their hands off this book once they start reading. And to know it all and understand how things came to be, they should probably start from the beginning.

Hmm.... guys, does it seem too soon for me to be giving another review? Oh well, I've got some time to kill anyway and the best way to kill time is read books :)
My review:

A Million Suns, in my opinion, is even better than it's prequel, Across the Universe. It's more action-packed than the first one and the story takes quite a new turn of events in this book. Believe me, there is nothing slow about this book and Beth Revis seems to like getting things from point A to point B in the speed of light without sacrificing the details. While the first book revolves around Amy's awakening and the murders of the few frozens, A Million Suns doesn't just answer the "Why?" but also "Why now?" To tell you the truth, that did make quite a lot of sense since Orion's been alive even before Elder's been born and he could have done it then but why did he do them now? The plot starts around 3 months after Amy's been awakened. They still call her a freak but at least they're learning not to flinch away from her. Though Orion's been frozen, he still haunts Amy and Elder. Amy still hates Orion for what he had done but she knows that some part of her understands why he did them. But the book isn't only about why he did them but also why he did them NOW. The important part is the NOW because soon enough Amy and Elder will discover the biggest secret of them all. Now Amy and Elder have to race to get to the clues before it's too late. The fate of Godspeed and its passengers lies in the hands of two teenagers. The book has only one conclusion: they need to get off Godspeed.

But the question is, how? 

Oh folks, just read it. You people are going to love it and none of you will ever regret taking this book out of the bookshelf.


This is my honest review of the book and I honestly think that Beth Revis should be immortal so that she could write books for us forever.  Hahaha!

Saturday 3 August 2013


Review from Goodreads:

A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone - one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship - tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

 -----------------X

My review:

Because it's such an awesome book, a combination of all my favorite genres along with Beth Revis's writing style, it has earned a 5-star rating from me :)

The story opens with Amy and her parents preparing themselves to be cryofrozen
  into Godspeed, a ship that's on a mission to go to another planet and colonize it. Or at the very least, survive it. Unlike her parents who are actually really looking forward to the new planet, Amy just wants to stay on Earth and live. But because she wants to be with her parents more, she goes through with it. 

The next chapter opens in Elder's POV. Elder is a guy who is being trained by a man called Eldest to become the Eldest after he dies. Elder soon discovers another one of the secrets that Eldest has kept from him: the cryo level. It is there that he finds Amy, who looks like a frozen sunset in her cryochamber. Then they find her awake and trying to break out of her chamber. Someone has unplugged her from her frozen sleep and that someone is most-likely the one who has been unplugging the others too.

Amy's awakening is just the beginning. The rest now lies beneath Godspeed's secrets and the lies that hide them all. When they finally discover the truth, they must make new choices. Is the truth worth risking all?

------------X


I totally recommend everyone to read this book :)