It was so small and short I finished it in a few days even though most of it was reading it on the bus to and from Uni and during Uni breaks. I don't think I've ever read a full novel that short, maybe except Animal Farm, but I'm still surprised by how good an impression you could create in such a thin book.
It's so well written! The plot isn't that great, as I noticed from the movie, but I realised that that's not what is important. Probably back then people didn't care about complex plots but really wanted a well written book. This story focuses so much on language and imagery that it compromises on the realisticness of the plot. This is just like in the movie, which which was all about how they portrayed it (through the amazing directing, costuming, acting, etc.).
Without any spoilers, here are a few differences between the film and the novel:
Some of my favourite quotes from the novel are:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticising anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Oh and I was looking for an image of the book cover and I saw this (SPOILER) Great Gatsby Character Map. It's really cool, but as I said, it has spoilers so yeah..
And because I read Gatsby so fast, I also moved on to The Hunger Games!
This was also an easy read. I finished the first book in less than a week. Coming from the complex and intricate A Song of Ice and Fire and the extremely lavished language of the Great Gatsby, this book came as a shock to me. Firstly, when I borrowed it, it was in the Young Adult section. I don't know what else I expected, but I was a bit surprised. And then, I flicked through the book and the font looked so big! And there was like double or 1.5 line spacing! A Song of Ice and Fire has like teeny tiny font and nonexistent spacing, so I was very confused.
Having seen the movie, I am extremely biased to The Hunger Games, so I loved the book and still had my moments of intensities even though I knew what was going to happen from the movie. The plot is still good, there are a lot of little things that the movie didn't portray, such as Katniss' thoughts on everyone and everything (which is obviously hard to portray in the film). The language is extremely simple, since it's from the mind of Katniss who is just 16 years old. But still, 16 years old is still a bit too old for some of the cheesy cringe-worthy lines in the novel. Nonetheless, I still loved it and can't wait to borrow Catching Fire, the second book!
OOOOH and the second movie comes out at the end of the year! I can't wait, I love Jennifer Lawrence!
And since we're on the topic of books and stories, the other day I was going through my hard drive (because my computer went full retard and just deleted something and I couldn't retrieve it at all even after restoring my computer but anyway) and I was trying to make some space so I was looking through folders clearing stuff I didn't need. Since this is a fairly old hard drive, I found some of my stories I wrote in year 9 and 10!! I was so happy, because all through year 11 and 12 I kept wondering what happened to those stories, thinking why I would ever delete them (since I loved them so much). I also found my year 9 creative story so maybe I'll go through them, edit them and post them all up here! Yay!
Just briefly, I'll talk about a few games my brother bought.
Dixit (lol what a funny name)
I don't know why it's called that, but it's an audiovisual game, so kind of like Pictionary but not really at all like Pictionary. Everyone gets I think 5 cards which have drawings/pictures/paintings on them (the paintings are actually pretty cool and very unrealistically awesome). When it's a player's turn, the player will put a card face down and say something related to that card, e.g. "Alice in Wonderland". The other players then put two of their cards each related to the topic "Alice in Wonderland". The player shuffles the cards and place them face up on the table and the others have to guess which card was his. That player wins points if at least one person guesses the right card, but wins no points if it's too obvious and all players guess the right card. The other players get points if they trick another person to guessing the card they put down.
It's an alright game, it goes pretty fast but I found it extremely difficult to think of the topics, and I was usually too vague or too obvious.
Love Letter
This is apparently a "filler" game, something you can play if you're on the go or have nothing to do because the entire deck is only 16 cards. It's got some weird system, and there's a story line like you're trying to get a love letter to this princess in a castle and there's all these different characters and stuff. If you get caught with the love letter then you lose the round. You need to win like a certain number of rounds or something I dunno. As you can tell I don't really like this game.
Lost Cities
I really like this game. You're archaeologists and you need to complete expeditions and at the end you need to have the most number of points (money) to win. It's only a two-player game though but I think there's a four player version or modification of it. It's really fast paced, the rules are really clear cut and the game goes by pretty quick, so it's actually quite fun.
Forbidden Desert
This is a cooperative game so all players team up to try and find the missing parts of your plane that just crashed in the desert. I really like this game and the concept of it. The board is always changing throughout the game which is really cool. The main issue is that it's only a really recent game, like about a month or something old, so the instructions and rules aren't as clear cut and it was pretty confusing.
Stumbling Time!
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