One of my all-time favourite films, purely for the dinosaurs. I think it’s a good idea to read the book as well; there are some extra things you learn in the book that I found interesting. But really – dinosaurs are just COOL and it’s great to see them onscreen like this.

This is by far my least favourite of the three JP films. The plot is a bit weak, and the film seemed very short to me, too (at least it did the first time I saw it). It’s worth watching for more cool dinosaurs, but it also really pissed me off that Spinosaurus, um, does the bad thing that he does not long after we first see him. (I don’t want to post a spoiler here, but it has to do with another of my favourite dinosaurs, and it just wasn’t a happy moment for me). ;)

Wow, this movie was bad, bad, bad. It’s about giant spiders, and the special effects were pathetic, and the acting was worse. Unfortunately, though, this film wasn’t quite bad enough to be truly hilarious, so there’s really no reason on earth to watch it.

I’d agree that it’s not as good as the first one. Some of the characters got on my nerves even more in this film. But, on the plus side, there were some funny moments, even once which I laughed out loud (which doesn’t happen very often). So, I found it worth watching, but probably only if you’re a fan of this sort of thing anyway.

I enjoyed the chant tracks on this – there’s a lovely version of the Gayatri Mantra. I didn’t like the songs with lyrics in English, though. I found them rather boring.

I found the quizzes in this book to be more interesting than in the Career Tests book by the same author. However, it’s still a pain in the rear to score them by hand, and I think I’d recommend putting “self-assessment tests” into Google, and following some links to do similar tests online. Much less time consuming. Also, so many of these tests are really pretty worthless, because they’re based on the biases of the test-writers, and sometimes it’s obvious that these biases are in direct conflict with my own feelings about certain issues. So, this was all right, but I wouldn’t really recommend it.

This is a MARVELOUS book, and has changed forever the way I think about history. Okay, that’s not strictly true – I already knew that much of the “history” we are taught as children (and as adults) is biased at best, and flat out lies at worst. So, this was a strong reminder of something I already knew.

The book is a mystery, based on the case of England’s Richard III, and whether or not he really murdered his young nephews, as tradition has told us for the past 400 years. I was skeptical at first that a book about Richard III could be riveting, but this one was. Very cleverly presented, it was a joy to read. And, I learned some stuff, too.

I’d have prefered to rate it “wishy washy” rather than “not worth consuming,” but the system doesn’t seem to want to let me do that. This book might be useful to others; it just wasn’t very useful to me, at this stage in my life. It’s geared more towards college students. Although, something I did find annoying that would affect all readers, no matter what age, is that the tests were rather tedious to score (lots of flipping between questions and answer keys, and lots of having to “reverse” answers). It would have been easy to make the scoring far less tedious, but sadly, that’s not what the author chose to do.

This is a lovely book of writing prompts. Each left-hand page has the start of a sentence, and then two lined pages for writing whatever comes to mind. There are also lovely photos on each of the right-hand pages. Some examples of the prompts:

It’s not naive to believe that . . .
I will live happily ever after when . . .
My dream job is . . .

I got this book from someone at BookCrossing, and was lucky enough to be the first to participate in a bookring for it – this copy is going to be sent around to as many people as there are prompts, for each of us to complete one of them. (I chose the first one I listed above).

Were I to make a list of my all-time favourite books, “Island of the Blue Dolphins” would be on it. I read this book over and over when I was young, and sometime soon, I’ll read it to my son. A true classic, and a beautiful, touching story.