For an animal lover, this isn’t the greatest book in the world. A good portion of the book deals with vivid descriptions of how animals are killed and eaten by man or by beast.

And let me save you about 100 pages. The whole entire first part can be skipped. Pi likes animals. His family are zookeepers. His dad thinks tigers are the most dangerous animals on the planet. Pi secretly goes around practicing Muslim, Christian and Hindu religions until they all find out about each other’s roles in Pi’s life and try to convince him to choose one – theirs. And because money isn’t good and India is falling apart his family decides to get on a boat with all their animals and move from India to Canada.

There, 100 pages saved – completely skip that part of the book.

The remainder of the tale is nearly its equal in boredom. Maybe I’m just not “proper” enough to “get it” but it wasn’t my favorite book. The most interesting part was when Pi finds a floating island of flesh-eating algae. And the final conversation with the Japanese men who want a believable tale about why their boat sank was also interesting.

The rest of the book I could have skipped.

Beware of the New York Times bestseller list.

I was really looking forward to this book because I heard it would tell me everything I DIDN’T want to know about what was going on back in the kitchen of most restaurants. I was looking for the book to relate to ME and tell me about things I am interested in.

Instead, I got a bunch of choppy stories that won’t name names or places and seem to be hazy at best in their recollection. I’m not saying Tony is a bad writer; I think he’s pretty darned good at writing. It’s just that in order to protect the not-so-innocent, he has to blur out all the details.

He seems to be fixated on fish, which I can’t stand and most of the first part of the book only offers advice on what sort of fish you should stay away from in restaurants and when. I did like the chapter on Bigfoot, but everything else about the book was a bore.

I read this book mostly on my lunch breaks at work and it took me forever to finish. I never knew or cared much about Katharine Hepburn, so I’m not exactly sure why I wanted to read it. It was mostly the story of a biographer’s friendship with Kate and some obligatory biography nonsense thrown (and I do mean THROWN) in. The only entertaining parts were those dealing with the present and Berg’s relationship with Kate. I think the book would have been less of a dry read if it didn’t try to retell her life.

All in all it was an interesting experience, but I can’t say I completely enjoyed it.

Yet another chicklit book where the main character has absolutely no confidence in herself and has no personality. At first we’re led to believe that Jemima Jones is overweight because she has an obsession with food. That’s not quite the case. She has an addictive personality and is always obsessed with something. When she discovers the Internet, she no longer cares about eating. When she discovers the joys of working out, she no longer cares about the Internet. And the cycle goes on and on.

I suppose this book was designed to make women feel good about themselves, but I don’t know how with such mindless characters. Always doing what they do for the sake of men.

To top off the poor plot, the writing is atrocious. I felt like I was reading a book for a person with a limited vocabulary – say a nine year old. I’ve seen online journals with much better writing than this.

Jane Green also keeps switching from first-person to third-person, but it isn’t well done as with Perfect Match. She seems to switch back and forth from first person to third because she can’t write well enough to tell the story through Jemima’s eyes alone. And several places throughout the book, she makes reference to what will happen later. “As you’ll soon find out” and “For and ” are probably the two most commonly used phrases in the book. Please don’t tell me what to think. The proper way to indicate what will happen later in the story is called foreshadowing. Jane Green, please learn something about it!

I’ve read several reviews of this book and many people thought it was great, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

This was a light reading book, although I don’t really think I enjoyed it much. The writing wasn’t very good in my opinion and the plotline was a little thin and predictable. Nothing extraordinarily funny in the book either.

This book was centered around four main characters: Cheryl, Jason, Heather and Reg. The book is divided into four parts, one for each character.

In the first part, Cheryl describes the Columbine-like shooting in her school during her senior year in 1988. Her and her boyfriend Jason had just gotten secretly married six weeks ago and she just found out last night that she was pregnant. She goes back and forth between the events that led to her death and the events that led to her marriage of Jason. She is in a sort of purgatory with darkness and silence and she can only hear certain prayers, but just the words, not the voices behind them.

I was hooked from the very first part since I just finished reading The Lovely Bones and having the character talk about her life while she was dead seemed very similar to me.

The next part fast forwards in time to 1999 and is written from the viewpoint of Jason. He is writing a letter to his nephews and manages to express only his hatred for his father, Reg and the fact that he has never gotten over Cheryl’s death. He expresses that he blacks out when he’s been drinking and especially so when other drugs are involved. There’s a few pages where he’s blacked out and some strange things happen to him. I never really fully understood what was going on during those few pages, so I might need to read them again.

Heather writes the third part in 2002, three months after Jason’s disappearance. She is Jason’s girlfriend and the closest thing to a stable relationship he’s had since Cheryl. She is approached by a psychic who tells her things only her and Jason would ever know. She trusts the psychic as she has no other choice if she wants to find out what happened to Jason and if he’s still alive.

While I was reading Jason’s part, I was looking forward most to Reg’s part, the final part which takes place in 2003. Reg is one of those holier-than-thou types and has some pretty atrocious beliefs. He told Jason’s sister-in-law that one of her twin boys might not have a soul because technically, one was a clone of the other one and he didn’t believe clones could have souls. He treated Jason and his mother poorly. In the end though, there is no satisfying resolution with Reg.

I thought the book was well written and interesting, but I was left feeling that there wasn’t much point to it. What was it all for? Perhaps I’m supposed to be left with this feeling. The book’s central theme is that God may no longer be there for His people. He may no longer care to help them or hear them. In that effect, I think it would be more aptly titled “Hey Nietzsche!” rather than “Hey Nostradamus!”

I really didn’t think I was going to like this book at all when I first heard about it (so why I decided to read it, I do not know) but I was pleasantly surprised and might end up checking out some of Douglas Coupland’s other books.

The fifth book was very dark and just plain sad. While the previous four books contained increasingly serious subject matter, they were still able to maintain a sense of fun and games. There was so little happiness to go around in the fifth book. I find that I don’t really like Harry. He handles things completely differently than I would. I would try to make some sort of peace with Snape and brown nose it up a little bit. Harry continues to make his life much worse than it COULD be by being a bratty little asshole. I understand he’s been through a lot, but most of the time, he’s only thinking of himself.

I have a feeling the 6th and 7th books are going to be more doom and gloom. I have no problem with that, but I would like some happier times ahead for Harry in return.

I was drawn into the Harry Potter series by the light-hearted, magical world J.K. Rowling created around the students of Hogwarts School or Witchcraft and Wizardry. The first three books were heavy on school activities, light on the dark, horrible world of Voldemort and plentiful with the fun, magical moments that made me fall in love with Harry, Ron and Hermione. The third book was by far, my favorite of the series thusfar.

The fourth book was considerably darker than any of the others and as a result, I enjoyed it less than I did the first three.

It’s very interesting to see the books becoming more mature as the characters and readers age. I’m finding that I don’t really like Harry Potter or his attitude and keep on reading for Ron, Fred and George. I also can’t help but feel that Ron and Hermione would (will) be the perfect couple. I’m confident that they’ll end up together in the end.

Girlfriend in a Coma is broken into three parts. The first part is told by Richard. His high school sweetheart, Karen went into an unexplained coma the night she lost her virginity. For weeks before she has had strange dreams. Premonitions of what is to come. She feels that she has seen something in the future that she shouldn’t have seen and feels like she is going to be taken away – taken hostage because of it. And she is.

She was impregnated the first and only time she ever had sex and her daughter is borne to her while she is in her coma. She remains in an uneventful coma for nearly eighteen years. Her close network of friends try to grow up during this time. They try to find deeper meaning in their lives, but they are left unfulfilled. Richard especially is a mess. He’s living for the day that Karen wakes up from her coma instead of living for himself, for his daughter or for his friends.

The second part is in 3rd person. Karen wakes up from her coma on a day holds many coincidences for her friends. Good things keep happening to Richard. Two of her friends, Pam and Hamilton arrive at the hospital ODing on heroin. They have stereo drug-induced dreams which they later describe as video snapshots of the end of the world. Both dreams are identical.

Karen wakes up and tries to get on with her life and tries to recover, but she is haunted by the reason she went into her coma in the first place. Something’s going to happen. Soon. She gives a date to the events to come and waits.

The third part is told by a ghost named Jared. Jared went to high school with Karen, Richard and their group of friends. He died during their junior year of leukemia. The end of the world has come and leaves only Karen, her daughter, granddaughter and her network of friends behind. Jared is there to explain to them why this happened and what they can do to fix it.

I think this book had the potential to be so much more interesting. Instead it became preachy and weak. We have overtaken the Earth to a point beyond where it could repair itself if we weren’t here. We need to be content with our life and that means actually doing something with our life. Questioning our life. Questioning other’s lives.

I hated the ending. Again, I thought it was completely weak and it could have been so much more with more meaning. The author tries to make you think, but he does so in a way that he doesn’t explain anything at all.

There was something about the book I liked. As with Hey Nostradamus I was left with an eerie, haunting feeling and I think that’s good. There’s something about Douglas Coupland that I DO like, I just can’t put my finger on it. Both of the books seemed to dance around issues, leaving you to guess what happened. Neither book really had any resolution at all.

I’ll probably try one more Douglas Coupland book to see if I like this author or if he just leaves me unsatisfied.

There were lots of funny parts in this book, unfortunately I already heard most of them as I watched her HBO special. I was sort of hoping this book would have some new material and wouldn’t be a written version of her special.