56 - Reading Riot no.1

Part of my New Year's Resolutions: to read one book a week. The series will be called Reading Riot, and this is week one.

I read this book:

Yes, it is a teen fiction/kind-of teen romance novel. I have guilty pleasures, and that genre happens to fall right in that category. However, I have no shame in sharing this book because I thought it was great.

The premise of the book is a red Moleskine notebook that a teenage girl leaves in a bookstore for an unknown teenage boy to (hopefully) find and complete the challenge written inside. The girl is Lily, and the boy is Dash. Two 16-year-olds looking for an adventure during a particularly boring Christmas holiday in New York City. Over half of the book is dedicated to Dash and Lily finding new, unique ways to pass the notebook back and forth.

The really cool thing about books written by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan is the two parts are written by separate people. Not only that, they don't even know how the story is really gonna turn out because they just email the chapters to each other as they write them sequentially. It makes the story and characters more real, in my opinion.

The likelihood of most of the events in the book actually happening is slim. However, the characters felt very real to me. Dash and Lily are two VERY different people, but sometimes it happens that way. Different personalities are attracted to each other all the time. Dash has a very large vocabulary and knows about most things. Lily is a naive idealist who is the youngest in a very large extended family. Personally, I found both characters very likable. To some, Dash may have come across as a tad condescending and unrealistic with his use of large words, but I disagree. He's not the kind of person trying to be condescending, he just loves words. And he means well throughout the book, not trying to make anyone feel inferior. As for his use of the words all the time, he has a nightly ritual of finding a new word to love in his dictionary... I think with a habit like that, it's very realistic for him to have a vocabulary like that. Haha.

Basically, I was sucked into this book. It's only about 250 pages, but I read it in less than a day. It was a very easy book to read, and I found myself wishing there was more. I thought the ending was perfect. Plus, VERY limited swearing and no sex! Like I said, teen fiction is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. So if you're not into teen fiction, you wouldn't like this book. But it was very well written (in my opinion). David and Rachel did a fine job, yet again. (See also Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist. That one's a bit more PG-13, though.)

10 - The Way I See It #2: Proving His Talent Through Song and Dance

Recently, I went to New York for a week on vacation. Now, I am a theatre-lover and watching a musical or a play is one of my all-time favorite things to do.

Also one of my favorite things: Harry Potter.

Now imagine my excitement when the one and only Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter since I was 9) was starring in a musical on Broadway. If you can't imagine it, I was VERY excited.

Having been involved in theatre for a long time, I have to say I'm pretty hard to please. Not only with theatre, but with singing too. For my whole life my oldest sister has been the best singer I've ever known, so she set the bar pretty high. It's very rarely that I'm impressed with singing, and I hate to admit that I'm kind of a snob. Haha. I also know good acting when I see it, and I know bad acting when I see it, and before I went to New York I hadn't been to a professional live theatre performance that I'd really been impressed with in a long time. Even Wicked at Capitol Theatre was really good but that was the performance that the actress who played Elphaba left a little to be desired when she sang Defying Gravity.

Having said that, I really enjoyed watching Harry Potter sing and dance.

What I was the most impressed by was the dedication that was clearly shown in Daniel Radcliffe's performance. I could tell that he worked really hard on the singing and the dancing and his character, and it really paid off. He's not so famous yet that he would get hired through his name alone. And being Harry Potter for all of his acting career thus far, he had to do a lot to prove to the world that he CAN be something other than Harry Potter. And he didn't have to be naked with a horse to do it. (Even though he did that already.)

I can really tell that he deserved this role because I saw Chicago in New York also, and Christie Brinkley was Roxie Hart. She's a famous supermodel who used to be married to Billy Joel, for those of you who don't know (I didn't know who she was.) She DEFINITELY got the part through her name. Because her singing, acting, and dancing were not up to par. I was really disappointed because I feel like  casting directors should know better. And it just seems unfair to me, casting her and not someone way more talented, just because she was famous.

 But this a critique on How to Succeed, not Chicago.

It was fun, entertaining, and captivating. I was not bored during this show even once, and when it was over I wanted to watch it again. Someone once told me that you know a show is good if you come out of it singing a song. And I have been those songs for a month and a half since I saw the show. And as far as the singing goes, if an actor didn't have the best voice, they definitely made up for it with their character. Like Wally in the clip above. And John Laroquette. He's not a singer, but he proved that he deserved his role just as much as Daniel Radcliffe did.

I saw five shows in New York, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was my favorite one. In 1994, Matthew Broderick played Daniel Radcliffe's role on broadway and that just made me like it even more. Haha. I love Matthew Broderick.

I only love good theatre. I don't give standing ovations unless they are deserved. And as soon as the curtain call started, I was on my feet.

I didn't give a standing ovation for Christie Brinkley.

6 - The Way I See It #1

So my sister showed me a blog that her friend had a few years ago and I thought it was really cool. It was her friend giving reviews on things that she'd seen, read or whatever. She had food, books, movies... she gave a really funny review of Breaking Dawn. (Click here to read it.) And I'm going to copy her. Not for my whole blog, but just occasionally as a post when I've seen or read something I found noteworthy.

So. My first critique.