Archive for July 9th, 2010

I had to admit I had a hard time finishing the book, primarily because it deals with one’s faith and spirituality and religion cannot be helped but be mixed into it. Being a Catholic with strong beliefs, I am quite wary of stories that depict God as something Else other than He really is.

What more when a child claims she sees God, experiences the stigmata, miraculously heals people with a touch even if she really has no intention to do it, and furthermore, calls her (yes a female) her “Guard”. Faith, the child in the story, does not have any religious background, her parents being non practicing Jews. What she has is a traumatic experience catching her father with another woman right in their house and a mother who had psychiatric problems and have experiences with depression.

Jodi Picoult doesn’t confirm nor negate whether Faith can heal or if she is making this all up or worse, her mom, Mariah, is behind all of this. She does make you see hard facts and make you go into your conclusion. I personally believe the story lets you take a look on YOUR OWN personal views and beliefs on faith, and it really is subjective. I have pored over the book instead of studying the  no exam life insurance quotes being offered to me because I really want to MAKE the story HAVE an ENDING. But there is none. And just as you were about to believe Faith is real, something in the ending makes you think otherwise.

To which Jodi answers in her web site:

What the heck did you mean by the end of Keeping Faith?

At the end of Keeping Faith, I wanted you to feel like Mariah and Millie and Ian and everyone else who comes into contact with Faith – like you’ve had to rethink what you believe. Whether you think she’s a prophet or a messiah or a fake, she is ultimately a little girl who hasn’t had her mom’s attention before. And AT THAT MOMENT she does fake speaking to God, because she isn’t willing to lose that attention. That said, I don’t personally believe that Faith is faking all along…I think that God moves onto someone more needy in that last scene. But I did want you to remember that above all else, she’s a kid – lest you fall into the same mistake that some of the media did during the course of the book.

I bought the book a week after I watched SATC2. A friend told me it was an easy and delightful read and I was curious I had to buy it. It took me two weeks before I actually opened to read it and once I read it, I couldn’t put it down and had to finish it.

It is true – it is easy reading. It is three levels higher than the Sweet Valley High and Sweet Dreams series and if you are a woman, you can somehow relate to all the awkwardness and bad choice of friends you might have made in high school. Back in high school, the most worry you can get is over-analyzing the eczema pictures you have in the yearbook.

When I was reading it, I was visualizing Sarah Jessica Parker on my head and her outfit in the movie circa first step in NYC – the 80’s. Imagine Footloose the movie costumes and you have it!

Here you get to see traces of what Carrie really is even after she became THE Carrie of SATC. She was always there for her friends – their priorities always seem to be higher than her own. She gets dense with guys, this time with gorgeous but bad boy Sebastian Kydd, who she has a crush on since she was 12. She freaks out when she realizes all her friends are slowly losing their virginity except her and yet she still maintains not to lose it in the end. Very Carrie for me, circa Aidan vs. Mr. Big time in SATC.

What was appealing here is that she has always been passionate about writing and through a mentor she never thought would be one to her, she claims top spot on doing what she does best – writing about men, love and (her seemingly lack of understanding) in relationships.

All that plot is great and keeps you glued to the page until the end, but what sticks with you later are Carrie’s internal musings.

On boys: "Boys’ mouths are never what you think they’re going to be anyway. Sometimes they’re stiff and sharp with teeth, or like soft little caves filled with down pillows."

Or even on calculus: "You never know when a rogue integer is going to show up and ruin your entire equation."

She maintains this wit even as she struggles between holding strong to the feminism her late mother instilled in her or taking the much easier path of losing herself and doing whatever boys will like more.

I signed up at GoodReads.com not to look for alli reviews but to help me discover new books, even make new friends and expand my reading preferences. There is a group that has a goal of reading 52 books a year and I joined them. Essentially, you just list down all the books you read for the year and most of them already have read 52! And it’s only July! Talk about inspiring!

The thing is, I really can’t stand reading ebooks because I can’t stand scrolling on my iPhone. I am such a cheapskate to buy $6 ebooks when I can buy paperbacks with the same equivalent. Turning the pages provide such a high for me. If only it was not that expensive!

Friends have given me so many ebooks lately but I still haven’t gotten to reading any of them. Every night I try to turn off everything electronic and just read books or even practice my handwriting (Believe me, if you have been typing and using the computer for a long time and using electronic gadgets to keep notes of everything, it changes! Better practice) and reading ebooks gets crossed off my list.

Who knows maybe I will just bite the bullet and read from the laptop. I bet my eyes would love to spank me when that happens!

Here are some Ebook Reader apps you might find useful if you have the iPhone or iTouch:
Read here!

eReader

eReader’s slidebar makes flipping pages easy.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

eReader is one of the most popular iPhone apps in the Apple App Store and it’s the second-most downloaded program in the store’s "Books" section. It’s well liked for good reason.

eReader is designed extremely well, and it makes flipping through pages of your free books or premium titles easy. If you want to skip to a certain page, you can use a slidebar above the text to flip through the book. It’s a simple feature, but you shouldn’t overlook it; this is an ideal way to skip pages that more eBook readers should adopt.

Stanza

Stanza makes personalizing the text quick and easy.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

Stanza is the most-downloaded eBook app on the App Store and it gets that prize for good reason: it’s the best application in this roundup.

Unlike the Kindle for iPhone app, Stanza allows you to read much more than just books. In fact, the program also lets you access newspapers and online sites, and supports MS LIT, epub, Mobipocket, and PalmDoc eBook formats. You can even view Word documents and PDF files in Stanza.

Buying books and getting them into Stanza is simple. The easiest way to access titles and start reading them is through the Fictionwise Reader Store, accessible within the app. It claims to have over 50,000 titles. In my search, it had everything I was looking for on topics ranging from history to sports to fiction. I didn’t have any trouble getting those books and reading them with the app.

Reading eBooks in Stanza is easily the most appealing when compared with its competitors. The app provides for multi-column views or standard book layout view. And by swiping the screen, you can move up, down, left, and right. You can flip pages with just a tap on the screen. You can also change the color, size, and font of your text with a slidebar. Combine those options and you can easily create an experience that can be tailored to your liking.