Inferno Squad is GREAT - Star Wars Battlefront II Inferno Squad Book Review

Today marks the release of Battlefront II:
Inferno Squad by Christie Golden. The novel ties in with the story mode of the
upcoming Battlefront II by introducing us to the members of Inferno Squad, who will
be the main cast of the story. While the game will show us what they did
after the destruction of the second Death Star, the book tells us about their very first
missions after the destruction of the first Death Star. The book is all about the four members of
the squad, Captain Iden Versio, Gideon Hask, Del Meeko, and Seyn Marana.

For this book to work, the characters have
to be a compelling team, and they absolutely are. Watching them bond, become friends, and succeed
on missions put a big ole smile on my face. It honestly reminded me of reading the early
X-Wing books, seeing the new Rogue Squadron come together. Each soldier has a distinct personality and
I already cant wait to see them all come to life on screen.

Whats most impressive about their likability
is that they are Imperials. And not even really noble Imperials. Theyre not like Thrawn or Wulff Yularen. They are die-hard, lets kill rebel scum,
and do whatever we need to do to succeed Imperials.

Ive always been a Rebel fanboy, so for
me to say Inferno Squad are a fun crew, that really means something. The bulk of the story is about how they took
down what remained of Saw Gerreras Partisans. Pitting them against the most bloodthirsty
Rebel cell was a smart move, because its not like we see the Empire running around
committing war crimes. Theyre stopping war crimes.

That said, the Partisans arent all bad
either. I wont get into spoilers here, but some
familiar characters return, and I am very much a fan of how that all went down. Whenever storytellers work within Star Wars,
there is always a danger of going too far with the easter eggs or relying too much on
familiar faces. The biggest connection this book has to other
media does not stray into that area.

Not only does it make perfect sense, but Christie
Golden was brilliantly subtle with her hints. Everything becomes clear by the end of the
book, but if you took the time to read other Star Wars books, specifically Rebel Rising,
you will be able to piece some things together. Thats the right way to do a multimedia
universe. Reward the people that invest in all aspects
of the universe.

But dont go so far as to alienate the people
that dont or cant. Golden found that balance and nailed it. I only have two complaints about the book. First, a pretty major plot development can
be easily guessed if you have been following the marketing for the game.

Thats hardly Christie Goldens fault,
I would just recommend not over analyzing the Battlefront II trailers like I did. Second, I wish it was longer, which is about
the most complimentary complaint to have. I liked the characters, and I dont want
to have to wait until November to spend more time with them. I think its interesting that both of Goldens
canon Star Wars books have to do with how far people will go to achieve their goals
while undercover.

Dark Disciple was about Quinlan Vos. Inferno Squad is about Iden and her team. I really enjoy these cat and mouse type stories. Through Imperial Eyes is one of my favorite
episodes of Star Wars Rebels.

And Golden really knows how to write dangerous
and upsetting moral crises for her characters. If you like morally gray stories about soldiers,
if you think the Empire did nothing wrong, or if youre just excited to get to know
Inferno Squad before the game, I can very comfortably recommend this book to you. And by the way, Mitch Dyer, the writer of
Battlefront IIs story, has confirmed that the game will include some fun references
to this book. One last thing I want to talk doesnt have
to do with the book so much, but I think its definitely worth mentioning.

The book is dedicated to the actors that make
up Inferno Squad in the game, but especially Janina Gavankar, who plays Iden. Golden says Janina reached out to her with
such enthusiasm to learn more about the book, and so she would know the complete backstory
of her character, so she could use it to inform her performance. Thats awesome. I love that dedication.

Again, that doesnt really fit within a
review of the book itself, but it definitely involves Inferno Squad, and I wanted to point
it out. If youre still on the fence about spending
your money, well hey maybe youd like to get the audiobook for free! The Inferno Squad audiobook is out now, its
voiced by Iden Versio herself, Janina Gavankar, and you can get it for free by clicking on
the link in the description or by going to www.Audibletrial.Com/starwarsexplained. If you sign up for a trial, youll get a
credit for one free book, and you can use it on Inferno Squad. Or a number of other Star Wars books.

Or get any book you want! The point is you get a free book, and youll
be supporting the channel when you do! Thats it for today! If you havent already please like this
video, subscribe to the channel to see new Star Wars videos every single day, follow
me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and consider checking out my Patreon page! As always, thanks for watching and may the
Force be with you!.

How To Get Honest Amazon Reviews For Your Kindle Book

Hi everyone. This is Stefan from projectlifemastery.Com, and in this video I'm going to show you guys how to get honest Amazon reviews for your Kindle books. I recently did a video blog sharing the best way to get Amazon reviews. If you haven't already watched that, I recommend it.

Go back; I'll have a link in the description or maybe somewhere on this video as an annotation. Go to that video because I share really how Amazon thinks and the best way, the most long term and sustainable way to get reviews for your Kindle books or really any product on Amazon. To summarize that, I do recommend watching it because it's a really good and powerful video. To summarize that, you have to understand what Amazon wants.

They want you as a publisher and an author to basically publish your book on their platform, and then go out there and market the hell out of it. Go to social media, blogs, YouTube. Use all the different channels and opportunities that are available online and market your product, market your book on Amazon or Kindle book. Then basically have customers organically leave reviews.

They want to make sure reviews are legitimate, they're honest, they're not manipulating the system in any way. If you are, if you're violating Amazon's review guidelines, they're likely to get deleted or removed. If you're massively manipulating the system then you could potentially get in trouble with Amazon, which is just bad news and you want to avoid. I focus on the long term, the sustainable strategies, to get reviews on Amazon.

However, I will share with you guys, in this video, a really powerful strategy. Something that you can do if you're just launching a brand new book on Kindle. This is something that I teach, inside of my K Mastery course at kmoney mastery.Com,  which is a really awesome online training program on how to publish and sell Kindle books on Amazon. One of the best strategies that I can recommend for people to get honest reviews that are compliant with Amazon's guidelines, they're not going to get deleted or removed, is basically creating what I call a launch list.

For every book that you sell on Kindle, you want to make sure that you have a launch strategy for that book. Oftentimes, if you're brand new, you just want to get your book out there. You don't want to have as much friction to start selling. You want to start selling right away.

As you gain more experience as a publisher and as an author, you want to be more strategic with every book that you're going to publish and launch. You don't just want to put a book out there. Oftentimes you want to hype it up. You want to build it up, just like if you go and see a movie or something like that.

They recently had the Batman versus Superman. They hyped that thing up, that movie, for several months beforehand. What that does, is when you hype things up and you prepare for that, then it creates all this buzz. It creates this excitement and then when it's finally available, you have people who are raving fans that are rabid fans.

People that just can't wait to get their on it and watch the movie. That's how these big studios and movies and everything are able to do millions and millions of dollars.
Similar with Apple. When Apple launches a product they don't just put out a product like a new iPhone and say go buy it. They announce it.

They build up a lot of hype for it. Sure enough, when it does become available, people are waiting outside the Apple store and everything, twenty four hours in advance or whatever, just to be able to go and buy the new iPhone or whatever. That's the power of a successful launch. That's how you want to think.

You want to develop a strategy for every book that you're going to launch. Getting reviews, honest reviews, is part of that strategy. One strategy that I have is building a launch list. For every book that you're going to publish what you want to do is you can either put it either available on a pre-sale, which is a new feature that KDP has in Kindle Direct Publishing.

You can have a book as a pre-sale option where basically the book is available to purchase. People can leave reviews on your Amazon listing, but they can't yet download and receive the book. You decide when the book becomes available, in which case then they're going to receive the book and be able to download it and read it. The pre-sale option is a great feature but it's not required.

You can utilize the strategy even without doing that. Let's say that you have a book, it's on weight loss. It's a weight loss book. In order to get reviews and build up the hype and the buzz, and be able to give your book that boost right out of the gate when you launch it; what I recommend for people to do is build a launch list.

Basically if you have a weight loss book, you want to find all the people out there. Reach out to people and find different audiences and demographics of people that are going to be interested in your book on weight loss. For example, you can go on different message boards and forums. You can go to different Facebook groups.

You can go on LinkedIn. You can go on Twitter. Even on Twitter, you can do a search for weight loss and you can see all the people that are tweeting about weight loss. You can reach out to these people.

You can reach out to these people on message boards, on Facebook, et cetera, on Reddit. You can reach out to these people and say, "Hey, I notice you're interested in weight loss. I've got this great book that can help you. It's a great book on weight loss.

It has a lot of different tips and strategies on how to lose weight. I think you'll really enjoy it. I'd love to send you this book for free." Or, "This book is going to be free on a free promotion from this time to this time." Or, "The book's going to be heavily discounted, only ninety-nine cents on this day. I'd love for you to check it out and receive value from this.

In exchange, would you mind sharing your thoughts, leaving an honest review on Amazon. If it's great, share that it's great. If it's bad, then share potential feedback you might have for me." By doing that, by reaching out to a lot of people, what I often do is I reach out to a mass number of people that are targeted, that are interested in the subject of my book, the niche You want to make sure people are targeted. Reach out to all those people.

Get people that will say yes, they'll agree to it or whatever. In which case you can either send them the PDF of the book, the actual book file directly to their email. You could gift them the book as well, on Amazon. Amazon has a gifting feature.

You can even send people a gift card to buy your book. There's different ways of delivering your book to people. You basically ... They'll agree to it and then you add them to what is basically an Excel spreadsheet.

I keep track of everyone in Excel spreadsheet. This is my launch list. These are all the people that have agreed. Their name, their email.

They've agreed to check on my book and leave a review. I've made it clear to them that the book is going to be available on these days and times. I ask them if they're able to ... I give them enough notice, but I ask them to be able to leave a review on this day, or during this week, or during this two week period because that's my launch period.

I want to get all those reviews for the book or the product. Just by doing that what happens is, you reach out to a lot of people. You build this list. Over time, you keep doing this, you're going to have a list of over a hundred people that you can go to, to get a hundred reviews for your book.

Every time your going launch a new product, a new book on Amazon, you can basically go to your launch list that you've built up maybe over several months or even several years. You go to your launch list and you say, "Hey, I've got a new book available now. Has a new book on weight loss." Or this book's on dieting or this book's exercise. "I'd love for you to check it out.

I'll send you access to it and leave an honest review." You can already see how powerful this is. The ultimate way of doing this is by building an email list, which is basically a list of your customers. That will happen over time. That is something you're going to want to focus on if your going to be publishing on selling Kindle books.

You want to use it as an opportunity to build an email list of your customers because then you can build a relationship with them. They've already read your books. They've already received value from you in some way. You want to build that email list eventually.

Having this launch list and basically just putting in the time and finding potential reviewers of your book, people that would be interested in it and building that up. That's very powerful. You do have to be aware of Amazon's guidelines. For example some of their guidelines are like, they don't want people that know the author or the publisher to leave a review.

That's kind of a gray area. People still do that. Amazon will delete those reviews. They have some how, some way of knowing that your mom left a review for your book.

However, I do recommend that if you are going to reach out to people, whether it's your friends on social media or people you might know or whatever, make sure that they're leaving a disclaimer in their review. Basically by having a disclaimer in the review and saying I've received this product for free in exchange for leaving a review, often times that will be enough for Amazon. They'll be okay with it. If they received the product for free, you sent them a PDF or whatever it is, of the book, making sure that they disclose that.

The relationship that they might have with you. Even if it's like ... Again I don't want to share anything that might be against Amazon's guidelines. Let's say that your sister left a review on your book.

She's like, screw Amazon's guidelines, I want to leave a review on your book. By her saying in the review that I'm the sister of this author or this publisher, again that's something Amazon likes to see. That's just basically making the review more honest for the potential customer as well. That, I believe, is one of the best ways, the best strategies on getting reviews for your book or your product.

It does take time, I understand that. I wish I could just give you guys a shortcut, like a quick fix or whatever. Oftentimes people are looking for that. Oftentimes the more sustainable, long-term methods that are going to lead to the most success, they require work.

They require putting in the time and working hard. I wish I could just give you guys a lazy way of getting reviews. Again, like I said, if you focus on those short term strategies, you can get a lot of reviews but then they're going to disappear. I've seen that time and time again with publishers.

They buy reviews. They're doing things that are clearly against Amazon's guidelines. Maybe they get a bunch of reviews for their book but then within a few weeks or a few months all those reviews disappear. If your book was selling and it was ranked high on Amazon, now all of a sudden it has a sudden drop and then your kind of restarting all over again to try to build that book back up.

By building this launch list ... Again you want to find where people are hanging out that are interested in your book, that want to receive your book. There are so many different places online. Even just going after the top reviewers on Amazon because Amazon rewards people for leaving reviews on Amazon.

They actually have a whole ranking list of the top reviewers in Amazon. A lot of them, they want to receive products or books for free to leave reviews because that's all they do all day. They'll have their contact information on their Amazon profile. That's another way too, that you can reach out to people and find people that can potentially leave reviews for your books.

By putting the time, guys, hustling and grinding and reaching out to people and building that launch list, that's a powerful asset you have now for every book that you launch. Even if at the beginning you only start out with ten people or fifteen people, that's ten or fifteen reviews that you can just get on your book either before it's available for sale on Amazon or right out of the gate. Right when you launch that book, you can get those ten or fifteen reviews just like that. Because you have those reliable people that have already agreed to receive your book and leave reviews for you.

Again, I do want to encourage, because the title of this video is, To go after Honest Reviews, you don't want fake reviews. You don't want people to lie. You want people to honestly share their thoughts of your book. If your book is good and it warrants five stars, they'll leave a five star review.

If it's not good, if it's a one star or two star book, then leave that as a review or at least directly communicate with me and provide feedback that I can use to make it better. Because all reviews are good. Every review is an opportunity for you to learn and have feedback to improve your book to make it better and better. Like you guys are watching this video right now, if you like it, hit the like button.

If you don't like it, click the dislike button. You know, I want you to share honestly how you feel. If your receiving value, great. If not, then let me know that, because that's valuable feedback that I can utilize to make my videos, my YouTube channel better and better.

My whole focus in business, in marketing, is always becoming better, always improving and trying to add as much value as possible. That's one of the best ways, I feel, to get honest reviews for your Kindle book. Of course if you guys want to learn more about how to market your book and sell your book on Amazon and on Kindle, I've got a great online training program called K Money Mastery. It's helped hundreds and hundreds of people make money online from Kindle Publishing.

Even people that have gone on to make a six figure income from online publishing, which is pretty remarkable to me. If you guys want to learn more about that then go to kmoneymastery. Com. I'll have a link below in the description of this video.

Check it out. It's reasonably priced. It's a really great training program. It will help you better market and sell your products better on Amazon.

That's it for this video guys. Thanks for watching. Be sure to leave a comment below. I'll talk to you in the next video.

Hey, this is Stefan and thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed this, then pleased hit the like button below. Leave a comment to let us know what you think. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more great videos like this.

If you want to take your life to the next level, then I want to offer you a free gift. It's called my Life Mastery Tool Kit and it literally has the best-of-the-best of what I have to offer in terms of videos, articles and resources for taking your life to the next level and living an extraordinary life. To get access to this, all you have to do is click the link that will appear right here on this video. If you're on a mobile device, then click the link in the description below and then head on over to that page.

Enter your email address and I'll send you immediate access to the Life Mastery Tool Kit. I want to thank you again for watching this video. Until the next one, I'll talk to you soon..

Homegoing by Yaa GyasiBook Review

Hi everyone. I'm Rincey and this is Rincey
Reads. Today I'm going to be doing a book review on Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I realize
that in my wrap up I mispronounced her name.

Hopefully I said it correctly this time. If
you saw my wrap up, you already know that I absolutely love this book. I gave it 5 out
of 5 stars. It's only the second book I've given a 5 star rating to.

The other one was
Honor by Elif Shafak, which is currently sitting behind my head at the moment. Homegoing comes
out on Tuesday, June 7th, which is just a couple of days away by the time this video
goes up. I got a copy of this from Edelweiss. But this is a book that I'm definitely going
to be picking up in hard copy and it'll probably go like right here so it can be in all my
videos like all of these other favorites.

This is a debut novel and it is one of the
buzziest books that's coming out this year. It got a huge advance so I feel like I've
been hearing about this book forever. And so I went into it being super skeptical about
whether or not I was going to like it because usually these big, buzzy, literary books generally
don't appeal to me. Especially I feel like the bigger the advance, the more likely I
am to not like it.

I think it's because the hype gets so big around a book that I go into
it super skeptical. But surprisingly, this book actually lived up to the hype for me.
This story starts off in the 1700s in what will soon to be Ghana. And you are following
this family over the course of about 300 years. In the beginning you are following these two
sisters named Effia and Essi.

They actually don't know that they exist. I believe that
they're half sisters as well. Effia ends up marrying this British man who comes to Ghana
and lives sort of this life of luxury. While Essi lives in this other village in Ghana
and her family sort of goes down a completely different path.

And you are just following
these families generation by generation. In each chapter you are getting the perspective
of a different family member. And every 2 chapters sort of goes down a line of the generations.
So you start up here with Effia and Essi and you follow each of their kids and then you
follow each of their kids, and you go on down the line through what's basically modern day.
I believe it's about the 1960s that it goes up to, or the 1970s. And so you get to follow
these two completely separate threads.

One of them as they are enslaved and taken over
to the United States and another thread that stays in Ghana for the most part. There's
so much about this book that feels like it shouldn't have been for me but yet it's so
well done that I completely loved it. I'm generally not a fan of switching perspectives,
especially switching in every chapter. Because I feel like that in general changing point
of views all the time either one, doesn't provide me with the depth that I want in the
story, or it leads me wanting to read more about certain characters over others.

But
what Yaa Gyasi is able to do in this novel is not only provide you with the point of
view of whatever character that you are following in that chapter, but each chapter also provides
more information about the past. So it feels like this never ending thread that you are
following. And in general each chapter just sort of follows these characters for a chunk
of time, but there's still so much information that is provided to you about the previous
generations within that chunk of time. And you also get to put the pieces of the puzzle
together, seeing how X event leads to Y event or how the events something two chapters ago
leads to the events that happen now and you can see that leading to the future events.
It's just so fantastic.

It's just completely mindblowing how well this novel is put together.
Like I can't even imagine the amount of just like planning that go into this. Just following
the family tree down this line and seeing how it all wraps up in the end. I was so ready
to like be unsatisfied by the ending because it was like you follow these threads as they
go down and it feels like they're just two completely stories and yet they're still so
connected to each other even though the relationship between the characters are getting father
and farther apart. It was just, it was so good.

I can't just stop talking about how
good this book was. There's just so many things to talk about with this book. I'm gonna try
my best to just cover a couple of highlights here. I love the fact that you get these sort
of glimpses into history while you are also learning about these characters.

You get to
see a lot about what's happening in Ghana over the course of these couple hundreds of
years. And you get to see sort of how these characters play in the history of the United
States. As someone who knows American history, obviously because I grew up in the United
States, it was nice to see how Yaa Gyasi incorporates these characters into those moments in history.
I really love the fact that you get to see how the consequences of one character sort
of has sort of ripples and affects throughout multiple generations, not just the one like
directly under them. I liked how you got to see that so much of these characters' lives
are so cyclical.

You see similar mistakes being made. You see similar personality traits
being passed down. You got to see similar almost paths being taken. Which feels so weird
because it feels like that's something that isn't really discussed or talked about very
much.

But because she's covering this big span of time, you get to see how there is
this aspect that's in people that comes from like your own family background. It's not
just, you know, nature, it's also nurture as well and just playing with that as well.
All of the characters that are presented in this book I feel like are really well developed
characters, which again, is something that I was not expecting at all because it changes
perspectives all the time. There is a lot of depth and complexity to all of them. It's
interesting to see like what information gets shared with different characters and what
doesn't.

And the reader definitely knows a lot more about the family history and what's
going on than usual the characters do and it's interesting to see like what gets revealed
and what doesn't and what stories get passed down through the generations. I think it also
just provides this really great and interesting contrast between what life was like in Ghana,
what life was like for blacks in America. This book is also a really difficult read,
which I feel like I have to say. Yaa Gyasi does not shy away from difficult topics with
these characters.

But despite all of that, I found it to be also completely compelling.
I didn't want to put the book down. I was thinking about it constantly and thinking
about the characters constantly. One recommendation that I got prior to reading this book that
I would definitely pass along to other people if you are planning on picking up the book
is to read at least a generation at a time. So read at least two chapters at a time together
so that way you can sort of see what's happening in the same like years almost.

Or what's happening
within the same generation. If you have to put down the book, which most people probably
will at some point, put it down after you finish every generation. So usually it's about
2 chapters each. And I think that really helps you as the reader to get a sense of what's
happening in the bigger world as well as the smaller world of these characters.

And I think
that made it so it wasn't super confusing. In the e-version that I got of the book, and
I'm assuming it's going to be in the hard copy as well, there's also a family tree.
So I actually flipped back and forth between the family tree and the chapters to sort of
understand the relationship I was going to be following. Even though I knew it went back
and forth between the Ghana side of the family and the U.S. Side of the family, I would still
always look at the family tree before starting a chapter and sort of get my bearings about
where I am in the world and where I am in this family.

So yeah, this is just such a
fantastic book. I'm definitely going to be picking up a copy on Tuesday. I'm so excited
to own a physical copy of it. And I cannot highly recommend this book enough.

It's a
big buzzy book for a reason. This is one that seems to be living up to the hype. So yeah,
that is just my review of Homegoing, the best that I could do of it. There's so much happening
in this novel, it's really hard to not like break it down chapter by chapter because each
chapter has so much happening, which is just so ridiculous.

And yet I was still able to
devour this book in like 2 or 3 days, which again, is just amazing what Yaa Gyasi has
done with this book and I am very interested to see what she's going to do next. Hopefully
her second book lives up to it. But who knows. So yeah, those are my quick thoughts on Homegoing.
If you've read this book, feel free to leave a comment down below letting me know what
you thought of it.

Or if you have any questions about the book, feel free to leave that down
in the comment section as well. So yeah, that's all I have for now and thanks for watching..

High-Rise Book & Film Review + Tom Hiddleston Reading.

Hoi! Today I want to talk to you guys about a book to movie adaptation that I completely left out of my list when I was doing the first half of 2016. And it is one that, kind of only came onto my radar about two weeks ago. And it is an adaptation of the book High-Rise, by J.G. Ballard, who I've heard of before, because I had to read one of his books, Drowned World, in my apocalyptic fiction course that I did during my masters.

I don't have any distinct memories of this book or whether I read the entire thing, but when I heard that this is being made into a film I was quite interested. So, at this point in time, I've only just started the book, but I wanna tell you a little bit about the basic setup of it. I also have a bit of a surprise at the end of this video, so keep watching. So, this book was published in 1975, and it is the story of Dr.

Robert Laing (I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce his name) and it sort of takes place in this high-rise building of 40 floors outside of London. And it's very much a self-sustaining building, and people technically don't have to leave and it's "the would-be paradise turned dystopia, ruled by intimidation and violence, and, as the residents organize themselves for war, floor against floor, no one wants it to stop". And now we're gonna jump to me in the future. Okay, it's now a week later and I have since seen the film and finished the book also, I am coming to you from Norway.

I have some thoughts and they are all written down on this piece of paper. So, first of all, I just wanna talk through the premise a little bit because when I filmed that earlier clip, I obviously hadn't seen the film yet or read the book. There is this 40 floor high-rise that's been build. There are 2000 people that have moved in.

And amongst that crowd, there's sort of the three main characters. First of all, there is Dr. Robert Laing, who is newly single and he's moved in on what I think it's the 25th floor. Then, there is Anthony Royal, who lives at the top floor and he helped design the high-rise.

Finally, there is Richard Wilder, who lives on the second floor with his wife and kids. He works either TV or film studios, and he's described as like a big strong man. So, when everyone has moved in to what seems to be this idyllic building, complaints start happening. The lights start getting cut for certain floors, the garbage chutes are not working properly, and what starts with complaints that aren't really resolved, ends up causing a lot of animosity between different floors, especially the lower floors, which are the cheaper apartments, and the top floors, where sort of just rich and famous people live.

And very quickly, things start spiraling out of control. So, first of all, let's talk a little bit about the book. It is from the point of view of the three different characters I mentioned earlier. None of these characters are very likeable.

It was an interesting experience reading the book directly after seeing the film. Both the book and the film start with a little flash-forward of basically a scene from the end. I did think the book was quite a quick read, it's only 250 pages. I found the writing quite blunt.

I think the content is shocking enough that the writing doesn't really need to emphasise it that much. So just simply stating certain things does the trick I would say that women definitely get the worst treatment and description in this book. There's a lot of, sort of, uncomfortable physical descriptions of women in this book and I've heard that J.G. Ballard was not the biggest fan of women.

What I did really like in the book over the film is that there was a lot more inner dialogue. Sort of illustrating the thought patterns of "why aren't people cleaning up their trash?" "Why aren't they leaving the building?" The mentality in the book is very much that they want to keep their issues to themselves. Because they want to have the opportunity to "solve it" amongst themselves, and they don't want the authorities to get involved. So, when they leave the building, they still dress up very nicely and, like clean themselves and they go to work and mostly sleep on their desks, but no one really has a clue what's going on on the outside world, and they wanna keep it that way.

You can sort of figure that out from the film but I think that in the book it's definitely more clearly illustrated. Another thing that is a bit more clear in the book is that the people very quickly start forming clans between different floors and they go on raiding parties. It basically turns into a bit of a Lord of the Flies situation, where they sort of make their own new rules and they are so far removed from society in this building that they feel like the rules of the normal world don't really apply to them anymore. It gets pretty ridiculous and pretty disgusting very quickly.

Which is a good point to switch to the film. Going into the film, I didn't really know what to expect. I knew that Tom Hiddleston was in it and they definitely made Dr. Laing, who's played by Tom Hiddleston, the main character of the film.

Also, there's a very interesting naked scene on the balcony that might be of interest to some of you. He gets a lot more relationships with some of the different characters both friendly and other. But I really noticed that you get to see a lot more of the female characters and they have a lot more speaking parts, and there's a lot more characters that have, sort of a developed character and an actual, you know, name to them. But it's also harder because you have to see all the abuse being played out on screen.

I feel that if you want to describe the aesthetic of this film, it's very much a 1970's swinger party that's completely gone out of hand. There were a lot of really gorgeous shots, lot of vibrant colours, the sound design was really good. Also, the soundtrack was great. There's this one scene where there's like a string quartet playing an Abba song, and later on, it gets remixed.

Probably one of my favourite bits. And, overall, I think the film just has a vibe of "you want to look away, but you can't". But sometimes you have to. I don't want to give away any of the ending, but I absolutely loved it.

So, if you know what kind of endings I love, then you can probably predict what happens. I do want to say that if you want to go see this film, be warned that tere's a lot of sexual abuse, violence against both people and animals... So, if you don't want to see that, maybe that's not the film for you. But I think it's good to go in with a little bit of warning.

I did think it was a really good film. I think it will definitely split opinions. I feel like you sort of leave the cinema a different person, in a bit of a daze. Okay, so that's everything that I've written down about both the book and the movie.

I'm definitely going to read some more J.G. Ballard. If any of you have read the book or seen the film, I'm very curious to hear what you think. I hope you enjoyed my double bill review.

And now, I'm going to leave you with a clip of Tom Hiddleston reading from the beginning of the book. Chapter one. Critical mass. Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Doctor Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning. No point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its 40 floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket, its swimming pools, bank and junior school, all in effect abandoned in the sky, the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation. Certainly, his own studio apartment on the 25th floor was the last place Laing would have chosen as an early skirmish ground.

This overpriced sell slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building. He had bought after his divorce, specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity. Curiously enough, despite all Laing's efforts to detach himself form his 2000 neighbours and the regime of trivial disputes and irritations that provided that only corporate life, it was here, if anywhere, that the first significant event had taken place. On this balcony, where he now squatted beside the fire of telephone directories,  eating the roast hind quarters of the Alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the Medical School..

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (Book Summary and Review) - Minute Book Report

This is a story about a boy named Brian who
is flying from New York to Canada to spend time with his father. However, during the
flight, the pilot of the small aircraft dies of a heart attack and Brian is forced to land
the plane. Fortunately, Brian survives the plane crash,
but suffers several injuries. He builds a shelter and gathers supplies, but really doesn't
know what he is doing.

After his wounds heal, Brian begins to learn
and adapt to his new environment. He starts to recognize what's edible and even starts
a fire. Just when things begin to look good for Brian,
bad luck strikes and he is attacked by a moose and a tornado wipes out his camp. In the aftermath of the tornado, however,
the tail of his plane surfaces in the nearby lake.

He swims to the plane and retrieves
a survival pack. Among the supplies is an emergency transmitter. In the end, Brian is rescued and discovers
a newfound respect for nature. Readers understand early on that Brian is
very vulnerable in the wild.

He is consistently slowed by his injuries and inability to do
much for himself. A lot of what he thinks he knows about survival often comes from popular
culture, like TV shows and movies. However, Brian begins to learn about his environment
and matures his survival instinct. He first recognizes his disadvantage in nature when
he begins collecting food and wood.

He understands that he must gather enough food and wood not
just for the present, but also for the future in case he ever were to get hurt or injured.
And it's from this foresight and progressive thinking that Brian demonstrates his understanding
of survival. One of the great realizations that Brian has
in the wild is that everything in nature is constantly trying to eat. This realization
pushes Brian to create innovative solutions to gather food, whether it be weapons for
hunting or a fish farm. And as Brian begins to reinvent technology
to harvest food around him, readers also recognize that his tastes change.

At first, Brian is
content with eating berries. Later, however, he craves fish, bird, and bigger game. The conclusion of the story includes two rescues
for Brian. The first is his physical rescue from the wilderness, but the second rescue
is from the bitterness and disdain towards his mother.

After Brian discovers that his
mother's affair led to his parents' divorce, he strongly holds it against her. However,
through surviving life-threatening situations, Brian puts his family drama in perspective.
He never forgets his mother's actions, but at least he can let go..

Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen - Animated Book Summary And Review

Imagine that you are walking back from work
excited that another successful day has gone by when all of sudden you realize you never
called mike he is your best friend and today is his birthday but you were so busy
the whole day that you never had a chance to call.. No problem you think to yourself - as
soon as I get home Ill wish him happy birthday but when you get home, a pile of unopened
mail greets you by the door, unwashed dishes are calling your name and you get distracted
by other exciting house chores The next morning, feeling like a horrible
friend, you wonder how can something so important slip my mind The reason is simple - your brain is for having
ideas, NOT for holding them. With a never-ending stream of demands for
you attention, both at home and at work, things are bound to slip through the cracks. Only when your mind is clear and your thoughts
are organized can you achieve effective results.

This is where Getting Things Done, or GTD
for short, comes into play. It is a framework designed to help you keep
track of tasks, ideas and projects. The Getting Things Done system is made of
5 simple steps - capture, process, organize, review and engage. Everything begins with capturing all
ideas, tasks, projects, to-do items and other random bits of information that come your
way every single day.

These are things like emails, letters, calls
and action items that come from talking to other people or they can be ideas and tasks
that are born in your own creativity and imagination. Wherever that information comes from, you
need to capture it, or externalize it so you dont have to keep it in your brain. Now that you have all this information captured,
it is time to make sense of it so you can actually move forward with your goals, instead
of wanting to pull your hear out from the information overload. Step number 2 in GTD is processing.

For every item that you captured ask yourself
the following question - is it actionable? The possible answers are two - YES or NO. If the item is actionable, like an email from
a colleague asking you about an update for the project you are working together on, ask
yourself a followup question - would it take 2 minutes or less to complete? If the answer is yes, go ahead and do
it. If the answer is no, you need to put
this action off for later by adding them to an action items list (more on that in step
3). If it will take you 30 seconds to reply to
your colleagues email, it makes sense to take care of it on the spot and move on.

If you need to have a 20-minute conversation
on the topic, it is best to schedule it. If the item you are processing is not actionable
- like a confirmation of a payment you made for your monthly internet bill - you have
2 choices - discard it or keep it as reference in case you need that info down the road. Repeat the same process for every piece of
information Youve processed the information, things
are already looking up for you, now you need to organize it. This is where the magic happens.

You have an action list from all the actionable
items that you did not already do in the previous step. Now you need to organize and prioritize them
based on the following 3 criteria: - by project, by time and by context Actions related to particular project, such
as building a deck for your next presentation, or organizing the halloween party for your
kids, can be grouped together. Actions that have some sort of a deadline,
or a time specific (like Mikes birthday) should go on your calendar so you can take
care of them when the time is right. You can also group actions by context, such
as phone calls you need to make or groceries that you need to pick up.

Of course you can also mix and match and put
things in more than one category - like that video you need to create on Friday, the 17th. This is where you need to tweak and personalize
GTD to fit your needs. You know best how to group and prioritize
your items. One thing to always keep top of mind though
is this question - what is the next action? If you sit down to call Mike for his birthday,
but dont have his number, you aren to being very efficient.

The next action shouldve been find Mikes
number, not call Mike. Asking yourself that question will help you
sequence things better. Now, youve organized your action items,
the sun is shining brighter and the world is a happier place. But what about the non-actionable items? Thats easy.

They can either be kept for reference - like
that manual for your TV that you dont need until your kid turns on the spanish closed
captioning and you need to figure out how to reverse it. Or they can be deferred for later - like that
idea for a business that you would like to keep and revisit in 6 months when you have
more time - add it to a someday maybe list and create an action item to review this
list in 6 months. Done! High five! All the random information is now organized
and you are ready to take over the world. The next step is Review.

With so many demands for your attention, things
are bound to go out of place. This is where the review comes into play. Every week, review your items and make any
adjustments if needed. Is everything where it supposed to be? Is there a pile of information somewhere that
you need to process? A weekly review is essential to keeping everything
running smoothly.

Every month, take some time to review your
short-terms goals. Are your action items moving your towards
your goals, or are you just keeping yourself busy? Are you saving for that car, are you learning
the Spanish you want or are you in reaction mode? Schedule these regular reviews and reflection
periods so you can ensure the train is heading down the right tracks. The last part step in GTD is called engage. This is where you actually roll up the sleeves
and get cracking.

You calendar should contain all the tasks
that you need to do today. Your project list will tell you what you need
to do to move a project forward. Your contexts will help you batch things together. As you go about your day, crossing all of
those items, next information is bound to come you way.

Now you know what to do with it - capture
it, decide if it actionable, if the answer is yes and you can get it done in 2 minutes
or less, do it, if not add it to the appropriate action list. If the information is not actionable, it gets
stored or ends up in the trash. Nothing to it. You are now as cool, calm and collected as
a buddhist zen master deep in meditation.

Now, Mike will never have to spend another
birthday without wishes from his best friend. And if you want more video such as this one.

FLOW BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYIANIMATED BOOK REVIEW

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
and that's by the way how you say his name, dedicates a big part of the book to this idea
that, "A person can make himself happy, or miserable,
regardless of what is actually happening 'outside,' just by changing the contents of consciousness." And he goes on to quote
Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, and Viktor Frankl...
So this idea isn't something new, it's been around for millennia now,
but recently we've been able to gather more data on it. And I've talked about this idea ad nauseam
now, so I won't go into detail with it.
I've talked about it in my videos about Meditations and Man's Search for Meaning,
and many other videos, but to touch on it briefly... People have this idea that
if you just had a bigger house, you'd be happy. If you just had a nicer car, you'd be happy.
If you just had a lot of money, you'd be happy.

But that's just not how happiness works... Here's a graph adjusted for inflation
that shows a period of about half a century where personal income tripled,
but it didn't really affect how happy people were.
After some basic point, where your basic needs have been met,
buying an even bigger house isn't the way to happiness.
It's about changing the contents of your consciousness. So how can we change the contents of our consciousness?
One of the best ways to do this is to put ourselves in a state of optimal
experience called flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as,
"The state in which people are so involved in an activity
that nothing else seems to matter." He goes on to say that,
"Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over
to think about anything irrelevant or to worry about problems.
Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted." And you've probably experienced this before,
and it's absolutely one of the best feelings in the world.
If you're working on your business, you might be so focused on what you're doing
that 12 hours might pass and you have no idea...

All of a sudden, you look up and you realize
you haven't even had any food, you haven't thought about anything else,
the only thing that you could focus on was your business. And the same thing applies to so many other
activities whether you're a rock climber focused on climing
your new record or a master pianist composing your new masterpiece.
It's an amazing feeling. You're so immersed into what you love doing,
into what you're really good at, that your brain simply can't focus on other
things. You're not worrying about stupid things.
You're not regretting what you did yesterday or stressing about what you'll do tomorrow.
It's absolutely one of the best feelings in the world.

So if we look at the flow diagram,
here's how you put yourself in the state of flow...
You don't want what you're doing to be too challenging,
otherwise you'll have anxiety. You don't want what you're doing to be too
easy for your skills either, otherwise you'll be bored.
But it's when you balance these two that you end up in the flow channel.
You're striving towards the upper right corner constantly.
You increase your challenge, you get better. You get better, you increase your challenge.
And the more you move toward that direction, the more intense the state of flow gets. So this is not really a how-to book,
but our goal should be to find what it is that we love
and then keep getting better at it and keep making it more challenging.
Or in other words, the main goal is to spend as much of your
life as you possibly can in the state of flow
because that is where you find this unbelievable ecstasy.

And Csikszentmihalyi gives an example of the
indians in the Shuswap region of Canada,
who would settle down in a place filled with resources,
and life was good, and they had everything they needed...
They had all the food and fish where they were,
but the elders would make sure that the entire village
would just pack up and move to a new location every 25 or 30 years.
This way, they knew they would have new places to explore
and hunt and fish and new challenges to overcome... And it's a great story to keep in mind when
you think about how most people just want to settle down in
front of their TV. For the rest of their lives... And in a lot of my videos,
I criticize being in front of the TV all night, or spending your entire day on your Facebook
feed, and I often get people who tell me,
"Well, what if that makes the person happy?" And the answer is,
"Sitting on Facebook all day will not make anyone genuinely happy."
If you pick a person who spends his entire day in front of the TV,
he's probably not going to be the most exciting, happy, ecstatic person.

Let's take a look at the graph again...
Looking at your facebook all day or watching TV
puts you in the lowest left corner of the graph,
which is known as the area of apathy. There's no challenge involved, there's no
skill involved, you're apathetic.
And when you're not completely apathetic, You're probably sitting there bored,
or worrying about everything there is to worry about. So move away from that...
Move away from the boredom, apathy, and worry and move towards ecstasy which is what you'll
experience when you hit the state of optimal experience
called flow..

Divergent Book Review by Veronica Roth

(Electronic beep) - If you watched my June favorites video, at the end of it I mentioned
I started using Audible.Com. Audible.Com is the top
provider of audiobooks with over 150,000 titles to choose from. (Hand slapping chest) Sorry, I had a moment. Anyway, I recommended the book Divergent by Veronica Roth and told you I would start listening to it in the car.

And guess what, I finished it! Thank you, L.A. Traffic. So now, I wanted to make a video giving my thoughts on this book. This book! Ooh, I loved it.

Ooh, I think I liked it
better than Hunger Games. (Groans) Okay, warning: minor spoilers ahead. First, you gotta understand. Besides a certain magical,
wonderful book series about a certain boy wizard, dystopian books are my favorite.

I heard about Divergent, but I didn't feel like I had to read it right away because the movie was just coming out and I had just started
rereading Hunger Games, so, yes. But then, what pushed me over the cliff of reading, it's like Reading
Rainbow but more violent, is that I found out that Tris, the main character of the series, had the same tattoo as me. I also have a tattoo of flying birds to represent each member
of my family on my ankle. Not this, this isn't real.

I got this tattoo before I read the book so when I heard about
that, it was destiny. We had the same tattoo,
her name started with a T, she was small but mighty, I mean, come on. So, in this book, society is
divided into five factions. Dauntless, Erudite, Abnegation, Candor, and Amity.

And when you turn 16, you must choose the faction that most
represents your personality. Kind of like Hogwarts houses, or like a Buzzfeed quiz, but to the extreme. You can choose to stay in
the faction you grew up with, or transfer to a new faction, but if you transfer, you basically never see your family again. Faction before blood.

Dauntless is for the brave, Abnegation is for the selfless, Erudite is for the intelligent, Amity is for the peaceful, and Candor is for the truthful. But before you decide on your faction, you have to go through an aptitude test that basically puts in you in a simulation and helps you choose. Well, when Tris takes the aptitude test her results are inconclusive,
making her divergent. Hey look, it's the title of the book.

Apparently this is bad, very bad, so she can never speak about her results. She who must not be named divergent. Well, when I got to this part, of course I had to sort
myself into a faction. And usually I'm good
with this kind of stuff, like Harry Potter was so obvious to me.

But this was hard. I know I'm not Candor or Amity, but the tattoo-loving daredevil in me likes Dauntless, the routine-loving giver in me loves Abnegation, and the nerd-loving Ravenclaw
in me loves Erudite. Well, I guess that makes me divergent. I would want to choose Dauntless, but I feel like in the
initiation I would just die.

I don't know, leave a
comment with what faction you think I'd be in, I'm curious. So Tris chooses Dauntless
because she's a little badass, and they're like, welcome to Dauntless, let's jump off a train. You alive, great, let's jump off a roof. These bitches be crazy.

We meet Four, sexy Mc-muscles, and Eric, ew, I don't like him. Since Tris is from Abnegation, everyone makes fun of
her and calls her stiff, and she's like, don't mess
with me and my sarcasm. Short people make up
for height in sarcasm. This book gave me a lot of emotions.

Tris always says that she's not pretty, and that it's weird for her to think that an older guy could
actually have feelings for her because she's so small, and I'm like, um, my life. When I was 16, I didn't
consider myself pretty, and I had a hard time thinking that guys liked me too, for the same reasons. I feel you, Tris. (Yells) The Ferris wheel, the Ferris wheel.

It was like the Hunger
Games cave scene for me times 100. It was so intense. I remember when I got to that part, I was driving and I was about to go into the grocery store
but I wasn't finished with the chapter yet, so I just stayed in the parking lot like holding my breath, waiting to finish the chapter and I was dying. Yay, audiobooks! I just felt very connected
to these characters, especially Tris.

This book does a great job in letting you know and
understand what's happening but keeping you one the same page as Tris so that when something does happen, it's exciting and terrifying and wonderful, all at the same time. Oh, Four. (Groans) Emotions! Four is just a perfect representation of a lot of guys, how they show their emotions, how they're pretty obvious
when they like someone, how they can be very hard emotionally but also very vulnerable, just brilliant writing. (Moans) His tattoos, his everything.

Oh, and at the end? (Screams) I could not, I could not,
I could not with this book, no, no, no no no. This book was just so
much in the best way. I loved it, and now I
have to see the movie, and I already downloaded the second book Insurgent from Audible, and unh. (Groans) Did you guys see the movie? Did you like the movie? Is Shailene as good as she
is in The Fault in Our Stars? Questions, so many questions.

Please go to audible.Com/tessa. You get a 30-day free trial plus a free book, aka Divergent. If you haven't read it
yet, please read it. And even if you already read it, listening to a book is
a whole new experience.

It's comforting, relaxing, and you can really explore your imagination because you're listening to it. And Audible is great
because it's on my iPhone, I'm listening to it in the car, in the grocery store,
walking down the street, in bed, basically everywhere. Audible.Com/tessa. Do it.

Starfish. Leave a comment with your
favorite part of the book and what faction you think
that you would be in. Subscribe. Check out my Etsy shop where
I sell stuff like this, and submit to me books that you think I should read at geekwithmestarfish.Com.

(Smacks lips) Love you guys, bye!.

Candide by Voltaire (Summary and Review) - Minute Book Report

This is a story about the adventures of a
man named Candide who grows up in the German castle of Westphalia. He is sensible and bright,
taking to the philosophy of Pangloss, a philosopher who believes that all things happen for good. Candide gets run out of Westphalia by the
Baron after expressing a romantic interest the beautiful Cunegonde, the Baron's daughter.
Still, Candide is determined to reunite with her some day. After joining the Bulgarian army, Candide
again runs, but meets Pangloss, who is disfigured and sickly.

Pangloss tells Candide that Westphalia
was attacked and that everyone died. The two of them travel to Portugal with the aid of
a friendly man, who dies in a terrible storm at sea. After surviving an earthquake, Candide and
Pangloss are convicted and each sentenced: Candide to be whipped and shot, Pangloss to
be hanged. Pangloss is hanged, but Candide is saved by an old woman, who heals his wounds.

The old woman takes Candide to Cunegonde,
who survived the attack on Westphalia, and explains how she is now the property of two
other men. Candide slays the two men who own Cunegonde
and he takes her and the old woman to the New World to escape persecution. As they are
sailing, the old woman shares her own journey from princess to slave. When they arrive in the New World, the local
governor sees Cunegonde and wants to marry her.

But before Candide can protest, he sees
a ship arrive whose intentions are to arrest him for the slayings. Candide leaves with a local guide, Cacambo,
and they find refuge in a nearby settlement. There, Candide discovers that Cunegonde's
brother is a commanding officer, having also survived the attack on Westphalia. However,
the men fight and Candide stabs Cunegonde's brother before fleeing.

Candide and Cacambo then find a city of gold,
El Dorado. Although the city is full of riches, the people live in peace and harmony. Candide
and Cacambo enjoy their time in the city, but decide to take some of the riches with
them to buy back Cunegonde. However, on their trip back, they lose most of their gold-carrying
sheep and are forced to leave the riches behind.

Candide decides to split off from Cacambo,
instructing him to take most of the gold, buy Cunegonde, and meet him in Venice. After his gold is stolen by a Dutch sea captain,
Candide decides to travel to France with Martin, a philosophical man who believes the worst
in mankind. In France, Candide and Martin run into Cacambo,
who is now a slave to a former sultan. Cacambo tells them that Cunegonde is a slave in Constantinople
and has grown ugly.

Still, Candide is determined to see her. As they are sailing to Constantinople, the
group discovers that Cunegonde's brother and Pangloss are rowing the boat. They land in Constantinople and Candide sees
Cunegonde, ugly and beaten, and the old woman. He buys them, still wanting to marry Cunegonde.

In the end, Candide buys a small Turkish farm
with the rest of his money and they all live on the farm together. Initially, readers should be able to identify
the author's use of satire as social commentary on money, relationships, slavery, and the
evilness in people. Yet the strongest satire is saved for religious commentary. In the
story, religious figures are often portrayed as hypocrites who display acts of lust, greed,
and selfishness.

This story also portrays the incomplete story.
Often, readers are led to believe that characters have died, but in fact, those characters survive
and return by the end. This demonstrates the survivability of humans as organisms, but
also an exciting literary device: the limited narrator. What this does is limit the reader's
knowledge of the world and create new surprises that the reader and main protagonist share
together. Through all of Candide's misadventures, his
belief that everything works for good acts as a strong constant.

This philosophy, in
a way, is mocked by the author as Candide takes it to extremes in some cases. This ultimately leads to the conclusion of
the story where Candide realizes that, in the end, it doesn't really matter whether
events, good or bad, work out. Ultimately, we, as humans, are meant to work and experience,
not to think or judge whether our experiences are for the benefit of ourselves and those
around us..

Can This Man Review A Book While Totally Stoned

- Mahalo, book nerds. I'm Jon Gabrus, and this
is Blazed Book Reviews. Yeah, I read. (Classical music) (water bong bubbling) My guest today is Nate Dern, author of Not Quite a Genius.

(Rock music) - Alright, thanks for having me. - Dude, don't you love books, man? Hey, have you ever read this book? - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn? Yes, I read that in high school. - Sick, dude. Gorillas teaching people stuff, people learning from gorillas and stuff? - It's pretty wild.

- [John] Yeah. It's pretty dope right? - I thought we were gonna
be talking about my book. - This is a new book, right? - Yeah.
- Yeah so, maybe the read-- you know, my watchers haven't read it. - I guess probably not.

- No. So there you go. But have you guys read this? - [Crowd Voiceover] Totally. Yeah.

Book. - This is sick. Me and Nate Dern, author of Not Quite a Genius highly recommend Ishmael. Alright, enough of this book bullshit.

It's time for Weed Pairings. (Upbeat pop music) For this week's Weed Pairing, I sought out a strain that would pair well with Not Quite a Genius by Nate Dern, and I found that strain in Sour Diesel. Sour Diesel! Or as I call it, Sour D. It's got a pungent, gasoline-like aroma, and its cerebral high? It is perfect for the
absurd and dark humor found in this book.

Now, I wouldn't smoke an Indica
before reading this book, because you might fall asleep. - That's not nice. - No no no, it's not a dig on your book. That's what Indica does.

Remember kids, Indica equals Into Couch. - Kids probably shouldn't be smoking any type of marijuana, right?
- Or reading. - Or reading? - This has been Weed Pairings. (Upbeat pop music) Thought experiment.

If you press this button, your book becomes a New York
Times number one Best Seller, but someone somewhere dies. Do you push it? - No. (Laser blasting)
Whoa. - A person died anyway.

And your book is not number one. - Oh, that's awful. - Shit. What if I died? - You didn't, though.

- Who knows? I could be dead already. Elon Musk. - What about him? - Not sure. He's the future car guy? - Yeah, Tesla.
- Tesla.

(Funky music) Alright this challenge is Stream of Consciousness. We have five hours to write whatever you want on this piece of paper. - Five hours? - Let's make it a minute.
- Okay. - Let the clock start now.

(Silly time passing music) Time. I'll read yours first. - Oh my gosh. - Here, just pass me your whole pad.

- Alright. (Clears throat) Oh good, sloppy handwriting. "I am talking to a high person. "But I myself am not high.

"This reminds me of every
party I went to in high school. "I did not smoke then "because I was on the cross country team." - It's true. And I ran out of time. - Oh.

That's pretty awesome. Okay. - Thank you. - Here's mine.
- I read yours? - Yeah, you read mine.
- Okay.

(Laughs) Okay. "Two german shepherds having sex." - Sick, right? - That's all you wrote. - Yeah, well, we only had a minute. (Sexy saxophone music) This has been Blazed Book Reviews.

I'm Jon Gabrus. Come back for next week's episode where I interview J. R. Tolkien.

- So thanks again for having me on. I appreciate it. Are you fake talking? You're fake talking because
it's the end credits? I think we can really talk. Maybe it was a mistake to be on this.

It's pretty early in the morning and you're already so high. (Soothing guitar music).

Call of the Wild by Jack London (Book Summary and Review) - Minute Book Report

This is a story about a dog named Buck who
lives on a beautiful estate in California, but is sold off as a sled dog. After being badly beaten by a dog trainer,
Buck is used to pull mail in the Arctic. Although the work is tough, he learns quickly and soon
takes over the sled team by killing the previous leader. The dog team is sold off to different sled
drivers and nearly worked to death.

They are in need of rest, but because of mismanagement,
the strength of the dogs gets drained out of them until they are killed off one by one.
Fortunately, Buck is saved by a man named John Thornton, a kind man with a heart for
animals. John takes in Buck and helps him recover.
Buck, having been mistreated by others in the past, is apprehensive at first, but then
grows to love John. In fact, Buck pulls a 1,000 pound sled to win John a bet. John takes Buck and the rest of his dogs into
the back country, searching for a mythical Lost Cabin.

During this search, Buck wanders
into the forest by himself and meets a wild wolf, which sparks a primal instinct within
him. One night, after returning from the forest,
Buck sees that John has been killed by a group of local Indians. In the end, with nowhere else to go, Buck
integrates into the local wolf pack, becoming a part of local Indian mythology. First, this story discusses the relationship
between domestic and primal instincts.

Buck is introduced as a soft dog, living a luxurious
life on the grounds of a mansion. But when he is taken and placed in the wild with other
dogs, something within him changes. Yet, these changes are not foreign to him. It's like
these instincts are already a part of him, just unearthed.

And what makes this more relatable to readers,
who don't necessary experience that call of the wild in our highly modernized society,
is how these primal instincts may have more to do with morality than grunts and cavemen
drawings. The story suggests that often to survive,
moral nature must die. As Buck tries to assimilate to his new outdoor lifestyle, he is timid
and almost polite, to the point where the other dogs eat his food. However, he soon
learns to steal food to survive.

In fact, he learns that it is easier to steal than
not to steal. But why would readers enjoy a story about
non-talking dogs? It's because of the applicability of the story to humans through the style of
writing. As written, readers are placed in the head of dog, trying to understand the
sled dog culture. And as the story goes on, readers discover
how humanized Buck's personality is.

Buck is relatable as a character. Any person who
has worked in a job that they didn't necessarily want can understand the struggles Buck goes
through in this story. It's a frustration derived by helplessness, anger, and fear,
all human emotions, yet felt by a dog and projected to a level of relatability..

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (Book Summary and Review) - Minute Book Report

This is a story about a boy named Jessie who
lives with his family in the countryside. He likes to draw and has been training all
summer to be the fastest runner in school. The Burke family moves in next door. Their
daughter, Leslie, is creative and smart and becomes Jessie's classmate.

When the big day of the race arrives at school,
however, Jessie gets beaten by Leslie. And at first, no one likes Leslie, but because
they are neighbors, they become friends. Jessie and Leslie begin to form a real friendship
around an imaginary land they call Terabithia. By swinging across the creek on a rope swing,
they enter a world where they are king and queen and go on numerous adventures.

It starts to rain, making it unsafe to travel
across the creek, but they continue to travel to Terabithia anyway. Jessie is invited to go to a museum with his
music teacher that he likes and has a great time. However, when he returns, he discovers
that Leslie had died in the creek. Jessie is shocked by all of this.

Leslie's
family moves away and Jessie uses some of their extra lumber to build a bridge across
the creek so that no one will ever fall again. Despite portraying the power of imagination
and the innocence of childhood, this is not really a children's book as it touches upon
various adult-related themes and challenges many of the social conventions established
in society. First of all, it displays unusual relationships
that children may not understand. Of course, by that fact alone, it does not make the book
false or bad, just, shall we say, unique.

For example, the relationship between Jessie
and the music teacher is strange. Jessie is attracted to the teacher and the way the story
is written, it seems that the teacher is attracted to Jessie. Maybe that's just how a boy his
age would think, but still, this can confuse a child. And while Jessie is at the age where opposite
sex attraction is normal, it does make readers wonder why he isn't infatuated with Leslie
a girl his own age, if that was the character trait that the author wanted to highlight? Another unusual relationship is between Leslie
and her parents.

They insist that she call them by their first names and they don't seem
to be parents in the conventional definition as much as they are her peers. These unusual relationships challenges the
reader's view on what real world relationships are like. Perhaps the author wanted to let
children know that they aren't the only ones who experience or see these types of relationships. This story also talks about spirituality,
both in the religious aspect and the more secular one.

Leslie goes to Easter service
with Jessie's family and after, asks about God. And while her questions are not provoking,
they do tear at paradoxes surrounding the Christian faith, like God's wrath and how
a loving God could also damn His children to hell. And of course, there is death. One of the
main characters in the story dies.

How is a child supposed to react to this? I mean,
really? How do children react to the death of someone they know? There doesn't seem to
be a real answer presented to us from the author, but maybe the lack of an answer through
Jessie's struggles to come to understand his situation is relatable enough for children. Many of these adult topics can fly over the
heads of children, but nevertheless, they are still there. We have adult-child romantic relationships,
child abuse, sibling abuse, religion, sexual curiosity, and unconventional parenting all
wrapped up within a story about a kid who likes to draw. Oh, and his best friend dies..

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Book Summary and Review) - Minute Book Report

This is a quick summary of Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley and why I think this book and this train track are similar. This is a story about a world where people
are born in test tubes with their lives being predestined into social classes. There are
no such things as mothers, fathers, children, and other social relationships, and all of
the essential human needs are provided for through mandatory or fabricated social experiences. The highest social class, Alphas, are the
most intelligent and enjoy more of life, while the lower classes, which are genetically stunted
in a lab, perform the society's lesser tasks.

Each generation of children is created in
batches through cloning and suggestive conditioning to further secure their future social status. Bernard, a government psychologist in London,
is an Alpha, but he's physically small and doesn't like the artificial social aspects
of the society, such as free sex and soma, a drug that makes people feel drunkenly good. As a psychologist, Bernard is sent to New
Mexico to study a "savage" reservation, a place where the "old" society still exists.
He brings along Lenina, a young and beautiful woman, and the two of them enter the reservation.
There, Bernard discovers Linda, a woman who grew up in London, but was abandoned in the
reservation several years earlier. It is also discovered that Linda had a son, John.

This is problematic because the father is
Bernard's boss, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, and procreation through
natural means is something that Bernard's society doesn't recognize. Despite that, Bernard
decides to bring back Linda and John to London. Bernard, who is normally quiet, becomes outgoing,
as his fame for bringing back John, "The Savage", grows. However, after John fails to show up
to a social gathering, his social status returns to one of an outcast.

After the death of his mother, John realizes
that something is wrong with the society. He draws the attention of the Controller,
the regional leader of Western Europe, and John and the Controller talk. The Controller explains how and why things
are the way they are. That the coexistence of truth and happiness is a balancing act
and that they have chosen a life of extreme happiness with very little truth.

Bernard is sent away to an island with other
free thinking people like himself and John decides to move away into the countryside
to live on his own. In the end, John hangs himself out of shame
after being made a spectacle. As always, a lot can be said about this story,
but what draws my interest and attention is the idea of predisposing individuals for a
certain path before they are even born, like placing them on a train track. In the story,
we learn that the batches of lower level individuals learn early what is comfortable to them so
when they grow up and have to do menial tasks, they aren't upset since they have been conditioned
to think that what they are doing is good.

In other words, a social ceiling has been
created for them. And what's interesting is that the same thing
could be happening today. For example, if an individual is brought up in a high class
social network, that individual is set on a track to continue to be in that high social
network. Likewise, an individual who is brought up in a poor social network is also predisposed
to remain in that network.

Of course, these tracks aren't binding and there is always
the possibility for varied deviations, but for the most part, environment heavily influences
the type of person someone becomes and what choices they will make. What's exciting to see are individuals, through
their own talents or luck, who change their social circumstances and assimilate themselves
into different social networks. In essence, they are changing the direction of their tracks
and ending up in new destinations. After hearing my comparison, what item do
you associate with this book? Let me know by leaving a comment.

Don't forget to subscribe for more Minute
Book Reports and thanks for watching..

Born a Crime by Trevor NoahBook Review

Hi everyone today I'm here to talk about "Born a Crime" which is a memoir by Trevor Noah. You might have heard of Trevor Noah from his late-night talk show and as a stand-up comedian. I personally didn't know very much about him going into this book which is fine, I think, because A.) You learn a lot about him in the book and B.) Nothing that he talks about is contingent on you knowing things about him. In fact i really enjoyed learning about him and kind of meeting him and understanding his point of view and where he came from through listening to this book, which i will say, i listened to the audiobook and i would highly recommend it.

I'll talk about the narration and everything I liked about the book after a brief synopsis. So Trevor Noah is, like I said, a late-night talk show host and comedian. He was born in south africa in the years of the apartheid, and he was born from a black mom and a white dad, which at the time of his birth was literally a crime. People between races were not allowed to have relationships, and so he was born a mixed-race child in apartheid South Africa, which was a crime.

So he was a very unusual child in the sense that he was one-of-a-kind pretty much everywhere he went. It was not something that people saw a lot, so he stood out, and he talks about that how it affected him growing up, kind of being set apart from everyone, and how that made him sometimes popular and sometimes very unpopular. In the book he talks about stories from his childhood and jumps around a lot. He talks about his mother and their relationship, which is really close, and them going to church together, and about his father and his future stepfather and those kind of male relationships.

He talks about the friends he makes, about how he tries to fit in at school; it covers a wide range of topics and a lot of experiences of his life. So talking about the narration-- I listened to the audiobook and i can't recommend it enough. He is one of the most effortless and casual narrators. I love when celebrities or any memoir writer read their own book because obviously it's their story, having them tell it themselves just adds another layer of sort of intimacy.

But also no one can really read the story like they've written it themselves, so it's nice to listen to him read it to you. It really felt like just sitting down and someone telling you their life. But on top of that, not only do you get his life experiences and these events he's relying to you, but he also weaves in a lot of history and kind of cultural and political information about South Africa before and after the apartheid, which I found fascinating. Because i really don't know much about that time period.

Obviously most people know about it and have heard of it and nelson mandela and all these big kind of broader themes and looking at it from sort of the lens of history. But I found it really interesting to hear about these things through the lens of a person living in it, especially a person from such a unique perspective. Since he is a comedian i also found it to be very funny. I was laughing from like the first chapter on.

Even in the darkest moments of the story when he's talking about really difficult things, issues of racism or struggling with the relationship with his stepfather who was very abusive, all of these things-- in the funny moments and in the dark moments-- he is able to find humor and relay that in a very natural way. I think sometimes humor can come across very forced; when people are trying to be funny, and especially writing... So maybe listening to that elevated it. But hearing him, not tell jokes per se, but just deliver these stories in a humorous way at times, it was really enjoyable.

I was laughing out loud while listening to this in my car. And I was also like very moved by some of the more heartbreaking and scarier moments of the stories. When he's talking about being put in jail, being racially profiled things like that was really interesting to learn about and really difficult. There are some moments where it's talking about, especially his mother, and things that she tries to do as a black woman in South Africa at the time, and she's just prohibited from doing simply because of her race and gender that are like so infuriating.

And to see them through the lens of the mother's child and through a real person was so much more enlightening than just reading about it like in a newspaper or online. You hear these headlines and you see these things happening all over the world, but to be able to hear them told from someone who's lived through it, witnessed it and experience it was like such a different level of experience than just hearing about it, if that makes sense. So I got a lot more out of this book that i was expecting to. It was funny; it was heartbreaking; again his narration was just fantastic.

The only thing i didn't really love about it is that it jumped around a lot, like i said. So in one chapter he'd be in elementary school and the next he'd be a teenager. It just didn't feel thematically like there was any sort of flow, and that's fine. I mean it is called I think "stories from a South African childhood" so it's just different stories from his life.

Sometimes it was hard to jump from one time period to the other, and one chapter is talking about how he didn't have any friends and then the next chapter is talking about his best friend. So it was just kind of like confusing, but I get that they took place in different time periods. And I understand why he saved the very last chapter of this book for the end, which is really an amazing chapter. I thought that he started and ended the book on amazing notes; it got me hooked from the very beginning and it ended perfectly, and a lot of amazing moments in between with a few that were kind of like jarring, when he was talking about things that I was not expecting based on the chapter before it.

So that's my only criticism. I really like this book and again i can't recommend the audiobook enough. If you're interested in this at all I would say go the audiobook route, but if you don't like audiobooks for some reason, obviously I'm sure it'd be a great experience to read too. I just think it's a great story.

It's one of those celebrity memoirs that I feel like really holds up to more than just spilling secrets or writing about their life because they're famous. I feel like he actually has something to say with his life experiences, and more on top of that with how he talks about race and politics. So there's a lot going on in this but it never feels long. It was like eight and a half hours, which is kind of long for a celebrity memoir.

I feel like they're usually shorter than regular audio books. But eight and a half hours is a really good length for this. I would have listened to a few more hours. I thought he was really interesting and easy to listen to, like i said, and i love this book.

So if you have not read this book i can highly recommend it. If you have, let me know what you thought about it in the comments below. And i hope you guys enjoyed this video and learned something new, and I will see you in the next one. Bye!.

Book ReviewThunderhead by Neal Shusterman

Hey! What's up, you guys? It's Connor, and
today I'm gonna be doing a book review for a Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman.
Thunderhead is the second book in the Arc of a Scythe series. In the first book... It's
called Scythe. I did a book review for that book as well, so I'll leave it
linked if you want to check it out.

Also I was sent this book by the publisher
for a sponsored video which I've already done, but this video is not sponsored.
Regardless, my thoughts and feelings are my own. I just wanted to let you guys
know that I did get this book for free. If you guys don't know, the Arc of a Scythe
series follows two characters that are living in this world where humans have
become immortal. Every time they start to age too much or age to a point that they
are no longer enjoying life, they are able to do what's called "turning the
corner," and they are turned back into a younger version of themselves.

So if they
turn 55/60 they're able to "turn the corner" and turn back into 25 or 30
year-olds if they want to. Because people never die, the population of humans
on Earth has grown exponentially, and the only way that people naturally die
anymore is if they are caught in a fire and burn to death or something similar
to that like acid or the body can't be found kind of thing. The only other way
that humans are killed is by a group of people called scythes, and scythes are
tasked with culling people. And they're supposed to do it without bias, and so
there's different quotas of different types of people that you have to kill.
There's a quota for men versus women and also different cultures and ethnicities
and colors of people.

So there's a certain number of black people that you
have to kill, and a certain number of white people, and a certain number of Asian people, etc. [This isn't technically true. You just aren't allows to be too out of balance.] And the main two characters are trying to become a part of this system. The entire world is run by one single AI system called the Thunderhead, and the Thunderhead is something that people actually really enjoy.

The
Thunderhead takes care of people, and gets them jobs, and has established a
minimum pay that everyone gets no matter what. So they don't actually have to work
if they don't want to, but most people do want to work because then life would be
very boring. And he takes care of everything on the entire Earth. There are
no governments anymore.

There's just different regions. It's the Thunderhead
and the scythedom that are running the entire world, and then this book takes
place a year after Scythe. As usual with my book reviews, I'm going to go through
my pros, go through my cons, give you my rating, and be done. My first pro for this
book is that it does take place a significant chunk of time after the
first one, so the characters have really had time to grow and change
after the events of the first book finished.
Citra has really grown into her own and has really solidified into the person
that she's gonna be.

Her morals are pretty concrete, and I really enjoyed
seeing her navigate through this world after the events of the first book. Rowan,
on the other hand, is still figuring it out,
and I really enjoyed that juxtaposition of Citra being so sure of herself... I mean
she is still young. The characters are only eighteen, but she is pretty steady
on her feet, and Rowan is trying to figure out what direction he wants to
take, kind of thing.

So I really enjoyed the fact that they've been up to things
within the past year that you're kind of catching up on as well as following them
as the plot moves along. I really enjoyed secondary characters
that were introduced as well. Grayson is such an interesting character. I really
enjoyed his point of view and his take on the world because instead of the
point of view of two characters that have been chosen to become scythe apprentices, you had a character that has nothing to do with the scythedom at
all.

He is just a normal Joe Shmoe character, and you get to see how he
views this same world. How he views the Thunderhead. How he views the scythedom. How
he views himself within society.

It was really cool to get that side of things.
Another secondary character that we get to meet is Maria, and she was super, super
interesting as well for other reasons. Honestly, the characters that Neal
Shusterman has introduced to the series in this book as well as the ones that
he's kept up with from the first book have all been very intriguing and very
engaging. I just want to know more and more about all of these characters, so I
really enjoyed that in this book. In this world, scythes are required to keep
journals, and in the first book you get journal entries from a bunch of
different scythes which from my review, a lot of people said that they did not
read those interludes.

And I think that you are missing out if you didn't read
them, but in this book instead of getting journal entries from scythes, you get
little interludes from the Thunderhead's point of view which was so awesome
because you could definitely see how the Thunderhead is viewing himself and his
role when it comes to people and how he's the caretaker of humans. But it also
follows him as he's learning that he doesn't know everything, and that upsets
him. And so you see a slow progress of the Thunderhead shifting the way that he
thinks and the way that he feels. I guess I'm saying "he," but the Thunderhead
doesn't have a gender.

This slow shift of the
Thunderhead's position and how he views itself really adds to the tension of the
book, and the tension throughout this novel is just growing, and growing, and
growing. It's the perfect amount of tension though. It's not so much so that
it gives you anxiety and you're getting stressed. It's enough tension that it keeps
you on your feet, and it keeps you reading, and reading, and reading which is
one of my favorite things that a book can do especially when there's POV
shifts.

This character ends on a cliffhanger, so you have to read the POV
of these couple characters so you can get back to that character. Bah! That it was so much fun. Another thing that I liked was just that
in this series in general it just addresses things of: who decides who dies
and who lives? Is it right for anyone to have that power? Is it right for anyone
to decide who lives and who dies? Is it even right for someone to decide when
they die? All of those concepts were things that I really was interested in
reading about, so I really loved seeing them in this novel. And the last thing
was that just the way that this book ended, I was floored.

I need the next book
right now. And Thunderhead just came out recently, so I have a very long time
until the next book comes out. But I want to know what's gonna happen next right
now! Now I'm gonna talk about a couple of my cons. I don't absolutely love when
books end on cliffhangers which is kind of what this book did.

If I have access
to the next book, it's something that I. Kind of enjoy because then I can jump
right into the next one. But with this one, I have to wait for it, so now I'm a
little bit annoyed. But that's a personal problem, and because I couldn't think of
any other cons on my own, I looked up a couple of reviews.

People have said
that they haven't appreciated the POV. Shifts in the middle of the chapter, so
from one paragraph to another sometimes it switches the character that you're
following and which character you get inside of the head of. And those people
have a hard time jumping from one person to another when it's not clearly stated.
Here it just switches from one to the other without saying it directly. You
learn pretty early on within that paragraph which character you're
following, but I can definitely see why that would be difficult for some people
to follow.

But as I said, that didn't affect my reading experience. I
absolutely loved this book. In the end, I ended up giving this book 5 stars. I
loved it.

I gave the first book four and a half stars, I believe, and this one 5
stars. So I'm just loving this series so much, and I definitely recommend it to
people that are intrigued about it check it out. So that's gonna be my review of
Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman. If you liked it, please give it a big thumbs
up and comment down below have you read this book.

Have you read Scythe, and you're
just waiting to read Thunderhead? Have you read anything by Neal Shusterman?
Anything you want me to know, leave it down below, and I will talk to you guys
next time. Bye! <Finger gun and tongue click>.