The Martian – A Book Review

This book is fun. Period.

I’ve read this book a couple of months back and since then I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who reads and even the ones who don’t read I had to talk about it. Yea it’s that kind of book.

I don’t read sci-fi very often but The Martian by Andy Weir is one of the very few that caught my attention and when I heard it’s going to be a movie that comes out by the end of this year I thought I’d read it before it did.

The story line was much better than I expected when I first started reading. I read somewhere that this book is like a mix between Cast Away and Gravity so I assumed there’s going to be a guy stranded on Mars and that’s it. I am glad I was wrong. You do get a guy stranded on Mars, but you also get a lot of science terminologies and things you learned in high school (don’t worry you don’t have to remember anything), obstacles and a lot of action and humor where you’ll find passages like this one: “Maybe I’ll post a consumer review. “Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped  working. 0/10.”

Sabriel – What I’m Currently Reading

This time I knew what I was going to read after I finished my last book. Sabriel is one of those books where many of my Goodread friends gave it high reviews, and because of my curiosity and wanting to read something with a lot of good reviews, I had to get it. 

This is the second time I’m starting this book. I was unable to get into it the first time so I left it for a while and got back to it now, so far I’m enjoying it.

This is the first book of the Abhorsen Trilogy by the author Garth Nix. The book is about an 18 year old girl named Sabriel who studies at a boarding school and knows a little about charter magic. Before she graduates she finds out that her father Abhorsen (who is a necromancer) is missing, so she goes on a journey to find him in the Old Kingdom. Two types of magic exist, Charter Magic and Free Magic. I found more details about what they are.

According to the Old Kingdom wiki Charter Magic:

“uses a multitude of symbols, either drawn on paper or in the air, spoken, engraved or embedded in an object, or whistled. Charter magic is reliant upon the user having a Charter mark on their forehead.”

On the other hand, Free Magic is:

“which is unconstrained by the Charter. It existed as the sole magic in the Beginning, but when the Charter was created, it was made “ordered, subject to structure, constrained by symbols.” All Free Magic that remained separate from the Charter became the magic of necromancy.”

So far this book is intriguing and I look forward to see what happens to her along her journey.

The Night Circus – A Review

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern has been on my to-read list for quite some time and I’m glad I finally got to read it. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it felt like an elegant dreamy fairy tale with detailed and very imaginative magical scenes.

The book is about a circus called Le Cirque des Rêves that opens at sunset and closes at sunrise with magical black and white tents and a lot of mystery surrounding it. People never notice when the circus arrives only when they see the tents all set up and they never notice when it leaves except by the tents not being there anymore. The story follows two main characters Marco and Celia who have been forced by their tutors to compete in a game that tests their magical abilities and they end up falling in love.

The story goes back and forth in a couple of different timelines that’s easy to follow. The writing is elegant and the characters are well defined and I enjoyed reading about them. I didn’t feel that Marco and Celia were the only “main” characters, the rest each seemed to have their spotlight at different times within the story.

This is a book I highly recommend reading and I also think it’s one of those books you’d like to give as a gift.