Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

Is it outdated to admit that I listened to this book?

Relax readers, it wasn't from a tape I put in my old car or running man, it was on Audible.com. Which, I must take a quick second a promote Audible. It's great. You get a free credit every month to use to buy any size book. I've been using Audible for the last four years. Listening to the presidential war of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and all the rest to Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

First off, right off the bat, one thing I must note that is great and rare, is that Mindy Kaling was the voice reading her own book. For some reason, there is just that click when the author's name matches the author's voice.

Secondly, this book is full of funny rants and stories. Real experiences. Not celebrities trying to seem more human than the perfect illusions their PR people put out. This is not a long story of work and strife, it's a short read or listen in my case, that is highly entertaining.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling gets 5 out of 5 stars.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I believe this will please all you war story fans out there, because this is one for the record books.

The Things They Carried is a story written in a fictional memoir prose if that makes sense. The story is not true, but you have this time lapse from the present to the past and the connections and parallels in the incidents which remind one of memoir stories. The book never outright says that this happened or that it didn't, but it's not a Million-Little-Pieces-Perception-Problem here, you will find it being sold in the fiction section of your local Barnes & Noble or Strand Books or other bookstores.

Imagine Vietnam, soldiers being pushed into the pain and hard truth of the world involuntarily. How would you react? To the new environment, the responsibility weighing on your soldiers with all the necessities hiking from location to location in this blood ripened world.

It brings up the question. What do you carry? Your potential and your books. Your work pressure and your family pressure. If you're a girl that always has a bag with her, what's in that bag? What's in your wallet? What's in your car? What do you never leave the house without? What do you immediately miss when you leave it somewhere?

This is a story of pressures, responsibilities, severe emotions, war, family, and everyone's consequences for anything and everything.

If you're also studying writing, this book makes use of long descriptive sentences and list phrases. This book is a good source to break apart and find what makes some styles successful and what is overkill. In my own personal opinion, I believe this tactic has been dead and continuously stabbed in this book, way too many. Tim O'Brien gets the point across of the weight we are all always carrying and the consequences on your persona from lifting such great weight, but, I don't need the point made every page of the book.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien gets 4 out of 5 stars. The overkill killed off one of its stars. 

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

You can hate me all you want, I did not like this book. I know, I know, it's a classic. Anyone who loves and studies literature likes this book. I did not like this book. And no, it's not because I took the possibility of waking up one morning as a large bug literal, I know, it's meant to be read metaphorically by literary critics. First off, the book was meant to be read literally by Franz Kafka, it was written as a comedic piece. Accidentally, it took on this huge form of metaphysical meaning and symbolic representation.

I don't think I'm spoiling anything in this book by stating the metaphor and symbolism in this book is: we're all bugs working and working and working until the day we die. Ta Da!

The writing is more like a play/skit for SNL. It's just horrible and for some weird reason, draining to sit down and read through this book. I can't explain it. It's similar to someone draining the water from your eyes and then has you focus on something to watch the desert grow atop my iris.

I would not recommend this book for you to read. Unless, everything I just said sounds enticing to you. Then by all means, you read it. I have and I'm done.

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka gets 2 stars. Just for the accidental symbolism and life lesson. Don't be a bug in your life. 

The Stranger by Albert Camus

I don't care what anyone says, I liked this book.

The estranged third person writing, the blunt ugly sentences, and the harsh reality of relationships and social connections.

In the scenario of blurred vision (literally and mentally) with the belief of danger lurking your way, would you shoot the gun in your hand or hope for the best?

I don't know about you, but I would shoot the gun. And then my life would spiral the way the plot unfolds in The Stranger. Death, Trial, Hatred, and the Truth about relationships (if you'd like the truth without paying a psychologist thousands and thousands of dollars) read this book.

The Stranger by Albert Camus gets 3.5 stars 

Update

I see people are reading this blog, which shocks me to my very core, especially considering that the number remains up even when I haven't posted or gone on the offensive of publicity in quite some time. So I feel the need to explain myself to this void.
First off, I apologize. I haven't kept up this blog with the books I have read, so stay tuned because they'll be coming quickly and feverishly. Make sure not to read this blog for too long, you'll get sick with the feverish posts (Mu Hu Haw Haw).
Anyway, below is a list of books that will be coming, in no particular order than the top of my memory.
                    1. Beloved
                    2. The Stranger
                    3. Metamorphosis
                    4. The Things They Carried
Secondly, I also have been hoarding books for the time I would devour them all one by one in a literary feeding frenzy. So they'll be a lot of surprises as well.
Third off, don't feel scared to comment. Agree, disagree, will you read it, will you hide from it, or make any suggestions you feel I should or should not read. The comment bar is there a wise female created it for us all to share our thoughts and feelings. My theory is that she was a sharer, talker, perhaps even a genius turned politician. I don't know.

Hold onto your bookmarks, here comes the page turning storm of a century. 

The Time in Between by María Dueñas

A grown up story for grown up people or young adults or anyone who can read. It's a good book and isn't that all that matters. It's realistic and true.

The characters aren't models or young. Everyone's flawed but errors don't make love disappear.

The story in this book is an ageless romance--not as a romance for every age group more like the characters aren't young adults--people screw up as in life, screw-ups hurt, they burn and melt the depth of your heart. But they don't just end every other emotion. They rot form the inside out. But they're not black holes to suck in every other emotion you had been feeling.

So we run, run from the pain and the lasting fire. We run from the hurt, from the lasting blazes, and from the new tinge of fire. Until we find some water. Something soothing and cooling to heal our ashed lungs and hearts. A drink of water to rinse out the pain and sorrow from the past. One strong enough to return to the original blaze.

If you're in to that sort of thing, yeah, that was my segue from that poetry, read this book.