a fun story about this book: the last time I read this was for a book project in middle school and i left it to the last minute and only ended up reading half of it and then skimming the end. this is the only assigned book I've ever done this for and I have felt guilty about it ever since.

However in retrospect this book honestly sucks in the second half. The plot follows Ralph a young british boy who's evacuation plane during WWII crashes at an island. He and the other surviving children then learn how to survive on the island while facing moral and societal problems within their new collective. The book raises questions of the nature of people and how people interact without authority.

All in all the ideas are not new but this book is a classic and was probably a big deal when it came out. The characters are all metaphors and what not and it gives me big Eng Lit school vibes. But reading it for fun was not so fun. Its a fun little interesting adventure story in the beginning but then as it goes on it gets darker and more depressing. I also did not enjoy the ending. It was quite obvious but also left me wanting.

I listened to this as an audiobook and 10/10 the voice actor was great and did little voices and the ending had wave sound effects which was cute.

Going into this book I thought it was going to be another boring philosophy book like the other books on Namjoon's list but this was actually quite good.
It's a memoir of a neurosurgeon and how he used mindfulness and intention setting to get far in life. The story starts from his childhood growing up as the protective younger brother in a poor household with a suicidal, depressed mother and an alcoholic father. By chance, he ends up meeting a woman who takes him under her wing and teaches him meditation and mindfulness and he uses it throughout the rest of his life to surpass his upbringing.

I enjoyed the first half it was very interesting but the second half wasn't as interesting in my opinion cause it was more surgery and neuroscience based.

predictable plot but still somehow thrilling and interesting.

interesting concept and cool tie togethers
plot follows two boys who have received an alert from the government telling them they will die today. they then go on an adventurous last day to try to love their best life and meet each other on through an app like tinder for dying people.

it was eh
the writing was very childlike and there was a handful of inconsistencies. characters were pretty flat and boring but we love some representation and will take what we can get

also not this being the second queer teen book i’ve read that includes Your Song by Elton John eyeee

a history of human kind touching on how early neanderthals lived to how modern research is advancing society to how terrible humankind can be by creating societal problems such as racism and slavery.

listened to the audiobook which was read by him

i thought i would laugh at least once especially since he was reading it in the audiobook but i didn’t find a single bit funny. disappointing

is this the 1st or the 6th book? unclear

i never realized how much of a religious metaphor narnia is. this is my first time rereading them since i was a child and i completely missed all the religious allusions.
this entire book is essentially a retelling of the creationism story. the kids ends up in narnia and witness the birth of narnia, aslan js god and creates the grass trees and animals through song and then pairs the animals off and gives them voices. some animals are given speech and some aren’t but he tells them to treat everyone equally. the kids are then given an adventure which honestly only happens in the last 10 pages-most of this book is boring setup in england. the adventure is for them to go find the a tree and take an apple but not eat it, a metaphor for the garden of eden. the garden is beautiful and the apples smell delicious and an inscription describes how the apple will give them everything but they don’t eat it and instead return it to aslan. meanwhile the witch from another world eats the apple and is the evil in the world that needs to be eradicated while the kid’s uncle represents greed and sin.

i started reading this after watching/reading The Magicians which is heavily based off of narnia.

i think it’s interesting that this story is mostly unrelated to the other narnia books and is a prequel but how both books have an edmund character who is an overlooked boy constantly tempted by evil and needs to find it in himself to choose good who is accompanied by a girl relative..

also weird that the outsider human children are treated like kings and queens in this new world

yet again the religious metaphors are rampant i dunno how i missed this as a kid. the characters are pretty boring honestly

this book feels like a fever dream. i remembered very random bits of it but overall the plot doesn’t really make coherent sense yet again the characters all fall extremely flat
and yet again there is a completely new set of characters.

a boy and girl find themselves on the run each accompanied by a talking narnian horse also both respectively on the run from their situations. the group gets to a city and finds themselves split up due to various coincidental events. the boy discovers his twin who is a prince living in the pevensies court. the girl who was running from an arranged marriage runs into a cousin. both kids go on small adventures and learn of important information which then sends the crew on a new adventure to inform the narnians and another country of a surprise attack

the only reason i give these books so many stars is due to the nostalgia

this is objectively the best narnia book (so far). it has an actual plot the characters are more developed and the adventure is fun