A Poised Quill: September 2016

Collective Review: Pottermore Presents eBooks

Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide

Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies by J.K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists by J.K. Rowling
Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide by J.K. Rowling
My rating: Average: 4.3 of 5 stars

This review is also found on my Goodreads profile here! :)

Only now have I finished the three Pottermore eBooks. Yikes! Turns out I'm not really good at reading multiple books interchangeably. However, that didn't stop me from enjoying Rowling's collection of short stories! :)

Ever since the series ended, JK Rowling hasn't been shy on releasing new information about the Wizarding World through interviews and tweets. What I don't understand is how people or "fans" are getting tired of it. I know I never will! A lot of people doesn't seem to understand that when JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter, she created a new universe. And this new universe will never cease existing. Instead this universe will only grow or solidify as time goes. Harry Potter's story may be complete and have come full-circle, but the world he was written in is incredibly vast and complex. And what Rowling is doing is brushing up the world she painted. The foreground is complete, but she's still working on the background--building an elaborate puzzle to give us the bigger picture. I will never get tired of learning new information about the Wizarding World. I thoroughly enjoyed these eBooks, but out of the three, I've enjoyed two the most.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

--
This review is also found on my Goodreads profile here! :)
--

WOW. ~~Here I am, staring at my phone's screen wondering what to write because nothing I say will justify the sheer intensity of what I went through with this doggone book.~~ So far, this is my best read for 2016. I have been blown away by the magnitude of the bar for science fiction this book has set.

How to even begin to describe this? The closest I get to it is a "science-fiction-slash-thriller." This book got me questioning my existence; questioning my CHOICES in life. I'm not really sure if the few sentences that follow can be tagged as spoilers, but just to be on the safe side, I'm going to tag them anyway. I can't exactly explain to you the book for fear of getting swallowed by the plethora of confusing quantum physics terms, explanations, and theories, but I will try to put it as simple as my limited knowledge on it can offer. [spoiler] To explain it the way the book explained it, imagine the famous Schrodinger's cat experiment. The observer will only the know result of the experiment once the box is opened--and it can only be one of the two possible outcomes: alive or dead. The quantum law states that until the box is opened, the cat is in superposition. Until the moment the observer opens the box and influences the outcome of the experiment, the cat is in superposition, or to put it simply--it is both alive and dead. But that's a cat. What if there is a box that puts a human being in a superposed quantum state with a drug that changes the way the human being's brain perceives reality; a drug that forces us to loose our quantum coherence and collapses our wave function? It opens a gateway to multiple universes (or multiverse). What if it allows access to a multiverse where everything that can happen happened? [/spoiler]

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

THIS IS NOT A CHILDREN'S BOOK. I repeat: this is NOT a children's book! *cries* No matter how innocent the title is urging you to believe, this ish is not for kids. Consider me shocked. Baffled. Disturbed, even. *cries harder*

I honestly did not get the point of this book. Halfway through, I was enjoying it, while getting confused on most parts. I was happy trying to take in as much of the mysteries and intricacies of the world Hawkins conjured, because I was expecting it to make sense--to have a perceivable connection to our world. But the deeper I get into the story, the lesser I understood. The intense focus I was projecting in trying to understand the story and their world waned, until the only reason for me to keep reading was just to finish it, and not because I was still enjoying it.

This book is definitely not up my alley. This is one of those books that I'm not smart enough for. :'( And I felt so bad because I really really wanted to enjoy it. I know, I know! halfway through, I said I was enjoying it and I was hooked! I really WAS. Up until two-thirds of the book, I was determined to give this a 4-star rating. However, it feels so unfair to my other 4-star reads seeing as I did not understand much of what happened on this book anyway. So I danced between giving it 2 stars or 3 stars. I decided to go for 3-stars because I enjoyed some parts of it--the gore, most especially. I was hooked, but when I realized that most of the questions on this book will remain unanswered, I became unhooked. My interest on it went from 95% to 2% (if that makes sense at all).

I just feel a complete disconnect. Maybe I was expecting too much from this book. :( I felt no emotional connection to Carolyn despite the gruesome history she went through. The conversations between Erwin, Steve, and Carolyn are absurd and unbelievable given the situation they are all in. Maybe an explanation--a sequel, or a deeper explanation of Hawkin's "Librarian" world--might dramatically change my opinion. But even so, the fact that this book cannot stand on its own (without a sequel or an explanation) just doesn't seem worth all the confusion for me.

----

I did find a few gems within this book: