All Writer's Love a Good Book!

My sister in law volunteers at her local library.

Hey, bookworms gotta get their fix however they can get it, right?

I have tried to get her interested in writing but she is my Honey's sister and that's 'nuff said on that subject! What? Not enough information? I swear you guy's; sometimes you say TMI next thing it is NEI...stay with me here people! OK, well...can we just say that I love them both and just one of the reasons I love them both is because they are not gab-mouths.

WOW! Cool word!

So, my SIL sends me an invite to a new social website, Shelfari, where you post the books you have read, plan on reading, and have read and then you critique or review them and you get your own bookshelf with the photos of the book jackets. It's fun. You can get your friends to come along and join the fun, get a reading group going on one book, join a group dedicated to a particular genre and see what others have to say about their favorite books.

Shelfari was started in Seattle, Oregon in 2006 and Amazon bought the company in 2008. It is meant to be used by the community as a place to discuss and read as well as a venue to purchase any of the books that may be found on other member’s shelves.

The wrench that really needs to be thrown into the shelf is a more in depth discussion of what does this book or that book make you think of. For instance, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. This is listed as young adult.

Personally, If a book is good who needs an age label on it? Who doesn’t love Harold and the Purple Crayon after all?

But the Hunger Games is a book that just aches to be philosophically dissected out loud and with more than a few people. This is the type of book that whoever reads it, will get a different impression, another point of view of a reality unlike their own. It is a futuristic novel, there is famine and poverty for the majority of the world yet one of the things that is done by the government is a broadcast reality type show called the Hunger Games. The winner of the games can be only one person. The point of the game is to survive. If you survive, your town, village, or city is instantly famous, there is no more famine for that town, and the survivor is set for the rest of their life.

Sounds great? Just one little catch. It is a survival test to the death.

Yes, the plot is a familiar one and yes, it is still a didactic tale set in a fantasy novel. And the point of that is…? Didactic tales always work very well and the fact that it is for young adults’ means they probably have not seen the “Running Man” or will not correlate it to the story. The point would be that anything that helps our younger generation grow into moral and ethical beings would be a good read right?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Twilight and other vampire stories as well, but I am so over vampires. They are not sending a good message if anyone asked; they haven’t, but I give my opinion freely! Let’s try and get the younger generation focused on something besides immortality on the earthly realm shall we? Geez! Who would even want to live forever? It would get so depressing to see…especially if you started out in the 16^th century with all that untouched, pristine earth and then to see what humans have done the earth today!

But, as usual, I digress. The Shelfari website is very interesting and can be even more so if more writers would get in there and stir up the consciousness of the world a bit! I say, anyone up for a bit of a philosophy challenge?