Amazon

A tale of 3 friends living a predetermined life.  A short life that completes in the first or maybe fourth organ donation.  

• science fiction
• cloning and medical advancement
• humanity
• friendship
• melancholic

Points I have pondered on:

What does it take to be human?

The world we live in is full of divides. These divisions of race, color, religion, culture, nation etc., do not only separate us physically but they also ensure that we all stay divided. The permanency of these things that keep us light years further apart from our actual distances, depends solely upon how far longer we arrogantly sustain the thought that we are more human, thus more deserving, than others. 

The soul.

One of the many things most of us believe in, is the existence of souls. What is the criteria for one to have a soul? Who are soulless creatures and how exactly do we deal with those categorized as such? Pardon the rhetorics, but these are serious thoughts.

That bossy best friend.

Admit it, best friends can ruin your life if you let them get away with it. How Gossip Girl is that?! hahaha I thank God I dont have to compete with any of my friends. Im not the competitive type anyway.  I rarely put border lines on friendship, there are no rules except to just be truthful.

I love the story of this book although Im not much of a fan of how it was written.  First person narrations either capture my attention right away or it just cant keep me interested.  I am big on first impressions.  The sadness of the novel is felt immediately.  Make me cherish my lifelong connections and appreciate how human I am.

Amazon

A very composed man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and how patiently and brilliantly he made his escape.

•  Interesting characters
•  Prison realities
•  Subjective Justice
•  Post World War II setting
•  Short Story

Points I have pondered on:

What is Justice?

Justice is blind to the truth and to the lies.  Im in law school long enough to know that the truth is bendable.  Im in this country long enough to know that the truth is worthless.  Im in this world long enough to know that the truth when told boldly can shatter dreams.  Telling the truth and keeping the truth are both equally selfish acts.  Getting Justice on your side is a hefty and dangerous pursuit.  Might as well pray on getting lucky.

We make our own prisons.

In life, it is either we are restrained by others or we are wound in the very shackles we forged for ourselves.  Freedom does not equal to a free spirit.  Sometimes I envy the insane, their reality is so altered they do not have to worry about what can and can not be done.

Is freedom worth the fight?

Yes it always is!  I pray that I may always have the strength to endure a life long battle of breaking free from imagined restraints.  It would be sad to have lived a life of holding back.  

The fine line between principle and ego.

These two feel just the same.  The former is a virtue the other a vice but when you take time to drink it in, the likeness is astonishing!

At the end of the day, it is you who shall evaluate your own life.  

Was it a life of freedom or was it in chains?

Wookies! So you've read my book list.  Here goes my first book reflection.  ^^

Amazon

An American Private soldier purporting to be a well known and respected German spy falls in love with a French whore.

• Love story
• World War II setting
• A handful of characters 
• Very light reading
• Young adult readability

Points I have pondered on:

What is cowardice?

I have barely lived my life yet to know exactly what it is to be a coward.  Sometimes I think it is the greed for power and prestige that seem very cowardly.  But thinking it over, that's just being spineless.  In the story, at first Private Peachy would appear to be someone we would call a coward.  Running away from an ensuing exchange of fires does warrant that. How about having to lie through your teeth and pretend to be someone you are not just to save your life, is that bravery?  It seems there is a fine line between cowardice and bravery.  I wonder who gets to judge the distinction.  That is hard!

Love in the oddest places.

In a time of crisis and devastation, only the purest form of love flourish.  It is when you are surrounded by deception that you trust your gut-feeling when you find yourself in the dark groping for sincerity behind all the lies.  Love is all that remains true.  We should hold on to it and cherish it.  Although finding out the truth makes everything else a lie, love would be the only exception.  No amount of lies can mask the love that came from those same lies.  Tough times give love the deepest of roots.

Friends vs Alliances

How do you honor friendship while staying true to your duty as an enemy?  It is a tough choice.  Many of us go through this everyday.  It's a choice we make while doing our jobs yet helping a friend would mean betraying a sworn oath.  In friendship there is no paper documents detailing your terms as friends, neither is there an oath to speak of.  Yet it is demandable, challenged and invoked as if its the most stringent of contracts.

When life give you lemons, you make lemonades to drink in celebrating friendships and love.  What is cowardly, is to sell the lemons as it is.

If anyone would pay attention to my book collection, it would be easy to conclude that I dig World War II genres.  I find that era fascinating, heart wrenching and exciting all at the same time.  My term paper back in high school, if I remember it right, was about the cruelties of that war.  Although I get horrified in reading holocaust tales, my interest and curiosity progresses exponentially.  I even got my self a hard copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf just to pick his brain.  

Not to make this post longer than it would be, I present my minuscule but fairly filling collection written in my ghastly handwriting! 

The Secret Garden - Frances Hudson Burnett

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis

The Reader - Bernhard Schlink

The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

My French Whore - Gene Wilder

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The New Reich - Michael Schmidt

Getting In Touch With Your Inner Bitch - Elizabeth Hilts

The True Stella Awards - Randy Cassingham

Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Real McCoy - Darin Strauss

The Woman Who Rode Away - D.H. Lawrence

The Devils Advocate - Morris West

Primary Colors - Anonymous

I Love You, Ronnie - The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan

Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler

Wall Street - Kenneth Lipper

Katharine Hepburn - Sheridan Morley

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Major Works of William Wadsworth

Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki

Japan Against the World - Russel Braddon

Tao Teh Ching - Lao Tzu

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Virgin Suicides - Jefferey Eugenides

Cannery Row - John Steinbeck

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Rage of Angels - Sidney Sheldon

Gullivers Travels and Other Writings - Jonathan Swift

This Boy's Life - Tobias Wolff

Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Veronika Decides to Die - Paolo Coelho

The Aryan Myth - Leon Poliakov

The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom

The Woman Who Had Two Navels - Nick Joaquin

Like The Flowing River - Paolo Coelho

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Chronicles of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Paboritong Libro ni Judas - Bob Ong

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Poison Wood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

Always a Reckoning - Jimmy Carter

The Pilot's Wife - Anita Shreve

Satan's Underground - Lauren Stratford

By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept - Paolo Coelho

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

The Politics of Law - David Kairys

The Love Spell - Phyllis Curott

Introduction to Critical Thinking - Bruce Reichenbach

The Purpose Driven Life - Rick Warren

  Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience:  this is the ideal life.  ~Mark Twain