The Pantanos

I was able to watch the movie a while ago and enjoyed it very much. So, I decided to read the book for this month's blog post. The Martian opens with the most iconic sentence I've seen: I'm pretty much fucked. The book's main character is Mark Watney, who is the resident botanist in NASA’s mission to Mars. While the crew was scheduled to spend a month on Mars, they were forced to leave the mission early due to a violent sandstorm causing damage to the transportation vehicle which the crew needed to return to their ship, Hermes. While evacuating, a stray antenna punctured Watney’s suit and cut into his side, causing him to pass out. Thinking he died, the rest of the crew returned to Earth. After regaining consciousness, Watney returned to the Mars base and began to make a survival plan until NASA would return to rescue him. Watney rations his meals and finds a way to grow food. As the botanist, he had some Earth soil with him. Mixing in his feces and the leftovers from h...

       If you’ve heard the name Alice Oseman, then you probably know that she wrote the Heartstopper series. But did you know that she wrote other novels? Such novels include I Was Born for This , Radio Silence , Loveless , and the book I will be focusing on: Solitaire . She also wrote the novellas Nick and Charlie and This Winter , which follows the events of Solitaire.       I had received all of these books for Christmas and decided to read one of them. I chose Solitaire and I wasn’t disappointed. Solitaire has a great plot involving Tori the protagonist, Michael Holden who becomes Tori's friend, and Solitaire. Solitaire is a blog that started in her school and no one knows who it is that’s posting on it. It isn’t a normal blog either, each post comes with some form of chaos like music playing on the speakers or ratting someone out for doing something really bad. Tori believes that the blog is somehow connected to her as some posts seem real...

  Hello readers, in this blog I will be reviewing the book The Art of Racing in the Rain. I had watched the movie version of the novel on a plane and was immediately intrigued to read the book to compare the two.  I've just finished the book recently and I have quite a lot of opinions about it.  Enzo, the golden retriever, is our narrator throughout this novel. He guides us through his life with his owner Denny Swift. Denny is a race car driver and mechanic located in Seattle and picked Enzo out of a litter of puppies on a farm in Washington. The book starts off with a silly warm mood as Denny takes care of little Enzo through his puppyhood. We quickly fast forward to a year later where Enzo is full grown and  the two of them are out buying groceries when they bump into a young woman named Eve. We soon get a glimpse of their romantic relationship through the eyes of Enzo. She started to appear more and more in their lives and before you know it they are married. At t...

       Diary of a Tokyo teen is Christine’s illustrated guide to her trip to Japan as a 16 year old Japanese-American. As she says in the book, her mom is Japanese and her dad is American and she has lived in America for almost her whole life. She however at first lived in Japan and then moved when I believe she was around 6. She talks about the differences between when she lived there and when she returned years later, and I find that really interesting to see the similarities and differences between a place you've been to and how it's changed since you left.      She describes all the places she went providing some pictures as well as her own drawings, the people she saw, and the crazy adventures she went on. Each page is about something fun, interesting, and different. W hether it be ramen, maid cafes, or chasing down a geisha, they show many random fun things to see and do if you were to ever go to Japan. They also provide really interesting fact...

  In this blog post, I will be discussing Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality by Pauline Chen. This book is a biography/ personal narrative, and it  is divided into three sections; lessons in medical school, how professional responses manifest and perpetuate themselves, and the transformations in how doctors approach end-of-life care.  All the experiences she had deals with the problem of mortality and how "facing that mortality in ourselves is perhaps the most difficult task of all." Chen leads us into her laboratory facility before her cadaver dissection as she describes the lingering sharp and rancid aroma of formalehyde (formalehyde is a preservative used for cadavers). The smell got much worse as she was presented with the cadaver the next day. Her first response after being in the laboratory was how "unsettling [it was] to be presented with so little history, and it became more so as we allowed ourselves to become intimately familiar with every det...

As part of Health class and Consumer Ed, I (and my classmates) made an Investopedia account and participated in a group stock investment game. After making some poor decisions (dropping my net worth down to 930k from 1m), I made a new account with a bit more success (1.05m from 1m). However, I felt the urge to learn more about the art of investing itself, which is why I chose The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, a book considered a classic in the investing world.  Benjamin Graham is also known as the "father of value investing." This book focuses on the long-term and risk-averse approach to investing and focuses on research and factual data instead of predictions and speculations (which I had been doing). I picked up this book with the idea that it might help me improve in another area of investing, and it did not let me down.  The first thing he states is, simply put, the reasons people lose money: buying into the hype of bull markets, not doing your own research, re...

My sister checked out this among many other books at the library because looked like an interesting read. After she read it I thought it looked fun and decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did, it’s funny, relatable, and a great read. It starts off with Dany, who just started 7th grade and isn't having the best time. She has no classes with any of her friends, finds it hard to navigate the school, and even gets picked on by some mean kid. Then, she discovers a sketchbook that brings anything you draw come to life! So she decides to draw herself a best friend. One that's in all her classes, has a cool personality, and can stick up for her when she can't. But what happens when her new friend finds out why she really exists?? While there are quite a few stories that involves magical sketchbooks I like the idea this book approaches. Drawing yourself a best friend. Not one that's all magical with neat superpowers, but a normal human friend who can relate to you in some way. ...