Adventure

Noragami (2014-)

 in Adventure / Fantasy / Interesting by

Summary

A minor god looks to gain recognition and uses the help of a girl while having conflicts with his Regalia.

Review

So, I totally watched this entire season in 1 day. And to say I want more is an understatement. This is not some deep show where you have to concentrate, but it is light, gives quite a few laughs, has decent animations and is just overall fun to watch! There are some interesting underlying ideas behind the issues which the main characters have such as popularity, not fitting in and similar concepts.

Most likely a lot of anime lovers wouldn’t love this show due to the fact that it’s not a huge one, like Bleach or One Piece (with so many episodes I can’t even keep track), but I like that it’s smaller. It follows a god by the name of Yato and he wants to gain attention. In the show the people of Japan would pray to the gods before big events and call upon the gods for help for various things from wishing someone was dead to just passing a test. Yato wants to be called upon more and get more money so that he could have a shrine. Having a shrine means that you truly are a god as you have a place to have people worship you. As of now he resorts to putting his phone number on walls or bathroom stalls.

Yato, along with his Regalia (which is a spirit which he can use as a weapon), and his girl companion fight these creatures called Phantoms which are essentially dark spirits and they can corrupt people. The gods job is to keep the Phantoms in check and kill them off using their Regalias.

There is quite a lot of comedy in the show and it had me laughing quite hard. The show definitely is for 16 and up because of some of the jokes but nothing was terribly inappropriate like some animes can definitely be.

I also did quite like the opening theme song.

Overall I really did enjoy it and was sad that there was only one season so far so I’m hoping that they’re going to bring it back this year. Just have to hope!

Oh, and please watch it in Japanese with English sub titles. It’s much more authentic and you lose a lot of the feelings when you watch it in English. Believe me. I’ve spent time watching the same episode in English and Japanese and it’s honestly not the same. It is sometimes hard to keep up with the subtitles, but you will learn how to do it in time. But it really does change the experience a whole lot when you watch it in English!

Happy watching!

The Ledge by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan

 in Adventure / Book Reviews / Books by

Book cover The Ledge by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan“An adventure story of friendship and survival on Mount Rainier”

Summary

“In June 1992, best friends Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood atop Washington’s Mount Rainier, celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate mountaineers. Then their triumph turned tragic when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevasse—the pitch-black, ice-walled hell of every climber’s nightmares.

An avid adventurer since youth, Davidson was a seasoned climber at the time of the Rainier ascent. But the harrowing free fall left him challenged by nature’s grandeur at its most unforgiving. Trapped on a narrow frozen shelf, deep below daylight, he desperately battled crumbling ice, snow that threatened to bury him alive, and crippling fear of the inescapable chasm below—all the while struggling to save his fatally injured friend. Finally, alone, with little equipment and rapidly dwindling hope, he confronted a fateful choice: the certainty of a slow, lonely death or the near impossibility of an agonizing climb for life. A story of heart-stopping adventure, heartfelt friendship, fleeting mortality, and implacable nature, The Ledge chronicles the elation and grief, dizzying heights and punishing depths, of a journey to hard-won wisdom.”

-From Amazon.com

Review

In all honesty, this book stressed the hell out of me. It was just things went from good to bad to worse. And I had to read this book over a few days to be able to make it. It’s not a long book at all, only about 253 pages or so and I’m used to reading that and way more in a shorter period of time, but with this book, I just couldn’t do it because of the content.

It is a true story and I would never have read this book if it hadn’t been the college wide book for next year but in all honesty, it was a really, really good book and had some fabulous lessons in it.

The main one that was said in the ending was, while the author literally fell into a trench while coming down from the mountain, life can make you fall into trenches, like a turn of your health for the worst or financial problems, and you cannot give up, even if you are left alone and it seems like you have no where else to turn to. You have to at least try because you never know, you just may come out of it alive and survive as a stronger person.

Essentially this book was just about this man who was hiking with his friend and there are trenches and if you fall into them, they are usually only about 30 feet deep so your partner can save you, but this one was way worse, about 100+ feet deep and he was dragged in along with his partner and it was about the story of how Jim was trying to get out.

I’m not a huge fan of the cold, nor confined spaces, and this mixed all of those ‘I do not likes’ together into one book and I had to take it bit by bit because of how it was written. Because it was in first person, you felt like you were with Jim during the entire experience and I just found it really quite stressful and upsetting.

But, while it is all that, it was a fabulous book because of the lessons you can learn in it. The perseverance was fantastic and it was incredible that he was able to do as well as he did.

I highly recommend this book! It’s not a hard read at all, as some non-fictions are. And it’s not boring. It’s sometimes a little monotonous with the talking about the climbing gear and such since I don’t really have any knowledge of those kinds of things, but even if you don’t know about it, it really doesn’t make that much of a difference and you can read it perfectly fine.

Please do check this book out. But I tell you now, prepare for an emotional rollercoaster.

Let me know what you think and happy reading!

Inferno by Dan Brown

 in Adventure / Book Reviews / Books / Older Readers by

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. 

Inferno by Dan Brown

From my Instagram

 

Summary

“Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in an Italian hospital, disoriented and with no recollection of the past thirty-six hours, including the origin of the macabre object hidden in his belongings. With a relentless female assassin trailing them through Florence, he and his resourceful doctor, Sienna Brooks, are forced to flee. Embarking on a harrowing journey, they must unravel a series of codes, which are the work of a brilliant scientist whose obsession with the end of the world is matched only by his passion for one of the most influential masterpieces ever written, Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno.

Dan Brown has raised the bar yet again, combining classical Italian art, history, and literature with cutting-edge science in this sumptuously entertaining thriller.”

-From Amazon.com

Review

This book was amazingly well done and SO scary. Not terror scary but because all the facts and scientific pieces of information are true, so that makes it way scarier to think about.

I just wanted to start off with the quote from the beginning of the book.

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Now, I am not 100% sure who said this comment but it seems like it was Dante Alighieri, but don’t quote me on that because it seems like there is a lot of discrepancies about who said it. But I really like this quote but I agree with it. Now there are many sides to every issue and to state that those who don’t pick a side or don’t have a say, essentially not caring, have a special place in hell.

Now, this book obviously has a lot of backlash online when you google it because it is a historic book, taking real things, places, and people, and using them in a novel so people like to rip these books apart and say how horrible it was and inaccurate it was. First off, this is a novel! You can’t quote it in a thesis or a research paper as even though it has facts, it is still a fictional piece and can’t be counted as a credible source. People seem to like to ignore this fact and say how inaccurate it was, and it partially annoys me, but you will always have those trolls whose main purpose is to rip others apart.

But with that aside, I honestly loved this book. It did take me much longer to read than a regular Dan Brown, just because I found the topic at hand quite stressful and also because I’ve been very busy so didn’t get to sit down and read as much. But I finally finished it in a 7 hour-long car drive, and am so glad that I read it. It was exciting, presented interesting ideas, and scared the living crap out of me because of some of the ideas presented.

For characters, each character changed throughout the novel. Some you thought were good and turned out to be bad but then were good-ish, then there were bad guys who were actually good….I mean serious confusion going on but it all was straightened out in the end, per usual.

The main character, Robert Langdon has been in some of his other novels so seeing him work on this type of case is nice because you get to see character development over longer periods of time which is a nice change.

Overall I do recommend this book. It’s a classical Dan Brown and if you like his other novels, then you are sure to like this one as well.

Happy reading and let me know what you think!

Dangerous Territory: An Alpha Ops novella by Emmy Curtis

 in Adventure / Book Reviews / Books / Older Readers by

Summary

“A SEXY STRANGER
Flirting with danger is reporter Grace Grainger’s modus operandi. But she’s learned the hard way not to grow attached to the soldiers she’s embedded with in Afghanistan. To escape from her pain and loneliness, she fantasizes about the hot night she spent with a gorgeous stranger three years before in D.C. Grace never thought she’d see him again-let alone need him to rescue her . . .
AN EXPLOSIVE NIGHT
Air Force Master Sergeant Josh Travers knows journalists are nothing but trouble. So when he has to risk the lives of his team to save some reporter who’s been separated from her patrol, he’s not happy-until he recognizes her stunning eyes and delicious curves. Josh has never wanted a woman like he wants Grace. Even in an Afghan cave with a sandstorm and enemy troops closing in, he can’t deny the desire. This might be the end for both of them-or one hell of a beginning.”

-B&N.com

Review

This book was honestly adorable. It was a short story, only about 115 pages on my iPad and $0.99 from the iBook store. It was about 30,000 words which is below the aim for NaNoWriMo so it was a really fast read. It had a cute relationship, adding the explosive location of Afghanistan and in the middle of a war.

Like hot damn. Who gets it on in the middle of a battle field in a cave at night with Taliban just outside the mouth of your cave. These two characters; JT and Grace.

There was some nice character development and yes I would have loved more, but you have to remember that this was a novella, not a novel. Novella’s of series, in case people don’t know (as I didn’t used to), usually take minor characters and use them in a side story, or use the same ideas as the main series but take it on a different track. Also novellas are usually much, much shorter.

But overall, this was a cute and sweet story. The sex wasn’t graphic and there really wasn’t any crude language used. A few f-bombs and regular cursing but no seriously vulgar language which is a nice change.

I will definitely be checking out more of Emmy Curstis’ books as I ‘d love to see what she can do. I recommend this book for ages 17 and up as it is a mature theme but it’s an easy read as I said. Do check it out though!

So until next time my lovelies. Happy reading!

Favorite Quotes

“Good. My name is T.S, and I will be your rescuer today.”

“Well, soldier, is that a night-vision scope in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”