To Read or Not To Read

Anybody else agree with the title? I know I do. It's sort of like a "duh" statement. I am a big believer, also, in reading the book before watching the movie. So when I learned that my eighth grade English class was going to watch The Help, I may or may not have found an online version and started reading it in class instead of watching the movie. A lot of book to movie adaptations are pretty good. I remember crying at The Fault in Our Stars movie as much as I did during the book. Paper Towns was also pretty good and funny. The Hunger Games movies were decent and I  loved  The Book Thief and If I Stay. Leonardo DiCaprio, among other elements in The Great Gatsby movie, as Jay Gatsby made The Great Gatsby as enjoyable as the book. The Outsiders was a decent adaptation and Divergent (the first one) plus a good handful of the Harry Potter movies are as good as their books too (but not better than). It's really the bad book to movie adaptations I remember. Y...

If you haven't heard of it, This is Where it Ends is Marieke Nijkamp's debut novel about a school shooting in Opportunity, Alabama. The story spans over a time period of 54 through four different perspectives as all the high school students stuck in their auditorium try to survive against a trigger-happy gunman. I really enjoyed reading this book, even though I had to take multiple breaks because sometimes it just got really hard to read. Not because I couldn't understand anything, but because I kept wondering, "What if this happened at my school?" and "This is horrifying, I can't imagine . . ." and I really couldn't imagine. I kept thinking of my younger siblings and how they'd react if put in a situation like this, and I had to put the book down before I went too far down that road. A book has never made me feel like that, and it was refreshing, however scary, to be so invested in the book that I was almost in story. There was also s...