Joel Osteen: It's Your Time

I am not a huge fan of the feel good Christianity. While it is nice to here that “God loves you and he wants you to be happy” or “God wants you to have financial success” things like that are not biblically based. Now, I am not a fire and brimstone sermon-loving girl, but I do like my teachings to come directly from the bible. That being said, it is nice to hear the God is on my side and rooting for me, theme that Joel Osteen commonly preaches.

He is one of the most well-known and popular preachers in the United States, selling out stadiums across the county, and has made the New York Times Best Sellers list often with his novels. This review is about his work, It’s Your Time.

In the tradition of Joel Osteen, it quotes very little of the actual Bible, but does have a good message about seizing the day and making your life better. The focus of the book is on you, the individual reader. If it was just put in the self-help section, I think it would be better. It feels as if Joel uses God to push his agenda.

Many of the stories in it, while inspiring, felt very Chicken Soup to me as well. Again, nothing wrong with that, as I love those books, but posing it as a God book kind of bummed me out. I would give it a two and a half star rating.

The Stellow Project: Review

It was suppose to be a fun weekend at the cabin with her sister and best friend, but on the drive up Lilah realizes something is wrong. The wind is getting worse, hail the size of soccer balls begins to fall, and cell service is out. The three girls continue to drive up the mountain to the cabin, knowing that there is a landline and that Lilah’s father is on his way. Only he isn’t.

Calls home are spotty at best, and the girls discover that not only has New York City practically been leveled (along with much of the country), but Lilah’s dad is being blamed.

Mr. Swellows is a well know environmentalist, but the past years have turned him from scientific authority into a crazed end on times environmental terrorist. He is the one who disabled weather satellites, making sure that no one knew of the catastrophic events heading for the cities. It’s is fault that thousands of people are dead, and as it turns out it is his fault that Lilah is sick.

Ever since Lilah can remember, she has trouble breathing. Pills and surgeries have plagued her life, at seventeen she has never been allowed to stay home alone in case she stops breathing and has to be resuscitated and taken to the hospital. Her father has kept her inside their houses, in climate controlled and pressurized rooms. He made her sick, she was his control group for medicines, theories and environmental tests.

After Lilah’s best friend deserts her and informs on her to the FBI, Lilah and her sister are taken in by a group of scientists who know more about her and her family then Lilah knows about herself. Befriending the lead scientists son, Lilah begins to investigate. Files on her and her mother are found behind locked cabinets. Pills in different dosages and animal testing are being done behind doors. Experiments are running rampant and Lilah doesn’t know what to do, or what any of it means. Lilah has to decide if some mistakes and experiments are worth it in the search for the greater good of humanity and the planet. But how much can she tolerate? And what are her father and the secretive scientists going to allow her to see before the Lilah experiment is killed off for the greater good of the research?

The book was okay. I think that the premise is good, but I didn’t like the main character. She was whiney and I felt no real connection to her. It also felt like it ended rather abruptly, almost like the author wrote 300 pages and then decided that was enough so she quickly finished the novel. At the moment there doesn’t appear to be a sequel, but the way the book ended leaves it open to have one in the future.

GoodReads Challenge 2015 and My Favorite Books of 2014

2014 was a good year for reading. On New Years Eve I finished my 115^th book! My goal for the last three years has been to read at least 100, and I am glad that I was able to fly past my goal again this year! I plan on setting my goal on Goodreads at 100 once again, with every intention of trying to blow past it.

While I read some books that were awful, many I read were absolutely amazing. Here are my Top 4 books that I read in 2014 (not counting books I reread)

·      The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

o   My best friend gave me this book for Christmas last  year and asked me not to read the back of it, but just   to trust her. She was right  and it was amazing! I went into the novel with no expectations and powered through all four books in about three and a half days.   It centers around a thief who the Magnus believes can lead the king   to power and magics, but at a cost. The Thief has his own agenda, and trying to keep   everyone from turning on each other becomes increasingly difficult.

·       Death Sworn by Leah Cyress

o   I cannot wait for the next book in this series. When I picked it up I was for some off reason under the impression that it was a stand alone novel, but I am so glad it isn’t and that I will have more books in this magical world. A review is below. http://bookscreatebetterworlds.blogspot.com/2014/04/death-sworn-review-by-leah-cypress.html

·      Earth Awakens by Orson Scott Card

o   This is the conclusion to the trilogy the predates Ender Wiggin’s epic battle. This series tells of the first formic invasion, and gives an awesome new view at which to look at Ender’s Game.

·       Undivided by Neal Shusterman

o   This was by far my favorite book. This is one of the best series I have every read, hands down. Read it, trust me. That’s all I am going to say.

I cannot wait to see the amazing books that are published this year, and what crazy and magical worlds I get lost in. Feel free to add me on Goodreads!

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5679489-cate-neuhauser

Variant #1

While I was not a huge fan when I started reading Variant, I loved it by the end. Many of the things that I didn’t like in the beginning were cleared up as the novel progressed, and character choices that seemed inorganic started to make sense the more I read the novel.

Benson Fisher has bounced from foster home to foster home for as long as he can remember, holding down meager jobs and friendless, after all, how can you make friends when every few months he has to move and can’t afford a cell phone or a laptop to keep in touch. But Benson has hope, he just was accepted into the prestigious Maxfield Academy on a full scholarship. The school has a full-ride program for orphaned and foster homed children and Benson was the candidate that they chose. Benson believes that this is the answer to his prayers, a permanent place to stay until he graduates, a good college, and friends. He has never been more wrong about something in his entire life.

Once at the school he finds that there are no adults; rather cameras and monitors, and a video every morning from a strange man telling them what to do. Everyday it is different, different classes that they have to teach themselves, crazy and violent paintball matches, weird PE classes, and that is just the beginning. Sometimes the doors lock on the students, forcing them to sleep outside in the cold with only a handful of sleeping bags for the entire populous. Other nights. Other times the man tells them to punish each other and send specific students to detention, no one has ever come back from detention. Anyone who has ever tried to run away has been killed, and it seems to Benson that no one even wants to try and escape the strange prison they are all being held in.

Every student was like Benson when they arrived, no family or friends to miss them, and the school knew it. Benson is determined to figure out what the purpose of the school is and escape, but talking about such things has put students in detention never to be seen again. The school is divided into gangs, and a few of them are tired of Benson poking his nose into business that isn’t his and decide to take him and his girlfriend out, even if it isn’t sanctioned by the school. That’s when things go from bad to worse.

Benson can barely walk after the beating his received, but Jane isn’t breathing. Benson is trying to get up and run for help when Jane suddenly sits up and starts making her way to a secret bunker near the school. Benson hobbles after her yelling to stop, but she doesn’t hear them. Once inside the bunker Jane does something crazy, she pulls off her ear and plugs a cord into it. Jane is a robot, and Benson watches as she downloads herself into a computer, 1s and 0s about him and the rest of the students at the school.

Now Benson doesn’t know what to do. Who would believe him about Jane, and more importantly who else is a robot. After all, Jane can’t be the only robot among them. Benson starts to make lists of when the students arrived, who has the most connection with the strange man in the videos, but if Jane who wanted to get out of the school, seemed to bleed when hurt, and who’s “heart” raced when they kissed, Benson doesn’t want to trust anybody. He needs to escape now more than ever, but to do so he has to have help, and he has to figure out who the robot spies are among them.

I really like this book by the end, things that didn’t always make sense in the beginning got cleared up and the story moved forward with excitement. I cannot wait to read the sequels!

TRUST NO ONE!

Timebound by Rysa Walker

            Kate had never really had a relationship with her grandmother. It wasn’t really her fault, but

ever since her Aunt Prudence went missing years ago the family dynamics had been strained. Which is why Kate was so shocked to get word from Grandmother Katherine. Despite her mother’s warning Kate started to develop a relationship with her grandmother, she was dying of cancer and Kate didn’t want her to feel like she was alone. Of course, there was more to Katherine’s visit than simply waned to reconnect before her death.

            Turns out that their family has a history of time travel, and Grandma Katherine is from hundreds of years in the future. She got stuck as a young woman in the 1950s after a scysm in the time travel department, CHRONOS. A group lead by Katherine’s ex-boyfriend had convinced many members that they should start altering history for their own personal gain. Time travelers were stranded throughout history, starting families and mixing genetics from time, creating new time travelers like Kate. Kate doesn’t need man of the technologies of the future to time travel, she is born with abilities no one ever though possible.

            She isn’t the only one though. Children from the time travelers are picking sides, and an all out time manipulation war is at hand. Different memories collide every time something is changed, even many of Kate’s. She has to decide what she is willing to give up, and what memories should be changed and forgotten for good.

I thought this book was… okay. I went back and forth about it to be honest. There were times I wanted to just put it down and never pick it up again. I has some good ideas, but the main characters who are trying to preserve the current timeline are hypocritical. It isn’t the original timeline after all, things have been changed before Kate got involved. Rather than deal with that, the author just glosses over hypocrisy and inconsistency of the story.