Novel Nerds *

World Book Night Giveaway!

World Book Night is all about spreading the love of books to people who don’t usually read. Thousands all over the UK are taking to the streets today to hand out books to strangers that normally do not read. So here at NovelNerds, we just had to do a giveaway.

Simply reblog this post and follow our blog here *for a chance* to win!

Note: UK residents only. We will be paying for P&P. The winner will be contacted at midnight! :)

Happy World Book Night!

May your eyes be strained by words,
Your mind filled with a kaleidoscope of images,
Your sanity challenged and your heart melted and broken
By all the glorious books we are blessed to hold!

World Book Night/April 23rd in the UK is all about encouraging people who don’t normally read to…well…read! People all over the world go and give books [usually their favourites or those listed on the link below] to try and widen the brethren-ship amongst us bookworms. 
People who give away books for free? THE BEST KIND OF PEOPLE.

Click on this World Book Night link to find out more about what April 23rd 2013 means and for events happening near you! 

HAPPY READING :D

Oh, and stay tuned for our World Book Night giveaway!

Book Review: The Great Gatsby by F. S Fitzgerald

Genre: Fiction, Romance

My rating: 5*

Book blurb:

‘He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.’

The Great Gatsby (1925),  F.Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, is one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Jay Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle in a mansion on Long Island’s gold coast encapsulates the spirit, excitement, and violence of the era Fitzgerald named ‘the Jazz Age’. Impelled by his love for Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby seeks nothing less than to recapture the moment five years earlier when his best and brightest dreams- his ‘unutterable visions’-seemed to be incarnated in her kiss…

A book is always read slightly different when you have to study it. When you look into a book like The Great Gatsby in a lot of detail, you’ll realise just how much of a genius Fitzgerald is. With the film coming up, the cast is definitely going to draw a lot of people who’ve never read the book to the film so if you haven’t, you should definitely read the book beforehand!

The frailty of dreams and their becoming a reality is a dangerous thing in this novel. Incarnating dreams into people is even more dangerous. The way this novel is structured is genuinely a masterpiece. I remember this moment when I was studying time in the novel and thinking “Holy shit, this guy is awesome.”

The way the past, present and future feed into one another and collide makes you wonder, can one create the past? Nope. Should one try to create the past? Probably not; the past is past for a reason but Gatsby does everything to re-live this one moment in time where, for him, life was at its best.

This novel shows how problematic it is to have fulfilled your dreams too early; especially when those dreams lie in wealth. What do you do when you’ve made your millions? What do you do when you’ve already done everything you wanted? The Great Gatsby is full of dried up, young souls with nothing better to do. And so, love and hope in The Great Gatsby are destructive. Relationships and love are misplaced and mismatched into disasters. This book really shows how corruptible desire can be and the extremities unrequited love can create.

Read for an insight into The Jazz Age, life after a generation of lost souls to the Great War and a good old story about broken hearts and broken dreams.

Oh and I hate Daisy Buchanan with a passion.

Something awesome this way comes

So I created this back in May/June last year. We had big plans which ultimately failed but I’ve decided to start again with this and hopefully our followers will like it.

Question: If we were to start creating videos of book reviews, book events etc. Would you watch?

just bought both for £5 hehehe

Why did you start reading?

For me, books were my companions growing up. I wasn’t really allowed to play out a lot like my brothers. So I read to escape. I read books to travel the world, meet new people and to just have fun. What about you guys?!

Flashback Friday #4

^How cool is this? Hands together for Farhana; the Novel Nerds site would be rather ugly without her tbh!

Memory lane is such a nice place when you’re walking with books. Today I read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Firstly, I absolutely LOVE these Brontë sisters. Secondly, Jane Eyre is so inspiring. I couldn’t possibly choose what exactly it is that I love so much about this book but Jane’s independence and perseverance is inspiring. Jane Eyre is the kind of role model we need in today’s world imo!

I love the way she eventually got her happily ever after… it didn’t come easily; it came through sacrifice but that made it all the more worth having. Had Rochester and Jane not gone through what they did, I don’t know whether their love would have been as strong. And she doesn’t just swoon helplessly at his feet and let him suck her blood dry [supernatural writers, take note] Instead, she stands her ground and holds fast to her values. INSPIRATIONAL. 

Some favourite quotes:

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.” 

 “I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.” 

“Rochester: “Jane, be still; don’t struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.”

Jane: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.” 

J: “I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.” 

R: “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.” 

Flashback Friday #3

Flashback Friday is an original meme hosted here at Novel Nerds, posting a favourite old love for the day.

So, this week I decided to take a look at The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I read this book for A-level English Literature and it became a favourite because it’s one of the few books that really made me think about the way we shape our selves and the relationship between individuals and societies. What’s scary about this book is how quickly oppression can become the norm which makes you wonder just exactly what is freedom? By whose standards are we free people?

For those who haven’t read it, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel set in the future. It shows a society that has reverted to a version of Puritanical living that really challenges your idea of morality, survival and the forever present gender friction in the world.

Some of my favourite quotes:

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” 

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.” 

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.” 

“Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”