As I mentioned in one of my posts, I’m studying for Diploma of Graphic Design and it’s almost the last stretch now. I’ll be graduating in 3 months time and thing have been really busy with me trying to finish up all the assignments for the final academic review. It’s stressful but I’m enjoying it so far. I will have to start looking for an internship in January. But I’m not going to worry about that now.

We are going to India for Diwali, we’ll be leaving on 10th Nov. I will get back on 18th because I hae work to do but my husband will stay on a little longer. I’m really excited about the holiday and hoping to get some work done.

I’m also designing  my Portfolio website as part of the diploma and will let you know as soon as it’s up. It might take up to a month though.

My aim is to get a Graphic Design job and eventually design book covers in the future. Lets see how that goes.

We also moved into our new house because the lease for our previous house was up. We moved to the extreme west of Singapore. We lived in the extreme east before. So it’s a good change. But packing/ unpacking is a real pain. On a brighter side, this is the view from our house now as opposed to the kitchens we saw from our previous house. The thing that the arrow points to is the Bukit Timah Hill which is the largest hill in Singapore. Yeah…I know. But I’m kind of excited over it, no idea why. I guess 2 years of looking at the insides of people’s houses does that to you.

In spite of the lack of time, I have been reading quite well. I notice I read more when I have lots of work just to take time off from it even for 15 mins. I’ve read some very good books that were on my shelves. Obviously I haven’t reviewed all here.

I also read 50 shades of Grey and didn’t like it at all. I’m still thinking if I should review it here.

In spite of all that is going on my husband and I do find time to do things together. Last weekend we tried Rock Climbing for the first time and we also attended a Level 1 Climbing certificate. It means that we can now Rock Climb without any supervision from professionals

Also,  a few weeks back, on my birthday, we went to Desaru, Malaysia for 2 days which was short but rather fun. Here is a video I did on my YouTube channel if you are interested.

Books and Vacation and trip to Desaru

My thoughts: Having read and loved most of Jean Sasson’s books, I’m always happy when I discover she’s written a new book. This book was more interesting to me because it was written on Osama Bin Laden, the elusive ‘self-proclaimed’ jihadi. Although I have intense hate for him, there is a part of me that wants to know why and how does a man become the Osama. How does a guy have so much control over so many people that they were willing to die for him? Also, What kind of family life did he have? All this and the author’s name led me to read this book.

The book starts with Osama’s life in Jeddah, then Sudan and finally to Afghanistan. Because the book is from his family’s point of view it doesn’t have details of his jihadi life but enough to note the major crossroads of his life and how it shaped and encouraged him towards a violent future.

Omar Bin laden: courtesy 4th-reich

The first thing that struck me about this book is the honesty with which it’s written. It must have taken immense strength from the wife and son to narrate this. They don’t pretend to hate Osama for the sake of the world. They loved and tried to please him in spite of what he was. His sons and wives spent their lives travelling with him to various countries and living in increasingly deteriorating conditions. Osama was a rich and successful builder to begin with. His family lived in luxury until Osama became overly “religious”. This book is not written for the sake of writing one. I have read memoirs of people where all they write is common knowledge. But this book reveals a different side to Osama, it shows him as a devoted family man. Time Magazine describes it best

‘The thrill of being a fly on the wall of the bin Laden family’.

The book was written before Osama dies so that part is still a mystery but fortunately I have a later edition of the book which gives a brief idea of the reaction of his family to his death. I seriously cannot stop talking about ‘Growing up Bin Laden‘ and since there is no one else I can talk to, I am happy and grateful I have this place.

It’s uploaded on my YouTube channel which is called ‘BookShelved’ so don’t get too surprised when you see the intro.

My Thoughts:
My only reason for accepting this book for review was that it was set in Singapore. If you read my blog regularly you might know I don’t read many thrillers. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that I don’t actively seek them. So if I’m just going to read a few thrillers every year, I’m glad ‘Year of the Tiger’ was one of them.

This book in set in 2014 Singapore. When workers are digging for a tunnel in Singapore, they stumble upon a secret room filled with loot from the World War II. It’s a vault created by the Japanese and protected with a lethal virus that could affect hundreds of people very quickly. When the workers take the loot and flee Singapore, it creates an epidemic which can only be stopped or controlled if the mystery of the virus can be solved by the clues left by Japanese.

For me the plot itself is a big draw because along with the current story it also gives interesting information on the Japanese during the World War. It’s intriguing to imagine that a small and super developed city like Singapore could have so many secrets. I found the Singapore history and the presence of tunnels and secret rooms in modern-day Singapore fascinating, and because it intermingled seamlessly with the plot, I was one happy reader. Unfortunately I don’t know much about the Japanese occupation of Singapore and this book more or less gave me a teaser without reading like a history lesson. It made me want to study more about that particular time period. How many thrillers can you say that for?  This is also the kind of story that could turn out to be true a few years down the road. That kind of explains part of my fascination to the story.

The involvement of the Japanese in the whole affair makes me wonder how Japanese will react if there was truly a situation like this. I kind of imagine it would be pretty close to the book. As far as the writing goes – it works well for a thriller I guess. The only problem I have is that the language used by the Singaporeans was not really Singaporean. If you have lived in Singapore even for a short while you’ll notice the unique brand of English spoken by the locals here which makes it distinctively Singaporean. While the characters weren’t particularly memorable, the story was enough to keep me occupied.

When I was almost 90% finished with the book I wondered about the end, I was worried about how it was all going to tie up. For me the most important part in the thriller is the ending, It could make or break a book for me. Fortunately, the ending in this book was pretty good. In some parts it was a very simple solution but in some parts it was pretty complicated considering the scale and scope of the problem.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and I hope there are more books written that are based in Singapore. I’m definitely looking forward to reading more David Miller books, especially if he writes about Singapore. For just 278 pages, ‘Year of the Tiger’ was throughly entertaining.

My thoughts:
Here is a completely different take on a very popular topic. Mr. Riggs has taken the plotline that many fantasy novels have today and turned it into something completely different…in a good way.

Jacob Portman is a normal teenager who leads a boring and uneventful life (according to him). He is fascinated and intrigued by the stories his grandfather used to tell him about his past life – about growing up in an orphanage on an island and about the peculiar children who lived there. He described children who could levitate, who could pick heavy objects and of the one who was invisible. As Jacob grew up he knew these stories were just made up.

But when his grandfather dies in mysterious circumstances, he decides to find some answers by journeying to his grandfathers orphanage somewhere close to Wales. What he finds there is completely unexpected, fascinating and overwhelming.

I loved loved loved the plot. I thought it was innovative and very mysterious. I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. The author created a beautiful atmosphere with the Island and the mysteries that surrounded it. I wished I was on the Island with Jacob. There is a lot more to the story than what I just told you but I wont disclose more because I want to keep it spoiler free.

Now the bad – yes, it’s not perfect. There were a lot of loopholes or if you see it from a different perspective, I didn’t understand some of the story. The ending was rushed and there is a sequel. I’m kind of bored with the whole sequel obsession in YA. Why can’t people write a book that is complete in itself? Also I found Jacob to be very decent considering the fact that he is a teenager and a boy.

I still really enjoyed reading the book and would love to read the next one. The pictures in the book helped with the story and made it more fascinating. Initially, before reading the book, just looking at the pictures, I thought this would be a horror novel – but it isn’t. I know some people get turned off by horror novels, so don’t be.

I think you would enjoy this book even if you don’t read YA.

Some of the pictures from the book

For today, let me introduce you to Chip Kidd, one of the most influential and famous book cover designers today. The cover I’m going to talk about today is this

I’m sure you all know what book this is about. The design process goes something like this.

Chip Kidd went to the library to find books on dinosaurs and found this page.

He put this in a photostat machine, took a piece of tracing paper, taped it over the tracing paper with a scotch tape and took a rapidograph pen and reconstituted the dinosaur and came up this which was used in the final book cover.

When it was sent to Michael Chrichton and he responded with this

The image was bought by Universal and was used in the movie which in turn was used in a lot of the movie memorabilia when it was released.

Thats the story behind the cover of Jurassic Park. I hope you enjoyed reading this post.

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Chip Kidd (from Wikipedia): Chip Kidd (born September 12, 1964) is an American author, editor, and graphic designer, best known for his book covers. Kidd is currently associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, when he was hired as a junior assistant. Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 a year, Kidd has freelanced for Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner and Columbia University Press in addition to his work for Knopf. Kidd also supervises graphic novels at Pantheon, and in 2003 he collaborated with Art Spiegelman on a biography of cartoonist Jack Cole, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. His output includes cover concepts for books by Mark Beyer, Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Ross, Charles Schulz, Osamu Tezuka, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, John Updike and others. His design for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel was carried over into marketing for the film adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their books

Obviously I have to get this information from somewhere. There are a few youtube videos on this so if you are interested you can watch this videos but for these feature series I’m going to break it down so that you can go through the process in less than 5 mins instead of watching a 20 mins or an hour-long video. All the references will be given alongside.

References:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC0KxNeLp1E (17.17 min long video)

Long time no see. I haven’t written on my blog for some time now and I do feel bad. I have been super busy though. If I havent mentioned it before, I am doing a Graphic Design Diploma which runs for 11 months and just because it’s a 3 year degree cramped into 11 months, its very hectic. But I’m having fun. I wont say I haven’t had time at all because I did but I just didn’t feel like blogging anymore.

But here I am – refreshed and ready to blog again. I have read some really good books meanwhile and it’s a pity that I didn’t do a review or something for them and now I feel it’s too late to remember the details even. I do have 4-5 review copies which have been on my shelf for a couple of months now. I should stop ignoring them and get to them soon enough. I accepted them because they seemed interesting and something I wanted to read, so I have no excuse to not read them. I just received this book called ‘Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar children‘ for review. I didn’t want to accept any new books until I started reading the ones I already had but I couldnt resist this one since it’s already been on my Wishlist and I really wanted to read it.

Anyway, for non-bookish randomness, I just bought Samsung Note. If you havent seen it before it’s this big brick of a Cell phone which seems way too big when you first use it but then after using it for a couple of days the iphone seems like a toy. I’m loving it so far.

The wordpress interface has changed so much. I’m not sure I like the new look.

I am really really really missing home. I wish I could drop everything and visit for a few days. I will probably try and go sometime during the break in August or something.

We watched Snowwhite and the Hunstmen and I found it really boring, My husband fell asleep during the second half. The effects and all were amazing but the movie just wasnt that captivating. I wish they had taken someone else instead of Bella (Sorry dont remember her real name) as I think she did not suit the character well. Someone like Amanda Seyfried would have done more justice to the role.

I havent bought new books for sometime now…oh except Insurgent…I did buy a few YA books for my younger sister but thats all.

Oh I’m on Instagram now but it’s under my real name so cant put it here. But if you’re on Instagram as well let me know so I can follow you. We can then get to know each other in the real world as well

Back to bookish things  – I am reading The Pagan Stone at the moment which is the third book in the Hollow series. I enjoyed the first 2 books but this one is really difficult to get into because it seems kind of repetitive. Anyway, I might abandon it and start Miss Peregrine’s…not sure what to do yet.

I haven’t been on Google reader for like forever but I need to see if there is an app for Google Reader on my phone which will really be helpful in catching up. I don’t mark read-all I just read the latest couple of posts from each blogger and then mark read-all.

Anyway, I am hoping to post atleast once a week if not regularly here. Tell me how have you guys been?

I know a few of you have their websites designed from designers. I just wanted to know how much it cost you. Is there any extra price for future maintenance and such? If you think this is too private, you could email (violetc (dot) books (at) gmail (dot) com), DM or facebook message me.

If you are one of those who haven’t designed their site because you think the charges are too much, what do you feel is the reasonable price?

I would be ever grateful if you could help me a bit with this

NOTE: This post is not because I want to get my blog designed. I’m studying Graphic Design at the moment and one other graphic designer I know said people paid him $4000 for a design which I thought was a super ridiculous amount as no one i know in the blogosphere would ever pay this much. I just wanted to know the trend. You guys have been very helpful. Although I don’t think I would design blogs in the future, its good to know the market price