The Giraffe Blog

  Imagine what would happen if you took a series of million-view TED talks and integrated them into a national bestseller nonfiction. The product? David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell, which I will simply refer to as David and Goliath . Although not necessarily capturing stories straight from famous TED talks, David and Goliath rings the readers’ minds with the same level of impact and excitement. This book teaches the readers why David was able to easily beat Goliath and how Monet, along with other artists initially criticized as amateur painters, could become successful. Despite the plain white cover, the book’s engaging content kept me turning its pages and gave me the hope that maybe I, too, can beat my Goliath.  Through the course of the book, the author brings in many immersive and relatable examples from around the world where people overcame their disadvantages and used them as their motivation towards success. Ra...

               BY Mason. I decided to read another book by William Sleator. This book is called The duplicate. It starts when a boy finds a device that can duplicate himself, and creates a twin. To some people, this could sound like a dream because your twin can do all your homework, go to school, and do chores. However, the twin thinks exactly the same thing. This becomes a problem when he has to share things like clothes to the twin. The duplicate gets into many fights with the real person, and there are many disputes and arguments. The duplicate then finds a way to seemingly get rid of all of his problems, but it does not turn out well.  What was funny about the book was that the main character thought that all his problems would be over because he could literally be two places at a time, but it does not turn out the way he thought of. I would recommend this book to other people, but the book does get boring at times....

Analysis of Spinning On Christmas of 2017, I was given Spinning by Tillie Walden. Being more interested in my other toys and shorter books, I put the 400-page graphic novel on my bookshelf. I tried reading the first few pages, but it was boring and the plot moved too slowly for me when I was younger. Last month, though, I found it and picked it up. Tillie Walden’s raw emotions and inner thoughts were wedged between A Traveler's Guide to Cuba 2007 and a box of unsent holiday cards from years ago. Tillie Walden’s Spinning is an honest and eloquent autobiography about how it feels to grow up.  The novel centers around her experiences as a competitive figure skater. It starts with Tillie’s family suddenly moving from New Jersey to Texas. It’s unclear how old she was at the time of the move, but she seems to be about eight or nine. She starts at a new school where she is targeted and bullied by her classmate, Grace. She manages to make a few friends, including Rae, another girl at her...

     I read about a book called Singularity by William Sleator. This book is about a family suddenly inheriting a house from one a relative, one that the mother and father of the twins know little about. After Barry, one of the twins who is more confident convinces his parents to go to “scout” out the house. After looking at the house, they find random animal skeletons, but the skeletons look different from what a normal animal looks like, almost like he pieced random animal bones together.      Later, the twins find a shed that when entered, slows down time. The cautious brother, Harry, does not want to fiddle around with the shed, but Barry forces Harry to make a decision. The twins then find a shocking secret.      Something cool about this story is that it is actually centered in Illinois, where the house is. It is interesting to see the perspectives of Illinois through the eyes of the twins, since they came from Boston. One example of th...

By Tessa Waldhoff I am currently reading Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. I’m near the end of the book, and the whole thing has been a series of twists and turns set in a post-apocalyptic (or maybe just apocalyptic) future. The story is about Rachel, Wick, and Borne, who all live together in an abandoned city ruled over by the biotech bear project gone wrong. Their lives are becoming more and more dangerous and the relationships between all three of them get very tense. It is outside of the zone of my usual reading material, being a combination of adventure and sci fi, but I am enjoying it; the concepts are so bizarre, and it makes for a very entertaining read. Personally, I don’t think the book is overly scary, but I found some of the connections between its world and our world disturbing. Other parts were just creepy and violent, such as  when they interact or fight with “Mord proxies” (monstrous biotech bears) or “changelings” (children who can no longer be considered humans because th...

As a follow-up from Purple Hibiscus, I decided to read another novel by Chimamanda N. Adichie, Americanah. Winning the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in its year of publication (2013), Americanah proves its literary and social value with an immersive narrative and a direct tone that makes the readers feel as though they know exactly what the characters are feeling. The main character, Ifemelu, opens the story as she makes a long-debated decision to return to Nigeria, her home country, after thirteen years of living in America. First time in several years, Ifemelu emails her previous lover from Nigeria, Obinze, who had married another woman several years ago. As Ifemelu and Obinze reflect on their love fifteen years ago, the story travels back to their years at high school and college, filled with romance and personal development of the two persons as they learn from one another. Throughout the first half of the novel, the author switches between the scenes from th...