Blog Spotlight: A Very Fukui Family

I have a student worker in my office who is taking a business course where she is required to write a blog. The blog can be about anything. She has decided to write about the cultural differences between her upbringing and her husband's upbringing; he is half-Japanese... she is not.

Her posts are short and sweet but also very smart and witty. I like that her blog makes you laugh but is not negative. I love that she is able to laugh at herself as she is truly trying to learn about the culture and customs she has married into.

Go check out her blog and follow her: A Very Fukui Family

Book Review: The Giver

I first read "The Giver" by Lois Lowry in my 7th grade English class. I remember liking the book a lot but not being able to remember the plot.

At a get together with some friends of mine from growing up, I brought up The Giver and asked if anyone could remember what the book was about. We could remember little bits and pieces but we really couldn't remember the book. It bothered me that I couldn't remember a book that I loved at one point in my life so I decided to read it again.

As soon as I starting reading The Giver it all came flooding back to me. It's a story of a controlled society where people are told exactly what job to have, their emotions are taken away from them, they see no color and the world is perfect and ordinary with nothing out of a routine. I love the book because it fascinates me that a "society" could function in such a way. It makes me think, would I want to live in a perfect world or would I rather have the imperfect world I live in where I know sadness and pain but I also know joy, wonder, adventure, variety and more?

I think the "controlled society" is very "in" right now. The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner and more and The Giver fits right in with them. No wonder they made a movie of The Giver (I haven't seen it yet but it will be interesting to see what they do with it). I wonder why this story line keeps us so interested and pulled in?

The Giver was a fast and easy read. I liked the book again but I think different things stood out to me as I read it. It's funny how with 13 years later a book can have different meanings. I think the one thing that was a big difference for me was the ending. I feel like the book ends in a very metaphorical way and when I read it in 7th grade I understood the ending completely differently then when I read it today. I had to read the last page a few times because I couldn't believe that I was understanding it differently and it couldn't be that the book was ending that way.

I'd recommend reading the book. Again it is a fast easy read, which is nice with our busy live's, but it also was just as interesting as it was 13 years ago.