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Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Book Review: Leaving Time

Assalammualaikum.


I saw this notice on the board at my condo lobby two nights ago.


That means I will be living in the Stone Age for 3hrs on the 20th.
Why did they have to pick THAT day?
The day that I get to spend my day at home, since I will only start work at 9 at night.

I thought of millions things I wanted to do but couldn't.
The thoughts of not having a rotating fan above my head, can't switch my TV on, my WiFi will be off, I can't charge my phone, if I watch movie on my Mac- before I could finish the movie, the battery might have died - they all almost suck the life out of me (this is clearly an exaggeration).

So I imagined bringing my Macbook to Dal Komm in IOI City Mall - so that I can sit there and have a cup of (overpriced) coffee and look cool - perhaps with my erphones on. But I was too lazy.
I also texted Shuhada, asking her out. She can't make it.
Heck I even considered going to the hospital and help Alia screen little babies.

Instead, I made one of the wisest decision I made this week.
I picked up this Leaving Time book I bought from Big Bad Wolf last week.
And walla~ 36hrs passed and I finished it.

I have so many things to write about.
This is my list:
1/ Big Bad Wolf book fair
2/ My 2 years as a house officer
3/ My extension - one of the many things that made me doubt my career choice at the moment
4/ Shopping and cosmetics - a trend I see nowadays
5/ Korean dramas
and a lot other things

But since I have just finished the book about an hour ago, it still very fresh within me I feel so manic now.
For the past 36hrs, I almost feel like I'm living in the world Judi Picoult describes.
I long to read and explore further, and finish the book - to know what happens to each and every characters.
If not for my night shift last night, I might have finished the book in less than 10hrs.

This is a story told from the perspective of 4 people - Alice, Jenna, Serenity and Virgil.
And it amazed me how Picoult managed to wrap the stories nicely with lots of academical facts about guess what - elephants.
Alice is a woman who took Neuroscience for her undergrad degree - and later on became a scientist studying elephants.
This is her story, and Jenna's and Serenity's and Virgil's - and how their fates intertwined with each other. How they see each other and the events that occur around them.
This book not only made me feel like wanting to be an elephant researcher, it made me long to go to Africa and touch those elephants.
It talks about how elephants interact very much the same way as we humans interact with each other.
And the science and debate behind it since we can't actually quantify emotions.

It astonished me the amount of work - researches and readings that were needed to produce this book.
If Malaysian community can produce these kinds of authors / books, we would be very blessed.
- I see most of our artworks now are plain imagination without any substantial effort put in it. Even CPR is portrayed so wrongly in our Malay dramas - enough to make me shudder in embarrassment just by watching it.

I can go on and on talking about this book.
But I dont want to give any spoilers here.
You should read the book, and you'll agree with me.
The amount of work put was enormous.

Btw, why did I write about this?
While I was going thru my previous blog posts, I stumbled upon this .
The post I wrote on The Lost Daughter book, by Diane Chamberlain - in June 2014.
Truthfully speaking, I can't really recall the storyline but since I wrote about it, I figure it must have been a good book. Hence I looked for other Chamberlain's book during the Big Bad Wolf book sale 2 weeks ago.

Therefore writing about this book now not only introduce this book to my readers (if I still have any) - it will also help to remind me in years to come that I was once captivated by this story - Leaving Time.
The ending totally blown me away and I literally had goosebumps while reading the last chapter.

I don't usually read a novel twice - but if I had gone out of fresh unread book supply, I shall remind myself that I might want to read this again.


-Because life is a test-


-AkMaR-
http://nur-akmar.blogspot.com

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