Cody's Book Buzz
Monthly reviews
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I have always liked looking at books. When I was a kid, I had a lot of dinosaur books. My mom had gone to a workshop when I was young that taught her that people like myself learn words as a whole rather than sounding out letters. So my mom and me spent many, many hours with her writing out words on long Q cards, and she would just read the words to me over and over and over again. I don’t know if that helped me learn to read, but it probably did. I think I became interested in larger books when I was around 17. Probably the first set of books I read was Harry Potter. I had already watched the movies so understanding the books was easier because I had already knew the story. At first, I only read books that had movies. I was reading book 4 of the Jason Bourne books when I left it at school and it was now summer holidays. So my mom went to the library to pick up the book that I had been in the middle of reading and I wouldn’t read it but she couldn’t figure out why. So we waited until September and she asked my teacher for the missing book but it was gone. So then my mom bought a replacement and I read the book and she discovered that I only read books that I own. Fast-forward about eight years and I now own about 400 books. Fortunately, I have been able to put most of them through my funding because you can imagine how much money 400 books adds up to. My dad and me just put up a bookcase last week and I know which book is on which bookcase. My bookcases and all the books is my happy place. Here is a picture of me standing beside one of my tree bookcases. I have two of these tree Bookcases. They are cool, but they don’t hold as many books as the standard bookcases do. I have three of those
- Cody and Mom
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November
Book Buzz
Eragon Series
There is a bunch of books in The Eragon series. Eragon is a 15-year-old boy that finds a blue stone. The blue stone turns out to be an egg and eventually the stone hatches into a dragon. Eragon becomes great friends with this dragon and actually flies on him and together they have lots of adventures. But of course like any other book there's always a bad guy and in this case there's a bad guy in every book. The middle book on the picture is actually a book about a movie of the first book and they are all pictures of Eragon and his dragon and the bad guys. And one of the books there is actually a Bad Dragon and Eragon and his dragon kill the bad one. I love these books because I love dragons.
October
Book Buzz
Percy Jackson books
My next set of books is the Percy Jackson books. A friend of mine actually gave me this box set for free. Somebody had donated them to our free store at our church and a staff them and gave them to me because he knew I liked reading. I had never heard of Percy Jackson before, so I started reading them and was pleasantly surprised and then I found out that they actually made movies of the first few books.
These are books based on Greek mythology so Percy is a demigod. A demi-god is someone who has a dad who is one of the Greek gods and a mother who is from earth. So Percy‘s dad is Poseidon and It isn’t until he is 12 years old that he finds this out about himself. He is taken to a camp for demi gods and discovers there are more kids like himself, which explains why he is the way he is.
Each book is a different story and there is a bit of romance running through the box because he meets a girl from the camp who starts off at being way out of his league but Percy proves himself quite quickly and eventually they go on quests together to beat the bad guys who are always after Percy for
one reason or another. They’re actually is seven books but I only have the first five. I liked the books even though I’m not much into Greek mythology
September
Book Buzz
The Divergent Series
My next review is a set of four books that’s called the divergent series. But first of all, let me talk about why my books aren’t really pretty looking. For many years when I bought hardcover books, the first thing I did was to take the jackets off and throw them away. My mom kept telling me to keep the jackets because they had nice pictures on them. Instead, she told me to just take the jacket off when you’re reading the book if you don’t want them getting wrecked. So, in the last year or two, when I got a hardcover book with a nice jacket on it, I would keep the jacket and take the jacket off when I read a book. I wish I had listened to my mom earlier My preference is paperback books, so I don’t have a ton of hard covers but sometimes it’s all you can get.
Anyways, the Divergent Series, book names are Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four. It’s a story of how people are divided into four different groups called factions but when a child becomes of age, they can break away from their parent's faction and pick a different faction. The main character of the series is a girl by the name of Beatrice. She changes her name to Tris when she deviates from the faction she was born to. But before she picks her faction, she gets tested. They put her in what looks like a dentist chair. They inject her with serum and put probes on her head, and it was discovered that she doesn’t fit into any of the factions and she actually is what a divergent. The person testing her tells her to keep it a secret because a divergent is very dangerous to the powers to be and they actually want to get rid of them because of the power they have Tris happens to be an extremely high divergent.
In the first book, Tris meets a boy named Tobias that goes by the name “Four And together they challenge the establishment and eventually win. The last book in the series is the book called Four and it’s actually a prequel and shows the story of Four's background until he eventually meets Tris.
I like this book series even though it is quite bizarre in some ways, but In some ways, it was down to earth as far as the characters itself. I would recommend this set of books, but if you watch the movies, there definitely is some plot differences.
August
Book Buzz
The Fault in Our Stars
Written by: John Green
So we often stop at places that you can buy books at because as you all know, I love reading and I probably read 4 to 5 hours a day and I only read books I own, so we went to the Goodwill and I picked up a book with kind of a funny name called "The Fault in Our Stars". Apparently, the title is inspired by a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where it talks about the fault not being our own, but the fault is in the stars. So, when I showed my mom, she said there’s a movie about that book, so I read the book and told her that I liked the book and then my mom watched it on her iPad, which is what we do after my dad goes to bed. When he goes to bed, we don’t watch the big TV because it’s the other side of the wall to the head of his bed and it keeps him awake... But then a few days later, when I was picking the show to watch for the evening, I picked this movie again, so my dad could see it.
Spoiler alert, it’s the story of a girl by the name of Hazel who has terminal Thyroid cancer and is pushed by her mom to go to a Cancer Therapy Group. She meets a boy by the name of Gus, who is a cancer survivor, but goes to the cancer therapy group to support his friend Isaac who has cancer. Hazel And Gus fall in love and hang out a lot together. There is a book that they both love, but they feel like it has an unfinished ending, but the author lives in Amsterdam so they have this crazy idea to go to Amsterdam and visit the author. They have been emailing back-and-forth with the author's secretary, and she invites them to Amsterdam but doesn’t tell the author about the invite. So, Hazel and Gus have this crazy idea about going to Amsterdam to visit the author. But Hazel’s doctors of course don’t think it’s a good idea. Hazel has to drag around portable oxygen everywhere she goes, but where there is a will... At first Hazel‘s parents are totally against her going, but in the end, they arrange everything for her to go such as doctors or nurses in Amsterdam, and they even go on a trip with Hazel. So, when Hazel and Gus meet the author, he is a grumpy old man and doesn’t help them at all, so they are quite mad at him, particularly Hazel. But they make the best of it and spend the rest of the days in Amsterdam sightseeing... While in Amsterdam, Gus lets Hazel know that his cancer is back and that things don’t look good. Hazel decides to stick with him, and as they work through things, reflecting on life and death, they fall deeper and deeper in love. Gus ends up dying first and the author from Amsterdam shows up at his funeral. Hazel wants nothing to do with him, but while Hazel is driving away, he jumps into the passenger seat of her car, and she gives him a piece of her mind. As she is kicking him out of her car, he gives her a piece of paper which of course she wants nothing to do with. She is still so angry at the author, but later on a friend of hers tells her that the piece of paper the author had given her was actually a letter from Gus so she scrambles trying to find the piece of paper and it turns out that Gus had asked for help from the author because Gus was not a very good writer and the author helped him write what he wanted to say to Hazel so in the end. Everything turns out.
I liked the book and movie very much even though it’s so sad when Gus dies.
July's
Book Buzz
My book review this month is on my Nicholas Sparks books. He wrote about 26 books and I have at least 15 of them. They are all good heartfelt stories. A lot of you would recognize some of his books because eight of them have been made into movies like The Notebook, A Walk to Remember. Dear John, and Safe Haven to name a few. Eight of his books were made into movies.
Upon checking the Internet for a bit of background on Nicholas Sparks, I found out that he was a track and field runner and holds a record at the University of Notre Dame that still stands. He actually had his eye on the Olympics but got injured in his freshman year. So he was moping around the house and his mother got tired of it and told him to stop pouting and do something. When he asked his mom what he should do, she said.‘Go write a book just do something” so he wrote a novel in six weeks that he said was awful, then finished college and worked some odd jobs but because he wrote that first book, he knew he could write and that he enjoyed it. So the first book he wrote was The Notebook and it was loosely based a little bit on his wife's grandparents life who were married for 60 years and still had a great love for each other.
Nicholas Sparks doesn’t write like a typical male author, but he writes stories that grip your heart and books that you don’t want to put down. My favorite Nicholas Sparks book is called Best of Me and I don’t have a least favorite book because I love them all.
June's
Book Buzz
My next set of books are called the Meg series. They are about a prehistoric, huge shark about 70 feet long called the megalodon. It’s A prehistoric shark that came out of the Mariana trench. it is the shark that they thought disappeared along with the dinosaurs but lo and behold it was still alive. As the books go along there even more prehistoric sharks and one by one a team works on killing them because they are getting into the regular ocean and come to shore and attack people.
There’s a little girl in the movie and I took a picture of her because that’s the exact iPad holder that I had when I was a kid. It could withstand me being rough on it. Eventually, one of the handles broke on my iPad. I was given my very first iPad by a friend who upgraded hers. It didn’t last too long because when the screen was dirty, I decided to wash it in the sink like who would wash a plate and I killed it. My parents bought another one because I needed it for my speech. I used it to communicate a little bit because my iPad had pec symbols, but I mostly used it to communicate with my classroom at story time. My mom would do a little story about what I did the night before so that I wouldn’t be left out when the class shared what they had done the night before. I never washed my iPad in the sink again.
As the books go on, they actually start to take place during the dinosaur period so some of the adventures take place on land. Each book is different, but they are all good. I haven’t been able to get a hold of book 7 of seven, which is called Meg purgatory because it’s at the printer but as soon as I can buy it I will.
May's
Book Buzz
My next set of books is all the Jason Bourne books. Most people are familiar with the Jason Bourne movies of which there is only four of them, but there are 21 Jason Bourne books and new ones keep coming out. The author is no longer alive, but other authors write under his name.
Sometimes, when I don’t know what a word means in a book, I will point it out and ask my mom what it means. So when I started reading the Jason Bourne books, I once asked her what the word assassin meant. She told me that was a very important word in the book and she explained what it meant.
I do like all the books and they all have different stories. Jason Bourne is always trying to get away from the bad guys. Funny thing is the bad guys are people in government that everyone thinks is the good guys. I am always watching when a new book comes out and then I buy it. The books are highly entertaining. Poor Jason Bourne, he is always on the run…
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April's
Book Buzz
My next book review is on Godzilla. I have five Godzilla books and they are mostly based on Godzilla movies. I have loved Godzilla since I was a youngster. So in order to talk about the books, I have to talk about the Godzilla movies as well. The first Godzilla movie came out in the 1950s and now we are at 38 different Godzilla movies. I have a lot of those movies. In fact when I was young, I even watched a movie that was in Japanese and it had no English subtitles. I would watch it over and over again because I loved the Godzilla stuff in it. If you look at what I’m wearing in the picture, I have a Godzilla cap, a Godzilla hoodie, Godzilla pants and even Godzilla shoes. Does that not tell you that I’m a fan of Godzilla?
Believe it or not, Godzilla has a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. I have attached a picture to prove it.
As I said before, my books are about some of the different movies. The different monsters in the books and movies are result of radiation from Japan because of the atomic bombs of World War II. And if you don’t know anything about Godzilla, he is actually the good guy. He usually comes out of the water at the beginning of the book or movie and goes back into the water at the end. And even though he does a lot of damage to the streets and buildings, it’s because he is chasing bad monsters.
I usually tell you what I like about books and include my dislikes, but with Godzilla, I love everything about them, including the bad guy monsters because they are all so cool. And in the last few years, they have started to come up with Godzilla versus Kong type books and movies. At first, Godzilla and Kong fought against each other, but now they fight side-by-side to kill other monsters. I always look so forward to when a new movie or book comes out because I just love Godzilla.
March's
Book Buzz
For the most part, I am doing my book reviews on the sets of books I’ve read. And again hopefully a lot of you know the story behind the hunger games. I did enjoy the books, but there is something dark to them because teens from different districts are forced to fight in the hunger games to the death. So there is one winner per games. The main character is a girl by the name of Katniss, and she kind of breaks all the rules. The first rule she breaks is that the second person from her district and herself decide not to kill each other so the powers to be have to change the rules a bit. In the final book Katniss starts an uprising and a bunch of them go after the bad guys and terminate them. The worst man is somebody by the name of President Snow.
Fast-forward a number of years and two more books are written for the series, both of them are prequel, which means they happened before the main set of books. So, the first prequel was a book by the name of the ballad of songbirds and snakes, and it’s the story of President Snow rise to power.
We did a pre-order on the fifth book and it just arrived a few days ago, so I started reading it pretty much as soon as I got it. That book is called "Sunrise on the Reaping and it’s the story of one of the winners of the hunger games 25 years earlier by the name of Haymitch when he was 16 and had to go into the hunger games. who later on went on to become a coach to Katniss. He actually turned into an alcoholic and was not a well person after going through the games. It definitely affected him negatively.
So the part I liked best about the books is when a bunch of teens stood up to the bad guys, particularly president, Snow, and went against him. The part I didn’t like about the book was that these kids had to fight each other to the death in order to win the Hunger Games.
February's Book Buzz
The suspense is finally over! Thanks for hanging in there—trust me, it’s totally worth the wait!
The “Lord of the Rings” set of four books, that is familiar to a lot of people. It was a written by J.R. Tolkien in the 1950s. It’s a shame that the author was not around to see the movies because he would’ve been pretty impressed. The movie has stayed pretty close to the actual story in the book, and if there was anything added, it enhanced the story.
In picture I shared (left) of me I was trying to be Gollum who is kind of a bad little creature who used to own the most powerful ring. But it turned him from a person into a raw fish-eating creature, but he still wants to get the ring back throughout the book because of the feeling it gives him. The person who has the ring now is a person by the name of Frodo. He is a hobbit which is kind of a combination between a person, a dwarf and hairy character.
So, the book is set up with all types of Kingdoms and different kinds of people who either want the ring for them themselves or want to see it destroyed. Frodo needs to go to the place where the ring was initially made and throw it into to destroy it once and for all, and to save mankind.
There’s lots of nice creatures in the book, beautiful scenery, and believable settings, and costumes, as a whole lot of money was spent on the production of the film. We were watching some of the extras behind the scenes only to discover that the man who would eventually become King kicked,
a helmet at the top of a hill when he found out two of his hobbit friends had been kidnapped and were likely not alive anymore. But when he kicked the helmet in real life, he actually broke his toe so the look on his face was genuine. My worst character in the story was a huge, huge spider about half the size of a bedroom that came after Frodo who was passing through. The spider bit him and made him unconscious. The spider was going to eat him later, but fortunately his best friend saves the day.
My favorite characters in the story were from the bad guys and they were elephants. Many people can ride them at the same time. Here is a picture of them as well.
January's Book Buzz
I am going to do my first book review on the first set of books that I ever read. When I was 17 years old, my mom used to carpool to day camp with a friend of hers who also had a son with Down syndrome. At the time I was borrowing the Harry Potter series from my cousin Lynae. So as soon as I would finish one of the books, she would hand me the next one. So I was reading book 4, and my mom‘s friend noticed that book at the front of the van and she asked my mom “who is reading Harry Potter? “ And my mom said “Believe it or not, Cody is”. So the next day when my mom went to pick up my friend for day camp, my mom’s friend came out with a reusable grocery bag and said here’s an early 18th birthday present for Cody and it had all the Harry Potter books in the bag that she had picked up at a garage sale. So now I had my own set of Harry Potter books. Those were my first big boy books. I later replaced them with a brand new set and gave the old ones to my cousin Meaghan' s kids.
So most of you know the story of Harry Potter so I won’t go into it. My mom tells me that when the books were originally written, people used to wait in line at bookstores the morning the bookstore was allowed to sell the newest book. She even knows a couple that bought two books on opening day so they both could read the book at the same time
So I liked the story very much. My favourite part in all of the books was when Harry and three others had to fight against dragons. My favourite books to read are about dragons and I have a lot of dragon related books
One part I didn’t like about the book is that there’s this basilisk that Harry has to fight. A basilisk is really a big snake. And I hate snakes.
But the part I hated the most in the whole set of books is whenever there were spiders involved. Because I really really hate spiders!
Great, great reviews Cody! Can't wait for the next one! I think I want to re-read the Harry Potter series now! Isn't that the greatest thing about books - you can read them again and again and still enjoy them. Do you read books more than once?
Your review photo is absolutely amazing 🤩. Impressive ⭐. Can't wait to read your review! Your followers all know it's worth the wait! 😊.
Harry Potter book
I'm so very proud of you Cody, it's such an amazing accomplishment!! I'm with you on the snakes and spiders, not my favorite thing either 😊
So very proud of you, and I know how you feel, I just bought myself another bookcase also!
I loved reading your book review Cody! I hate hate snakes too!
I loved reading about your first series, and I'm glad I got to be a part of it! Keep up the fantastic reviews.
Amazing buddy! I hate spiders too
Seeing you with all your books on this website makes my heart happy! Way to go, Cody!!
Amazing 😊❤️💯