Runt Reviews

Been doing a lot of reading this month, so I figured I’d compile all my thoughts in one blog post.

The Hunger Games: Brilliant book. A little slow at the beginning, but it wasn’t long before I was on the edge of my seat (bed, really), my eyes moving faster than my brain could comprehend the words. At first it was difficult to create a corresponding world in my head where people are starving and living without electricity just a hundred or so miles away from a technological paradise, but then I recalled that the world of Suzanne Collins’ book is no different that today’s society, where everyone in the US and Great Britain and such have electricity but some people in Africa have never even seen a car before. Big wake up call there.

I noticed some typos that irked me here and there, but I was very happy with this read. Katniss, Gale, and Peeta are strong, intelligent, lovable characters that I can continue to root for. A+

The Dark Devine: Okay, what is up with the “Saturday”, “One hour later”, “what happened after lunch” tags on the chapters and scenes? That is not the way to engross me into a story. Strikes me as a bit amateurish, but that’s minor. Not that alone would be enough to keep me from reading the book.

There’s too much idle chitchat at the beginning. I’m a meat and potatoes kind of girl – tell me what I need to know when I need to know it. April is unimportant. Pete is unimportant. I don’t care anything about their pop quiz on Edward Hopper. The action sped up to my liking around page 150, but that’s almost half way into the novel. Not good. From this point I’m invested, but I’m still mostly skimming. The twists were great, though – wasn’t expecting any of that – but I can’t say I’m all that enthused to read the sequel, as the characters struck me as kind of flat. C-

Shiver: My one word reaction to this book is ‘meh’. Too sappy for my liking. Sure, it might be totally romantic to think of Sam loving Grace for his whole life while being trapped as a werewolf in the woods around her house, but it’s kind of creepy to imagine Grace returning it (Plus, there were a lot of similarities between Shiver and The Dark Divine, the most notable of which being that both main females share the same name. If I had read the books months apart from each other, I wouldn’t have cared let alone noticed, but since I read both books within days the similarities made me even more detached from the storylines). Some of the sensory images used in the book sound pretty enough, but they’re meaningless (‘A shattered spider’s web of many colors, cracked in ice, immeasurably sad.’  – what?). It gives the impression of an author – or maybe, a narrator – who is trying too hard.

I can’t even put a letter grade on this one – it’s not horrible, but it isn’t great either. So my letter grade is simply ‘Meh’.

The God Delusion: Really interesting read. Before picking up this book I considered myself agnostic with a heavy lean toward atheist. Now, I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’m all the way there, not because of Richard Dawkins himself but because of the excellent supporting points he makes throughout the book. I’m not a chemist/physicist/biologist so some of his jargon went way over my head, but Dawkins makes a valiant effort to break down his examples, arguments, and analogies into language us everyday folk can understand.

Only complaint I had was the length. He had delivered all his key points by chapter seven; the rest of it felt like padding, and contained arguments against the institution of religion that I’ve heard hundreds of times before, though it far from pained me to read them again in detail. B+