What Are You Reading 2013

Just finished:

In the Garden of Beasts

The was a exceedingly dry book with very no real crescendos, and tells a story through a very matter-of-fact narration. I actually managed to finish this book despite wanting to give up multiple times along the way. One of the biggest draws was the book's literary value: the sentences and paragraphs were extremely well written, and the prose had a very consistent tempo (even though very very slow) and flowed very well. I was reading more for the language lesson than the story itself.

I don't recommend this book unless you have a very keen interest in WWII history.

Ready Player One

Having suffered through the book above, I desperately needed something refreshing and easy to read, and nothing fit the bill better than Ready Player One. In comparison to Garden, this book was almost purely plot driven, and the overall prose was akin to Harry Potter (i.e. extremely easy to read/terrible). There are a ton of geeky buzzwords planted throughout the book that resonated with my inner nerd, a cheap trick, but worked very well.

The plot is very contrived, the world is taken almost directly from Second Life and Snow Crash, the love story is childish, and the ending is predictably vanilla Disney. However, the book is very entertaining. I didn't find any deeper meanings in the book; to me, it was almost like watching a Transformer movie: just turn off the brain and enjoy the ride.

11/22/63


This was the first Stephen King book I have ever read, and I actually loved it. The writing style was mature yet simplistic (a nice balance between the two books above), and the story had so many twists and turns, and most importantly, the story had a reasonable and logic ending; although predictable at times, it still managed to draw me in just to see how events actually pan out. I felt very engaged reading this book, and didn't even realize how long it was until I had finished it (I read books on Kindle). There was a very nice mix of internal struggles (within and amongst the main characters) and explicit and implicit battles against the supernatural/laws of physics (?? sci-fi elements). The pace was fast throughout, and the character development was great. Undoubtedly, there are a lot of plot holes in the story due to the sci-fi-esque nature of the story, but those can and should be overlooked.

I would actually set aside hours before bedtime to read this novel, and often lost sleep because I didn't want to stop.

Reading

Lost in Shangri-La


This book is exactly like In the Garden of Beasts except it doesn't even have exceptional prose. I read over 50% of the book, and I think I am going to give up.

The story is immensely interesting, but the author goes on **very big** tangents to describe every person who is remoted related (up to three degrees of separation) to the main characters invovled including childhood, education, career, etc. where their histories have absolutely nothing to do with the main story line. I feel the whole book could be summarized in three chapters: crash, survival, and return to base (this is just my guess, and I have no idea what will happen) rather than hundreds of pages of nonsense. There is likely more filler than the actual story.

I will not finish this book.

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The Art of Fielding

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