Recent Reads
Aug. 29th, 2012 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calzephyrI finished the third book in the Fallen series by Lauren Kate - just one more book to go! I have it from a trusted authority that the last book, Rapture, is much better than Passion. In some ways Passion is a very lazy in its concept - Lucinda travels back in time to visit her past lives and tries to discover the link between her and Daniel. Twilight fans take note - maybe Edward has been pining a century for Bella, but Daniel has been suffering for millennia!
Lucinda revisits about ten or so past lives, which really, for the book, is just one past life too many. After she visits her Mayan self, I skimmed through the ones set in ancient China and Egypt. It's admirable that Lucinda and Daniel are portrayed in different ethnicities, but it just became so repetitive, especially after Lucinda, with the help of a dubious gargoyle named Bill, learns to inhabit these past lives. Ugh! What a stinker of an idea.
Yet Passion was just the thing to read after finishing Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Publication dates always surprise me. For example, I was amazed that Oryx and Crake was published in 2003, when I thought it was much more recent. People are poor judges of time.
And generally people are also poor judges of the future too. As I read this speculative piece of fiction, little things jumped out at me, such as the lack of social networking and texting as a communication method, and that's when the publication date really hit home.
Oryx and Crake is the kind of book one will either love, hate or vastly depressing. I encountered all three feelings in that order. At first the near future ideas combined with retro ones (biotechnology, living in compounds) was interesting. In fact there are many finely interwoven and well-written ideas in this book, but there also seem to be far too many - after a while they seem like recent biotechnology news clippings strung with plot, and is at times mentally exhausting.
Margaret Atwood's extremely passive voice kicks in early and the book is best read in small stretches. There are plenty of actionable events in the story, but they are told in a dry, semi-flashback way. There's a reason the Royal Canadian Air Farce made fun of her.
At times descriptions of technology seemed lame, the way someone who didn't grow up with technology might explain it. The Naming of Things was also clunky - some of the genetically engineered animals sound too contrived, such as snat, wolvog, rakunk and pigoon. Same with the massive biotechnology corporations that control everything. There's a reason why it takes a whole team of creatives to come up with new product names :D
Then the depressing part kicks in. The central message becomes game over for humans, and possibly the narrator. The cliffhanger ending, presumably resolved in the sequel, The Year of the Flood, was a huge letdown. After 376 pages that mostly ruminates on the life of the main character, Jimmy, aka Snowman, I felt cheated as a reader. The main takeaway was that Jimmy was/is a jerk and his scientist parents didn't love him enough.
However, the book is still within Atwood's lifelong theme of survival and just about every possible aspect of that theme is exhaustively explored. It's hard to judge the first book in a trilogy; hopefully the following books will make it more satisfying as a whole.
Lucinda revisits about ten or so past lives, which really, for the book, is just one past life too many. After she visits her Mayan self, I skimmed through the ones set in ancient China and Egypt. It's admirable that Lucinda and Daniel are portrayed in different ethnicities, but it just became so repetitive, especially after Lucinda, with the help of a dubious gargoyle named Bill, learns to inhabit these past lives. Ugh! What a stinker of an idea.
Yet Passion was just the thing to read after finishing Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Publication dates always surprise me. For example, I was amazed that Oryx and Crake was published in 2003, when I thought it was much more recent. People are poor judges of time.
And generally people are also poor judges of the future too. As I read this speculative piece of fiction, little things jumped out at me, such as the lack of social networking and texting as a communication method, and that's when the publication date really hit home.
Oryx and Crake is the kind of book one will either love, hate or vastly depressing. I encountered all three feelings in that order. At first the near future ideas combined with retro ones (biotechnology, living in compounds) was interesting. In fact there are many finely interwoven and well-written ideas in this book, but there also seem to be far too many - after a while they seem like recent biotechnology news clippings strung with plot, and is at times mentally exhausting.
Margaret Atwood's extremely passive voice kicks in early and the book is best read in small stretches. There are plenty of actionable events in the story, but they are told in a dry, semi-flashback way. There's a reason the Royal Canadian Air Farce made fun of her.
At times descriptions of technology seemed lame, the way someone who didn't grow up with technology might explain it. The Naming of Things was also clunky - some of the genetically engineered animals sound too contrived, such as snat, wolvog, rakunk and pigoon. Same with the massive biotechnology corporations that control everything. There's a reason why it takes a whole team of creatives to come up with new product names :D
Then the depressing part kicks in. The central message becomes game over for humans, and possibly the narrator. The cliffhanger ending, presumably resolved in the sequel, The Year of the Flood, was a huge letdown. After 376 pages that mostly ruminates on the life of the main character, Jimmy, aka Snowman, I felt cheated as a reader. The main takeaway was that Jimmy was/is a jerk and his scientist parents didn't love him enough.
However, the book is still within Atwood's lifelong theme of survival and just about every possible aspect of that theme is exhaustively explored. It's hard to judge the first book in a trilogy; hopefully the following books will make it more satisfying as a whole.
