Number 6 is The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson.
The second book of his Mistborn series and whooboy I did not like this book at all. I started it just after Christmas, and gave up on it for awhile. But as I have a real hard time leaving a book behind, I persevered. But I realized pretty quickly in that I do not like Vin as a character at all. I don't find her interesting nor engaging. The same with Elend. And their melodramatic relationship just made me go 'ugh, please just breakup' (and I'm not one who is easily bothered by silly, young relationship drama). Some of the stuff with Sazed would've been interesting, and I wanted to see what happened to Marsh and got him to where he would be at the end, but nope. And the ending just came across as such a big mess that I don't care what happens next. I won't be continuing on in this series.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Monday, February 09, 2015
Book #5 is 11/22/63 by Stephen King.
I'm not entirely sure why I decided to read this book, other than it was lying around the house because my cousin lent it to me. I was still feeling some... King hesitation left over from my time with the Dark Tower, and we all know that I HATE time travel... and yet, I ended up picking it up.
The time travel really makes no sense, and I'm not sure I understand it's internal consistency, but it's simple, and I appreciate that. Main character Jake Epping, a recently divorced English teacher in the year 2011, is shown the 'rabbit hole' in Al's Diner, a weird breach in the time stream that leads to 1958. And no matter when you come back up the rabbit hole, only two minutes have passed in 2011, and the past immediately 'resets' itself.
Al, the original discovery of the rabbit hole, does some experiments with changing the past, has some success, and decides that a big change needs to be made; stopping the assassination of JFK on Nov. 22, 1963. But, Al ends up with cancer and cannot fulfill his destiny.
He recruits Jake Epping.
I started off with being slightly miffed at this book. Mainly because of Jake's repeated comments on how he majored in English, so doesn't know much about American history. This actually drove me nuts. Maybe I'm weird in that I have an English degree, but I like history. A lot. English literature is tied to it's history, so I guess I find the idea of being ignorant of history just because you read a lot of books to be complete bunk. (I will come clean though that in university, I took quite a few history courses, and a couple of them were on American history as I find the time period of post-war America to be really fascinating, so I do know just enough about the 50s and 60s in the US to be dangerous).
Once I got past Jake's ignorance though, I liked the story. I liked Jake's first experiment in changing the past, I liked the return to Derry. I liked him settling into his life in the past as he waited for the past to 'catch up'. I liked that the past is obdurate and fights change. I liked that the past fought change very violently leading up to the assassination.
I didn't like that the ending though, felt rather rushed despite the book feeling over long. I'm not sure we needed all the minutiae of Jake's plans and his stalking of Lee Harvey Oswald. I think I would've liked a bit more time spent in the changed present.
But anyway, I did enjoy this, time travel, historical ignorance, and everything.
I'm not entirely sure why I decided to read this book, other than it was lying around the house because my cousin lent it to me. I was still feeling some... King hesitation left over from my time with the Dark Tower, and we all know that I HATE time travel... and yet, I ended up picking it up.
The time travel really makes no sense, and I'm not sure I understand it's internal consistency, but it's simple, and I appreciate that. Main character Jake Epping, a recently divorced English teacher in the year 2011, is shown the 'rabbit hole' in Al's Diner, a weird breach in the time stream that leads to 1958. And no matter when you come back up the rabbit hole, only two minutes have passed in 2011, and the past immediately 'resets' itself.
Al, the original discovery of the rabbit hole, does some experiments with changing the past, has some success, and decides that a big change needs to be made; stopping the assassination of JFK on Nov. 22, 1963. But, Al ends up with cancer and cannot fulfill his destiny.
He recruits Jake Epping.
I started off with being slightly miffed at this book. Mainly because of Jake's repeated comments on how he majored in English, so doesn't know much about American history. This actually drove me nuts. Maybe I'm weird in that I have an English degree, but I like history. A lot. English literature is tied to it's history, so I guess I find the idea of being ignorant of history just because you read a lot of books to be complete bunk. (I will come clean though that in university, I took quite a few history courses, and a couple of them were on American history as I find the time period of post-war America to be really fascinating, so I do know just enough about the 50s and 60s in the US to be dangerous).
Once I got past Jake's ignorance though, I liked the story. I liked Jake's first experiment in changing the past, I liked the return to Derry. I liked him settling into his life in the past as he waited for the past to 'catch up'. I liked that the past is obdurate and fights change. I liked that the past fought change very violently leading up to the assassination.
I didn't like that the ending though, felt rather rushed despite the book feeling over long. I'm not sure we needed all the minutiae of Jake's plans and his stalking of Lee Harvey Oswald. I think I would've liked a bit more time spent in the changed present.
But anyway, I did enjoy this, time travel, historical ignorance, and everything.
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