Random Thoughts

Ryan keeps telling me that I should write a blog about the recent books that I've been reading. I think he's just trying to give me ideas or something because he knows that if he doesn't keep nagging me that I will probably forget all about it and not write anything and this is the only thing that he can think of for me to write about so I guess that's what I will write about, although I can't guarantee that I will completely stick to the topic, thus the title random thoughts.

So the most recent books I read were Jane Eyre, City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare, and The Beyonders by Brandon Mull. I've been really lucky in the last week because I was able to actually get some books that I was excited to read by authors that I already had read and knew were good. I have to admit, I always get a lot more excited about authors that I have already read and liked, than with completely foreign authors who I don't know what to expect with and I get really excited about new books. I was especially excited to read the new Cassandra Clare book because I loved the first three books of the Mortal Instruments series, and I have to admit that young adult fiction is probably my favorite genre. Adult fiction can get a little boring and children fiction is fun but sometimes a little too simplistic. Thus it is the perfect happy medium. To be honest I wasn't particularly excited to read Jane Eyre but it is a classic and I have it for free on my kindle, maybe my favorite birthday present ever, so why not?

Sometimes it's better to approach a book with low expectations and have it surprise you rather than high expectations and getting disappointed. Jane Eyre was the first book that I started out of the three and it was also the last that I finished. I think that it was my low expectations that helped me to get through the first part of the book, which was both slow and kind of depressing. It is a classic novel which generally means that it will be a somewhat heavy book and it definitely didn't disappoint in that aspect. I feel totally inadequate to try and critique a classic, without properly analyzing it, as every good English student knows, and I just read it for pleasure so I couldn't really do it justice. I did end up really enjoying it, but it definitely isn't a light reading type of book.

I am lucky to have family who are readers too so that I can get some of the new books I want to read without buying them! Christie and Curtis bought a copy of The Beyonders when it came out and I convinced them to let me read it after Jeffrey using my reputation as a fast reader for leverage. For any of you who have read his Fablehaven series it is a completely different type of story but I think that the general writing style is the same. Beyonders was good at the beginning, drew the reader in but after a certain portion of the book it kind of lost momentum and was a little bit slow until the end where it picked up the pace and had some twists and turns. Part of the reason that I think the middle was less interesting was that it seemed to lose the mystery too early and after you found out what it was it didn't seem to really give a good enough reason for the "hero's journey" that the two main character's embark on. The end introduced some interesting twists however you can't help hoping that there had been more of that something which keeps you wanting to discover throughout the book which seems a somewhat formulaic hero's journey plot. As is typical with a Brandon Mull book the book is entirely plot driven somewhat at the expense of the characters. Personally I tend to prefer female authors because often they seem to be able to really embody and give the readers a real sense of the individuality of the characters, and to form an attachment between the reader and the characters. Authors who do this well, in my opinion include JK Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Cassandra Clare. For example in the first Hunger Games when Rue dies you really feel Katniss pain and that translates into your own pain for this awful loss of an innocent. By contrast in the Beyonders there is a character at the beginning of the book who reappears near the end that I did not remember who it was, a problem I had with the Fablehaven books as well. Every time a new book came out I often couldn't remember who many of the characters were outside of the main ones. However, as this is something that I have come to expect it didn't bother me too much, but the lack of a real pull to keep reading the book in the middle was a bit of a disappointment. The end was really good though and I would say that overall it was a fun book, and my brother in law loved it and didn't think it was slow at all in the middle so maybe it's just me.

City of Fallen Angels was by far the book that I most looked forward to reading as I have been looking forward to it for months. This is probably part of the reason that I wasn't as happy with it as I thought that I would be. As I said most the time too high expectations sometimes let you down. Overall, I really liked the mystery portion of the book which was very interesting and puzzling throughout and the end had lots of action that kept me glued to the book. The part that was a little bit of a disappointment for me was the relationship of some of the characters that became a little too twilighty, and especially resembled the third twilight book. If you look past and kind of skip over those parts it was a really interesting book yet and I'm looking forward to the next one, especially since it was kind of a cliff hanger, but with slightly lower expectations.