Over the course of the hot summer months, I spent almost two solid months moving from one end of the state of California to the other. Yet somehow I found time to read. In fact, I've got nearly 80 books chalked off so far by this point. Not bad!
So I'm going to give you a wee sample of the stuff I've reviewed. Some of the books were ones that I put off reading for years because I was afraid I'd be disappointed, while others were brand new releases this year that I saved to read while on vacation.
So here you have it. My summer haul. I'll be adding more reviews over the course of the month (both August and September)!
The Death Cure
The time for lies is
over. The tagline for this book is said quite well. Thomas and his friends
have been in the captivity of WICKED after surviving the brutal Scorch Trials.
Just one final test, they are told, and the world will finally have a cure for
The Flare, the horrible disease that has killed most of the earth’s population.
Not so.
Thomas and his friends are through with the trusting,
lab-rat crap. They break out of the WICKED facility and hit the airways in an
attempt to escape and lead a normal life. But with WICKED on your tail, it
isn’t possible. And besides. After Thomas sees what the world outside looks
like, he’s not so sure that he wouldn’t mind making more sacrifices to find a
cure for the Flare. Because planet earth is little more than a living hell.
The final installment of The
Maze Runner trilogy ended on a high note. I adored the first book, devoured
the second, then finally got my hands on the last book this summer. I was
fascinated by the story world that James Dashner created and the super-high
pace and adventurous tone of the novel is what initially kept me reading page
after page, and eventually, book after book. I can’t complain about anything.
It was a real pleaser from beginning to end. The only thing I was personally
disappointed in was A) Thomas’s choice about his memories (I won’t give away
any spoilers) and B) Two of the character’s deaths.
The Incredible Journey
Homeward Bound: The
Incredible Journey was my favorite movie growing up. To this day it’s still
my fondest childhood film. I loved it so much that I would wake up in the
morning humming the theme song, and my dog Jessie and cat Luke would
inadvertently become my stand-ins for Shadow and Sassy. So I found an old book
in my closet titled, The Incredible
Journey, by Sheila Burnford, and I had to read it. The book was penned
during the early 60s, and like Born Free,
it is almost like reading a book about taking a nature hike. I positively loved
the animals; but unlike the Disney film, the dogs’ characters were switched
around and the cat was a boy, not a wise-cracking female feline named Sassy.
However, even though it was drastically different from the movie that I adore,
it was still a wonderful book about the loving loyalty of animals. I nearly
started crying in some parts, so strong was the characterization of the pets. A
wonderful story with a happy ending – what more could you ask for?
The Lovely Bones
My name is Salmon,
like the fish… The first line in Alice Sebold’s literary drama is a great
one, and it was actually what prompted me to pick up the book and read it. The
story goes like so: Susie Salmon is brutally murdered by a slimeball named Mr.
Harvey, who lives in her neighborhood in 1973. Quicker than you can say salmon she pops up in her own personal
heaven, where she looks down on earth and watches her family unravel after her
murder. And of course, she watches to see if her murderer is ever brought to
justice. The result? A mess.
We’ve all heard about this book, some of you have probably
read it, and I have put off reading it for several years. I tried watching the
movie a couple of years ago and I turned it off as soon as Susie started
walking through heaven and saw Mr. Harvey bleeding to death in a bathtub. Seriously.
I never wanted to read the book because I thought it was would be just as gory.
Turns out I was pretty much right. This book is honestly one of the most
depressing pieces of literature I have ever read. Susie dies. Her murderer gets
away with his actions (mostly). More women’s murders are recounted. Susie’s
mother commits adultery and runs away for no apparent reason. Her sister Lindsay annoyed
me. The only normal character was Ray Singh, Susie’s childhood crush, and even
that ended up being tainted in the end. In other words, all of the characters washed into one. They were all the same: monotonous, flat, and depressing.
So what am I saying?
This book was a hopeless look on life and loss. Rather than
being inspiring, it implies that heaven sucks, because you’re stuck in a
snowglobe-like world and you get to watch your family fall apart and everything
is so perfect that you’re mired in a state of perpetual boredom. There was no
hope for life after death, and no happiness was ever really attained. In the
end, everybody settled for living with their grief, which came within them more
than it did from Susie’s tragic murder. One poor choice after another was what made up
this book. There wasn’t really a plot, just one sad paragraph after another
about how miserable life is, how unfair it is that Susie’s poor mother had to
take care of 3 kids (the tragedy!), how heaven is something like a black and
white picture with glass instead of bars, how adultery is OK as long as it
makes you feel happy, and how bad things happen to relatively good people.
I closed the book feeling like an anvil had been dropped on
my head. There wasn’t a spark of happiness or optimism to be had. Whereas I had
turned off the movie, I tried to plow my way through this “literary
masterpiece,” and what I found was just a mush-bowl of hopelessness and
mindless sex. Some masterpiece.
