2013年7月26日金曜日

Jen reads... Requiem

Normally I would put a picture of the book cover here, but seeing as the only picture I could find (okay so I may not have looked beyond the first few images in the Google image search I did) was… not to my taste, I haven’t this time. If I had liked the book more, I might have made more of an effort… (this bodes well eh?)

I wrote about the previous two books in the series here and here. For anybody who has read all three you can probably tell that it’s a bit of a mixed bag so far… I sort of enjoyed the books but then… hmm. This post may be a bit spoilery so if you don’t want to be spoiled about anything you can have my general feelings about the book now: Meh.

It’s been a while since I read the book, and to be honest not much of it has stuck with me, apart from frustration at the ending. It ends in a stupid unsatisfying place, and I sort of don’t mind when more… serious(?) fiction does that, but when I’m reading something as a light easy read, I want closure dammit!!!)

The other thing that annoyed me was the unnecessary love triangle. 
At some point I really need to read some YA which does not have any kind of love triangle, or hint of a love triangle in it. I HATE love triangles. I might have enjoyed it when I was 14 and knew nothing about what actual relationships are like. But now I would much prefer to read about relationships which actually seem real to me, and love triangles just don’t ever seem that realistic. I’m sure that they are something that happens in real life, but surely not to the extent that they’re featured in fiction. It would be nice to see someone in an honest, trusting relationship at some point, who isn't also secretly madly in love with someone else. To be honest, this may be more of a reflection of the kind of completely drama free relationships that I've been in, maybe if you haven't had such a calm love life as I have then this kind of relationship drama might seem more realistic.

The main problem that I have with love triangles is that whoever is at the centre of them (and it seems to be the girl a lot of the time) sort of ends up seeming like a bitch. In this book, Lena is forced into a love triangle that she didn't really do anything to create, but she does NOT deal with it in a good way. That's not to say that how she deals with it is unrealistic, but it completely made me lose sympathy for the character for long stretches of the book, and that was something that I feel that I would have needed to enjoy this more. I feel that the book could have explored the situation in much more interesting way, but just... didn't.

Urgh.

Anyway. The ending is stupid. Love triangles are stupid. I didn't actively hate this book when I was reading it, and I wouldn't say I hate it now, but looking back on the whole trilogy… I’m not sure that I would recommend reading it. If you are actually in the intended audience for the books you would probably enjoy them more than I did.

On the positive side though, I do think that the books were all nicely written, and although I'm not sure I'll ever pick them up and re-read them, I will keep an eye out for the next Lauren Oliver book.

2013年7月1日月曜日

If only Bernard's watch was real...

Ahh, Bernard's Watch. That was quality TV (not sure whether it was bad quality or good quality though, hehe). I wonder if the rumours that the boy who played Bernard went to the same university as I did were actually true. I should have gone to find him!

Ahem, anyway, I'm going to stop alienating most of the people reading this and get to the point (um, not that I really have one...)

 I have been feeling a distinct lack of time recently. It's not that I don't have any free time (I do!!), it's just it's all getting used up. Too many things that I want to do, not enough time. If only work didn't keep on getting in the way. 

Recently I have been.... 

Watching (amongst other things - I haven't really talked about this on here, but I do a lot of box set watching, heh):

Breaking Bad (I started watching this ages ago, didn't see what the fuss was about then stopped... after 3 episodes. Then I realised that pretty much everyone whose opinion about things I respect said how amazing it was, so started watching it again.. and was pretty much hooked straight away. Yup, I'm stupid. Anyway, I'm trying to catch up before it comes back in August.. Not sure how feasable that is!)

The Walking Dead (One of my colleagues loves it, and I'm enjoying it so far! I'm also trying to catch up before it comes back. I have a lot longer for this one though)

Reading:

A Japanese book of short stories by Otsuichi, which is just as good as I hoped it would be. I haven't been reading that much in Japanese recently though. 


The new Murakami. Haven't got that far with it, because it's too short and I don't want it to be over. Which doesn't make any sense. But I need to read it before the translation comes out, otherwise whats the point of being able to read in Japanese?! TELL ME!

Inifinite Jest. Because I feel the need to pick stupidly challenging stuff, apparently, even though I'm very bad at actually seeing this kind of thing through. (This might explain my choice of degree... people say that Japanese is really difficult to learn?! Sign me up!!!) So far though, I'm really enjoying it! I remembered that I actually like not really getting whats going on, and then slowly seeing the pieces come together. The endnotes are insane though. INSANE! I'm glad I was somewhat prepared for reading it, knowing that some bits of it might be a slog helped me through them. I'm past page 200, which is apparently the point where you stick with it till the end. 

And that's it. Infinite Jest has so much going on and so much to keep track of that I don't want to read anything else in English in case it confuses me. 

Stuff coming up when I have time (who knows!):

Requiem - Lauren Oliver (not sure how I feel about this, so this might take a while!)

The Orphan Master's Son - Adam Johnson (again, not sure how I feel about this one either. Where have my opinions gone today?!)

The Last Girlfriend on Earth – Simon Rich (I will write about this before I forget what I thought and have to read it again to remind myself!)

Stuff that I'm almost definitely not actually going to write anything proper about:


Kūchū Buranko (Flying Trapeze) -  Hideo Okuda (It was interesting and I enjoyed it more than the first book in the series. Not sure I'm that bothered about reading the third one though. Too many other exciting things to read!)



That's it. I haven't actually been getting THAT much reading done recently, I've been kind of sick for the past week or so, boo. And my TBR list just keeps on getting longer and longer and longer and longer...