For the last few weeks to maybe months, I've been reading an average of one book per week to week and a half. By the time I write a review on one book I about add another two to three to my backlog. All that to say, I'm quite behind in my reviews at the moment. Instead of doing them one at a time like I usually do, today I'm going to rapid fire six reviews and get them done. By the end of this I will almost be entirely caught up.
Lets begin. I'll start with most recently read to least recent. Here we go.
I recently bought The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris and was excited to read it right away. Its a relatively short book of 338 pages of loosely packed sentences (not densely packed pages) and I completed it in just under a week. As I'm sure everybody knows by now, the book is a murder mystery that was made famous by the movie by the same name, starring Jody Foster and Anthony Hopkins. For that reason I won't bother describing the book synopsis.
To be honest, I thought that I would like the book more then I did but in the end I was actually slightly bored by it. I'm thinking that this was more because I already knew the story and the ending than anything else, but I also found it to be very simply written. I found it to be very accessible but kind of rudimentary in a way. Thay being said, I still gave it a 4 out of 5 stars so I guess, I did like it quite a bit in the end.
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden is another classic story that is similar to The Silence of the Lambs in that it was made into a major motion picture. Its another one where the story is well known to me, having seen the movie several times. This one was very well written though and felt more complex to me than the former book. I gave it 5 out of 5 stars this time.
The movie follows the book pretty accurately and the movie is very good in my opinion, so if books aren't your thing then the movie is worth checking out if you haven't already seen it.
I've been reading a lot of classics these days as you can see.
I know that most people read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee as a child in highschool but my class watched the movie for some reason so I never read it until now. I can confirm that this is a great read as an adult though. There are a few minor parts in the story that I might remove to make it a little shorter, but all in all I liked it a lot and gave it 5 stars.
You probably know the story already so again, I won't bother with a synopsis. If by chance you haven't read it though and are interested in what its about I'll be happy to provide an update in the comments, just let me know.
Who would have thought that a tiger could hold a vendetta? It seems like a very human behavior and not something common in the animal kingdom, right? Apparently tigers are very similar to humans in a lot of ways.
The Tiger by John Vaillant is a non-fiction true story about a Siberian Tiger that takes revenge on a poacher in the remote forests area of Northeast Asia, known as the Amur.
This story is like a nature version of the movie Taken with Liam Neesson, or maybe some other similar action film. The tiger has a set of skills that he will use to hunt down the man who wronged him.
Tiger: "I will find you and I will kill you."
The thing about this book is that its like most nonfiction in that the story that you think you're going to be reading about is actually only a small portion of the book, maybe 15-20%. This book gets into the history and practice of tiger poaching, tiger behavior and tiger lore. It also discusses some of the history of Russian and Siberia and more. Its all very interesting and you learn a lot about tigers, but the vengeance story is just a small part of the book. Its sort of trickled throughout it.
I gave this one 4 out of 5 stars. It was definitely interesting and I have a new respect for tigers, which are a highly intelligent and a very interesting species.
This last book I didn't care for very much at all. It is called Blindsight by Peter Watts. Its a sci-fi story about a crew on board a starship who are observing an alien spacecraft that has parked itself in earth's solar system.
I found this book to have some very interesting ideas but also to be very pretentious. In a way, it insist upon itself. It doesn't read like an author has a story to tell, but more like they have several ideas that should probably be written as standalone short essays. Instead they have compiled all of those ideas together into one somewhat disjointed book. Some of these mini essays that im referring to just come out of left field, and though they may be interesting in their own way, they appear to have nothing at all to do with the story. For instance, one such essay states that according to game theory you should never tell anyone when your birthday is... how that relates to the story at hand, I had no idea. There were several of these types of musings on various subjects that the author just peppered throughout the novel.
The characters were similar in their absolute randomness and their hodge-podge make up seemed to serve no function other than to allow the author to discuss his ideas on a particular subject. For instance one of the crew members has dissociative identity disorder with 4 distinct personalities. Another character has had half his brain removed as a child and can only interpret his reality analytically. One character is a cyborge, and finally, the crews captain is a vampire. Why a vampire? Well, so that the author can discuss his thoughts on the adaptive principles of evolution and muse about how and why a vampire might exist in nature... of course thats the reason.
I gave this one 3 out of 5 stars. Though I did find some of the ideas to be interesting, I didn't find the story to be all that enjoyable to read.
