Book: Mockingjay

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins is the last book in the Hunger Games trilogy. So this is also going to be a review of what I thought about the series so far. I liked this book the least. In fact, I kind of wish that I had just stopped at the end of the first book. There is no precise moment that I stopped enjoying the story. Just a gradual shift from interesting to aggravating. It is another example of the situation where there is a fairly well written series with a main character I really don’t like. So someone with different tastes in storytelling would enjoy this a lot more than I did. Certainly it helped solidify my own tastes a lot more, and I always am thankful for that. Sometimes ranting against something disliked helps me work out the specifics of what I do like in a story.

 

Book: Catching Fire

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins is the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy. It is mostly like the first, so see the previous review for most of my reactions. Not much changed while reading the second book. Decently written, but some of the little quirks of this author’s style are starting to bother me more. So if the first book was borderline enjoyable for you and you aren’t sure about moving to the second book, this one is more of the same. I enjoyed it enough that I’m already in book three.

 

Book: The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins surprised me. From previous attempts to read mainstream bestsellers, such as Twilight or Harry Potter, I’ve been disappointed at how shallow and trite the more popular books are. Hunger Games was not as deep or complex as the stories I like the most, but it was interesting enough to keep my interest the whole way through. I will certainly be reading the next book in the trilogy and unless it turns out to be horrible I’ll be reading the third as well.

 

Book: Wool

Wool by Hugh Howey is a very short story. It is exactly as long as it needed to be, and that turned out to be pretty short. I had been hearing about this story for a while now. I follow news and blogs about self-publishing and this story has apparently been one of the big winners. The author achieving fame and fortune just by writing the book and then putting it up as a ebook himself and letting it get really popular. He eventually wrote more books in this series even though the short story was originally meant to be a stand-alone, and was doing well enough that when the big publishers wanted a book deal he could negotiate for the terms he wanted instead of giving in to the terms they wanted. I hope to reach close to that level of success with my writing eventually. The making a living part anyway, since I don’t ever expect to be signing a publishing contract.

Back to this story. It is so short there isn’t much to say. It is very well written, the flashbacks are smooth enough that I never got confused as to if I was in the present or the past, and the point of view is expertly handled. There is a twist that is both foreshadowed and remains a twist. The ending is perhaps bittersweet, but I did not find it all that depressing. Someone else might find it a bit of a downer. This is a story I’d recommend. I’m not rushing out to read the rest of the series, but I do want to find out what happens next eventually.

Wool by Hugh Howey
Wool Omnibus

 

Book: Flow my Tears

Philip K Dick can twist a person’s brain around. I just finished Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and not entirely sure what to think of it. Quite good in a rambling way. This is the first book by Philip K Dick I’ve finished, but I’ve heard enough and can extrapolate from the movies based on his works to say that the surreal rambling is probably his writing style. There were a few parts of the book that actually invoked emotional responses, which is rare for me, and one that I actually had a hard time getting though. It messed me up enough that I read through it several times and at least once accidentally went a page backward instead of forward on my kindle while reading it.