Books I don’t like and some that I do.

I have said before that I don’t like to criticize some one that is better than me in writing on his own job.

That said I cant hold my self back from the books that follow.

It maybe that I have scruples to criticize only authors that I like, or that I am hypocrite that blatantly lies. I don’t know, but here it is, a list with books that I don’t really like or simple annoy the shit out of me.

Bitten from Kelly Armstrong

See it and weep!!

It was some years back when I picked up that book.

At the time I was going through a vampire/werewolf/occult period (in retrospect that sounds incredible gay), you know, anything that has big teeth is cool.

I had read some books that picked my interest as Anita Blake, Succubus Blues and some others so a werewolf book was a pleasant challenge. It wasn’t pleasant it was a mistake, and a big one at that.

Bitten follows the only female werewolf at the world as she tries to make a life out of her twisted little world. The story isn’t bad, it’s actually a quite good in introducing the characters.

The world was given with enough details so that you could make out an image but just enough, the sex was nice but as a book it had one big flow (as I see it).

Unlikable characters, how unlikable you ask?

Before the end I was rooting for the bad guys.

The protagonist of the book Elena Michaels is a woman that annoys the shit out of me, she is psychotic twelve year old with makeup, any attempt made to make the character more likeable meets an epical fail. At one part she admits murder because of shear stupidity and at another she admits that she planed and executed another, oh but she shows some regrets for that one! ONLY ONE of them! The rest of the cast doesn’t go better, shallow characters upon which they were made attempts to improve them, but also failed, oh no wait I actually liked two of them, one that dies two to three pages after he is mentioned and one of the big bad wolfs of the story.

Times I read the book: Two (2). One to learn the story and one to confirm that it was as bad as I remembered.

Overall rating on my absurd system: 5/10

The sword of Truth by Tery Goodkind

All of it, bathed in its glory.

The series “The Sword of Truth” is a frustrating subject to me. On one hand we have a fresh and interesting world with great characters and a really, really nice story, it gives you something nice to compare with this world as it touches some interesting ideas, like politics, racism and prosecution among other things  

Yeah, among many many other things.

I liked the books I really did, especially the “Soul of the Fire” which I have read three to four times.

I have only one objection.

The fucking Deus Ex Machina that the writer has decide to keep permanently on the stage.

For those of you two out there that don’t know what a Deus Ex is, there is always Google.

The main character is nice enough and he struggles to stay nice all the way, he doesn’t fall to the dark side, he doesn’t give in to temptations, he is a perfect hero. Also he is the most like character ever put down on paper, he gets free passes at anything, we need a spell that has been lost for years, he comes and cast it without knowing how, we need a strong warrior? Bah the sword gives him the knowledge of his previous owners… all of them… over a hundred years of  battles and experience just got in to his head and not just sword fight, any style that they knew! When he needs it he shows us his talent in art, or politics, or battle, or magic, or sports, or anything ever.

It’s explained in the books how he does what he does (always, no dark spots there, that’s another the thing that I liked) but it gets frustrating from one point on.

There is a saying in my country “λακωνίζειν εστί φιλοσοφείν” it roughly translates to “Saying few thinks equals to philosophy” meaning that saying few things makes you look smart, why? Because if you say a lot of things you are bound to say something stupid. That applies to Deus Ex Machina to, use them once or twice? A semi passable explanation will do, use them constantly and no amount of explanation will ever save you.

Times I read the book: The first four, two to three, the fifth three to four and the rest… you know what doesn’t mater gust read them.

Overall rating on my absurd system: 7/10

The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling.

Can you feel it in the air? A shitstorm I coming.

Some of you expected it, some of you feared it and some of you have left before reaching to the middle of the sentence.

As absurd as it seams I will not talk about the usual points of stupidity that lay in those books, for once the subject is beaten to death by the motivational posters only and second I didn’t really cared for most of them while I read (there I said it, I read them, its out now and nothing can take it back) the books, what really annoyed me was the idiot that was forced to our throats as a hero and also the completely unrelated to him fact that I couldn’t picture the scenery at all (keep in mind that I read the book in my languish so there weren’t any words that I couldn’t understand). You might argue about my hero argument and my incapability to pout a picture in my head but I don’t really care, those were the honest problems I had while I read the books. At the time I had thought that this would be a great script for a movie because then I would have a background image for the whole action. After I saw the first movie my hopes of that were lost. Notice that I don’t complain about the story or the other character beyond Potter, that is because I actually liked them, at the time, I guess the only real reason that I am angry at the Potter universe is that is worth a lot more, it could me so much more. It is worth an author that can write the books so that they don’t give the impression of a first draft.

Times I read the books : One and final each.

 Overall rating on my absurd system: 4/10

Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson

Here we are Ladies and Gentleman! The fuck you book of the year. I stumble upon it while I was searching the internet for good books toy read, I googled “top 10 fantasy”, “top 100 fantasy” etc, I found a list with many, many good suggestions, among them was this book. I started reading it and it was refreshing at the start, some think new.

Then the main hero rapes a fifteen year old girl.

At that point I closed the book and never opened again. I don’t care if this where one of the greatest masterpieces ever produced by the human race, I still wouldn’t pick it up again. The hero rapes a fifteen year old girl.

I think that up to this point you have noticed a common theme on the books I dislike. They all have an asshole as a protagonist. A guess that’s just me but I just cant stand a book with a weak hero, I don’t care if he is smart (Fitz at the Farseer Trilogy isn’t), or strong (that’s the point with the hero’s, they don’t start strong , they become strong), or likeable (I still don’t like the Punisher of Garth Enis but I love the shit out of the series) what I do expect from him though is to be something to look up to, to be an example, you don’t admire the Punisher for his actions, but for his spirit for his tenacity to never give up that you can and must admire.

 Overall rating on my absurd system: I don’t know haven’t read it but if I have to rate it 1/10

 

Does any from the above make sense to you? Yes? No? why don’t you leave a comment?

Until next time people.

Review on Wolf Totem

   
Hi to all!

Its been a while since my last review.

I will make it up to you by giving you my review on one of the greatest books in the world.

 Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong.

As you can read in the wikipedia page that I linked below the picture the book is a part autobiography and another part research and fiction.

The first time that I read it was about 3-4 years ago. I was riding the metro, minding my own business, when I saw a news stand at the station with comics, magazines and some books (paradoxically, it also had various other stuff to eat and drink even though we are reminded that eating and drinking in the subway is prohibited every couple of minutes), I went to take a look at the place hoping to buy something simple and mindless like say, an issue of PC Master, when I noticed it:

Behold its beauty!

There it was, sitting on a self among the rest of the books, just asking me to buy it.

The saying “You cant judge a book buy its cover” is absolutely right: you can’t; but a cover helps to create a good first impression. In my case it attracted my attention long enough to get me to read its synopsis on the back and give a quick look at the first pages. Then I paid for it, read it and had my mind blown across its six hundred and eighty one pages.

There were three reasons for that.

First.

The narrative was like nothing I had read before and I have read a lot of writing styles. I had never before read something from a culture so different than mine, so it made a strong impression on me.

Second.

The story and character development were great.

Third.

It gave me a whole new perspective of the world. Allow me to elaborate:

Since I was young, I knew that some things were connected, even things that seemed radically different to one another. I thought they shared common roots or pathways, the greatest example of which (for me at least) came from the book “The Eight” by Katherine Neville; in it, a chess master, a musician and mathematician find connections between their fields, the chess master provides a solution to a problem, the mathematician represents that solution to a mathematic formula and the musician takes that formula and creates a music piece based on it. For me, this was an eye opener; it made me think what other fields have connections that we don’t know? Do economics interact with biology? Can biology solve problems in the field of electronics? Is it chance that led some of the greatest minds in history to study in more than one field of science? These thoughts plagued me, until a Chinese man living in Mongolia shows me the connections between the animals and the people of the steppes. These weren’t simple, straightfoward connections. They were an intricate web of lives that spanned in every direction, infinitely.

Ah this! Kid’s stuff, I totally got the underlying message and everything!

I knew that there was balance in the nature but I always considered Nature as cruel, you know? We could take all the fruit from the tree and as long as we didn’t completely kill every animal in the forest everything would be ok, which why we have hunting seasons after all, right? To give them a chance to breed and increase their numbers, but wolves and bears? What do they provide us with? Their fur? We don’t live in caves anymore and yes they are nice to look in their natural environment so let’s protect them when we have time to spare.

This is what I used to think.

I didn’t get how the predators helped keep the population of the other animals in balance and didn’t get how much trouble is to deal with other animals on your own either.

Here’s a fun example:

Mice. In every city they flourish, grow fat and carry diseases around only because the don’t really have a natural enemy. How about cats, I hear you ask? Yeah cats are fine, but how many of them are there? They kill a mouse here and there but after that the mice just learn to avoid the place, so humans come along and use poisons to kill them and traps but how long can this go on? How long before the poison we use on the rats saturates the ground so much that it begins to pose a threat to the people living there as well? In the steppe the natural enemy for a mouse is the wolf (among many other animals), that hunts the mouse as a delicacy or a main course if he doesn’t have any other food options available, effectively keeping the population in check.

Oops, sidetracked.

Its true that the book makes a strong environmental point but that wasn’t the only side of it that I liked. The first time I read through it some of its issues flew over my head especially those referring to the Chinese (specifically) and Asian society (in general). During my second read, these issues made more of an impression. Here is why: the first time I read the book I knew near nothing about China or Japan, or any other Asian country in general; since then I have come across some interesting reads about them, some are book as the Zoo of Otsuichi, or even manga (not a good source to learn anything ever), but the most important of the was Traveling: China and Japan by Nikos Kazantzakis. Yes he is the writer of Zorbas the Greek. He travels through China and Japan at the year 1935 writing his impressions, the edition that I read had an afterword buy Helen Kazantzaki were she writes her impressions as she and Nikos were travelling together China and Japan twenty whole years later (1955 for those of you bad at math). Through this reads I was able to better grasp the importance of a book such as the Wolf Totem and its references to these societies.

In conclusion. Buy the Wolfs Totem and read it, and then give it to someone else to read it to and buy it again.

 My gratitude to Konstantine Paradias for the editing. Go ahead and check his blog here.