When Bad Things Happen To Good Books

I love books and have a tendency to get rather attached to the characters. I also get somewhat annoyed when a writer does a disservice to said characters, as was the case in this story, Beach Road by James Patterson/ Peter de Jonge.

I rather like James Patterson's books. He's good at holding your interest with the right amount of suspense and putting you inside the heads of the characters. Which is possibly the reason I am so disappointed with this book. It was great up until the ending. Had I known what was coming I would have stopped reading once it got to what I thought would be the end. At the end there is an awful plot twist that is completely unbelievable. There was absolutely no indication up to that point that what happened is even a remote possibility.



The book is written in first-person style, which is my main issue with the way it ends, because it ends up seeming completely false. When you reach the end, it's as if the main character was lying to you, as if he knew you were in his head. That doesn't make any sense. Also, there are many things in the book that completely seem at odds with the twist at the end.

To me it seems as if the book up until the last hundred or so pages was written by one author and then the rest by the other, and the second writer only gave the first part of the book a cursory glance before writing the ending. They take a perfectly likeable, believable character and turn him into a cruel, calculating monster with absolutely no warning. The only possible way that it would work is as if he had multiple personality disorder, which he certainly doesn't seem to. I mean, he earnestly tries to find the guy who, in the end, you find out is none other than himself. How does that make any sense?

Overall, the book was great. Once you reach the end of the trial, though, it goes completely south. If I had any idea what was coming, I would have put the book down at that point.

--Dragon

(I get rather attached to characters in books, as I said, and it's as if the writer created this guy and made you like him, then just drags his name through the mud)
Read more!

Woe to Words

I love books. Absolutely love them. Acutally, I'll go so far as to say that if it has writing on it, there's a very good chance that I'm going to read it. I go through about 1-2 books in a day. Not necessarily every day, because I'm pretty sure that the world would run out of books in my lifetime and by the end of it I would get excruciatingly bored. So I try not to read one every day. That's what they invented the internet for, after all. On those off days I peruse various blogs and how-to sites (yesterday I learned a really nifty way to lace my shoes!) until my eyes bleed.

Erik, however, will balk at reading the storyline blurb at the bottom of the screen in video games unless it's completely necessary to understand how to play the game. At the least, I find this to be a travesty and a shame. At the worst, I see it as more proof that our culture's priorities are completely wack and proof that there is much to be desired in our schools. (And I would know... I graduated from said school system only about 2 years ago)

So you see that our ideas about reading are completely contradictory. I've always thought any children I might have would necessarily share my love of reading. But I fear that Erik's ambivalence about it cause us to have marginally literate children who glaze over when assigned reading homework and grow up to be the type who don't bother to read anything longer than a street sign. I'm sure this is a silly thing to worry about with the myriad of other, far more legitimate concerns a prospective parent could have, but this is something that has occured to me on a number of occasions. So what do I do to make sure the Wee Dragon enjoys reading at least as much as a normal person, if not as much as I do?

--Dragon

Read more!