So here’s the link to this story: Manna. I don’t often read webstories or self-published ebooks, I guess just due to prejudice? And yeah, sure, it might have benefited from some editing, but I still read the entire thing this morning. Near-future dystopian society, and (spoiler alert!) escape to a utopian society. And yet, it’s so realistic… so many of the technologies mentioned in this story are definitely not that far off, and there are going to be big decisions to be made about how we’ll use them (whether for good or for evil). But for now, just go read the story.
Month: February 2014
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012)
So I realize everyone has already read this book already, but I only got around to it recently. It turns out there’s going to be a movie, and obviously the book is always better than the movie, so I wanted to get reading it out of the way.
It’s not very often that a book or series is both popular AND good (*cough* 50 Shades *cough*), so I was pretty impressed with Gone Girl. I don’t usually read other people’s reviews of books (does anyone even read book blogs? If not, I’m in big trouble…), but I actually did for this one, and I was surprised by what I read. A lot of people didn’t like the ending — I wasn’t so much surprised at that; the way the book goes, it ends exactly the way a lot of readers would hope it WON’T — and I didn’t like the ending either, but for a different reason.
Perhaps this comes from writing, or maybe just years and years of non-stop reading, but I didn’t like the ending because it was so abrupt. I mean, yeah, characters are as messed up as real humans are, so they’re going to do things you might not like or make decisions you might not want for them. But when you spend 100+ pages describing a single day, and then you’re down to three or four pages to describe WEEKS at a time, especially when big, exciting, important shit is happening? That really bothers me. And if the author had rushed through the beginning rather than the end, I might think differently — but this strikes me as really lazy, like “oh, I don’t really feel like writing the last hundred pages. Twenty or so should do the trick.”
I feel like, the way movies are so dragged out, this problem will probably disappear in the film version. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
Put the Book Down 