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.

Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M.E. Thomas (2013)

I actually finished this book last week, but it’s been stewing in my brain for a while… I described it to a friend as “more interesting than good”, but now I think maybe I was just being judgemental.

I always like reading get-inside-my-head type stories, but I was uncomfortable inside this person’s head. (M.E. Thomas is a pseudonym; she gave a lot of details about herself without any of them being too specific. I wonder if anyone who read this knew her and figured out who she was?) I like to think I’m a nice person, but some of the things the author said and did were not so dissimilar from myself. And since sociopaths or psychopaths are supposed to be the worst of the worst (rapists, murderers, liars, thieves, …) this was unnerving.

But I think this is exactly M.E.’s point — how different are we all, really? I mean, the first chapter is called “I’m a Sociopath and So Are You”. Everything and everyone is on a spectrum; it’s just that most of us think we’re on the ‘good’ end, while people like her are on the bad end. But then she describes her life as a powerful lawyer and a law professor, and tells stories that illustrate how much she really does love her nieces and nephews, and you think, huh. Maybe she’s not so bad, and maybe I’m not so good.

This is the forum for sociopaths on M.E. Thomas’s blog that she started back in 2008, before she wrote this book.