Book Reviews for October

I had to stop reading The Count of Monte Cristo. It's a great book and I was thoroughly enjoying it. The only problem is that school work was getting in the way and it was taking way too long to get through the book. I suggest saving off the book until you have the time to read a 1,000+ page book.

The next book that I read was Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. It was the Hugo Award winner for this year and I wanted to see how it stacked up against Old Man's War (which was nominated for the Hugo as well). While I thought that this was good sci-fi, I really didn't enjoy it as much as OMW. I don't know, I guess I'm much more of a military sci-fi dweeb and can't get as much into the hard sci-fi that is found in Spin. It's a very good book and is definitely worth the read. I just enjoyed OMW much more. In fact, I re-read OMW just to make sure I could do a really fresh comparison between the two. In my eyes OMW still wins.

After that, I read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Wifey recomended it so I decided to give it a try. For some reason, this book seemed very similar to a lot of other coming of age books that I've read in the past. The only difference was that it was set in Afghanistan. There's something that I now call The Sixth Sense Effect. Here's how it goes: After watching The Sixth Sense you come to expect that M. Night Shyamalan's movies will have a huge plot twist somewhere near the end of the movie. As a result, any more M. Night Shyamalan movies that you watch will not surprise you if and when the plot twist occurs. You're expecting it and it's not going to surprise you when it happens. I found that to be the case when I watched The Village. I have a feeling that more people would have enjoyed the movie a lot more if they didn't know that it was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The Kite Runner suffers from The Sixth Sense Effect since I've read coming of age books before and I know that some huge revelation would be coming. I guessed what the plot twist would be within the first couple of chapters and the rest of the book was a slog once I knew what was going to happen. It's a well written book, but I don't think that it deserves all the hoopla that has surrounded it.

Next Book: Cell by Stephen King