by Mark Helprin
Apparently, I'm really bad at choosing books to read when I'm on vacation that are nice and light and actually good. Last year I thought "The Host" would be a good one. Instead, it bored me to tears. This time I was thinking more along the lines of "On vacation I'll have the time to read this 700+ page behemoth without having to worry about getting through it in a week in order to write my blog." So I started it when I knew I would have plenty of time to read. Unfortunately, the result is that I feel like I lost a lot of valuable reading time.
Full disclosure: When I bought the book, all I knew about it was the trailers for the movie. All I really cared about were the fact that Colin Farrell and Jessica Brown Findlay are in it. I could have read the reviews, but I'm not sure that would have helped me. This book seems pretty divisive. It has a lot of five-star reviews, a lot of one-star reviews, and only a handful in the middle.
Most of the negative reviews hated his writing style. I have to agree with them there. It's all very flowery and boy does this guy like his similes! Everything is like this, like that, like a virgin's flowing locks, etc. Don't get me wrong. I actually like a little of that. The problem with Helprin is that he spent more time doing that than he did telling the story. It got very old very quickly and helped to make me feel like I was slogging through this book rather than being engaged by a good story-teller.
Some of you may be wondering why I bothered to finish the book if it was so long and so boring. I have to admit that I don't know. I liked the first third of it. I didn't love it, but I thought it might warm up. The second third was spent introducing new characters and going off on tangents, but I trusted him to bring it all back together and make it relevant. And he did. But by the time I reached that part, I was so bitter about having had to slog through the middle third and so focused on just finishing the book that I didn't take the time I should have to enjoy it.
Oh, and the horse! Oh, my god, you guys! The horse! The very beginning of the book is told from the point of view of the horse as he is running away from his master. The horse so clearly had an attitude from the very beginning that it reminded me of the horse in Tangled (which we all know was the best character in that movie). Usually, when I got bogged down by two-dimensional human characters, Helprin would go back to talking about the horse and I would instantly perk up.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters
by Rick Riordan
I was a little disappointed in this one, too. Granted, Annabeth is still my favorite forever and the villains here are awesome, but the plot was basically a retelling of The Odyssey. Right down to using the name "Nobody" and hiding under the sheep. I mean, if you're going to have your characters face all of the same villains, can't you at least make them a little more creative, rather than just copying off of Odysseus?
That being said, the ending was phenomenal and I cannot wait to read the next book to see where that leads!
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