Blue

Hmm...

So, I have a lot of mixed feelings about the book that I'm not really sure how to write out. I knew before reading this that Dan Brown and The Davinci Code was pretty controversial. It dealt with some pretty heavy subjects, like religion. I, myself, am not religious so I consider myself pretty ignorant in matters like this. Because of that, I kind of avoided the book and Dan Brown for the longest time because I wasn't sure if I would really get it. But, after a while, I decided to just go ahead and read it. Maybe a lot of things would fly over my head or wouldn't affect me, but it would be an interesting read to say the least.

My final thoughts on it were eventually this: It's an entertaining read at the least, but you have to sort of “turn off your brain” if you want to enjoy it. I'm sorry if that doesn't make much sense, I'll try to explain it down below.

I knew that Dan Brown tended to be very “liberal” about interpretations on historical events religious matters, so I read with that in mind. There are different things that Dan Brown changes around about history and other similar subjects. Some of these are pretty hard to suspend disbelief for...so it's something that's very hard to work around (I personally just pretended this all was happening in some parallel universe, haha). I don't know if this means that this novel is very poorly written or if Brown just took a lot of artistic licenses, but that's a hurdle I had to overcome in reading this book.

Another thing that Brown does in his writing is that he jumps around a lot from different characters and events. I know that this is supposed to be showing the entire story through different perspectives, but I sometimes feel that it really contributed nothing or was just a waste of space. It also felt jarring at times. Sometimes it would feel there was no focus, and other times it felt like it was cutting off a good action sequence.

Also, there were some things that just seemed...implausible to me. I mean, this entire books kind of relies on you having to suspend your disbelief and having to accept some unorthodox interpretations and whatnot, but it got too unbelievable to me at some times. Like, there are countless researchers and scientists studying these topics, and Robert Langdon was the only guy who could figure these puzzles out? There are quite a few other examples, but they're spoilery so I won't get into them. I'll just say this: some scenes were making me scratch my head.

I don't know if this was just me or not, but did anyone else feel like Vetra could have been completely taken out and the novel wouldn't have really lost anything of substance? I feel like she just fulfills the “Sexy Foreign Love Interest Trope”. I don't know, it might just be me. The romance itself was poorly written, and I cared very little for it.

There is a whole theme about science vs. religion, which I know is a pretty powerful debate, but the theme didn't really resonate with me, so I can't comment on it. I'm sure people that are more knowledgeable with the subject can comment on this.

One of the biggest issues I had with the book was Brown's writing itself. I can usually overlook bad prose if the story / characters are good, but this wasn't the case here. The writing was pretty choppy to me and not paced really well. There are some weird descriptions here and there and it sometimes felt like a juvenile trying to write more advanced.

But, with everything said and done? I still found it entertaining. It wasn't a boring book at all. I got some enjoyment out of reading it, if just for the fact that it was a mediocre thriller that was able to hold my attention until the end. I've read a lot of books that are so bad or so boring that I wasn't able to finish it. Angels & Demons didn't fall in either of those categories. It's just a fun book with some action that's decent to read. Yes, you have to overcome many hurdles to get some pleasure out of reading this book, but it wasn't absolutely terrible. This might be because I don't know a whole lot about the controversy surrounding Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code. But if you can suspend your disbelief far enough (and I mean REALLY far) and have a tolerance for mediocre writing...it's not terrible.

And like I said, if you just pretend this book takes place in some alternate universe, it makes it a lot easier.

(Warning: Some slight spoilers ahead!)

As a lover of dragons and fantasy, this book immediately caught my interest. I pretty much love anything fantasy-related. The only problem is that fantasy can be a pretty “cut-copy” kind of genre. A lot of authors stick to the same general layout when they write the world and characters for their books. It seems to always be the same: The magical elves, the mountain dwarves, and the mortal humans. Dragons are usually the big-bad monsters or the wise-good reptiles. So, when I picked up this book, I was a little cautious. I wasn't sure if it would end up being just another samey fantasy book or a hidden gem. But I was still eager to try it out. In the end, even if I don't particularly like it, I still get some enjoyment just because I like reading about faraway fantasy lands filled with magic and magical creatures.

So, is this book one of those hidden gems? No, not really. After reading it, I can sum up my overall feelings with a big “meh”.

I thought it was really cool to have the dragon as a main character, though I feel the potential was wasted. Hearing the small tid-bits of dragon culture and lives was pretty interesting. I think the book should have been more focused on that. Maybe going more into the history of the different dragons and their culture and languages. The history of the world was nice, but nothing was was super unique or memorable. I guess for me, there were tiny pieces of interesting parts of history. For example, I thought the concept of having the dragon living and being raised by wolves was very interesting! Overall though, the book just isn't that captivating. It gets so boring at times, honestly. Nothing really caught my attention or really inspired me to keep going. The dragon's journey wasn't that harrowing or compelling. It's not like where Frodo has to take the One Ring to Mount Doom or the entire world will plunge into an era of chaos. Nothing feels frantic or energetic. Sometimes, it just feels that “this dragon is going here and here just because he wants to.”

I think that maybe if the journey had more feeling or had more at stake, it would be more inspiring to read on about. The beginning pieces are there, but they need to be emphasized a bit more. If Auron was the last of his kind and had to find the fabled DragonLand (or something similar to that), then it should feel like that. Auron should be thinking about how he holds the key to his species survival! Or if it had a more “fish out of water” type of feel. Auron could be a dragon that knows next-to-nothing about the world below and is forced to retreat after a giant dragon war or something like that. He has to survive in environments he has never seen before and interact with creatures he didn't know existed in order to get back to the dragon lands. As I said before, it starts out trying to give this kind of feel, but it falls short. As it is now, it's just...eh. Kind of boring.

Also, it doesn't really help that Auron isn't a very interesting character in my opinion. Having a dragon (who was partially raised by wolves) sounds like it would make for a great narrating voice! Instead, I feel that if you took Auron out and plopped in a human, elf, dwarf, etc., it wouldn't have much of an impact. Having Auron make observations in a more dragon-perspective from his culture and up-bringing would have made it more interesting to read about. Also, Auron didn't feel like he made any huge character developments. He is traveling through a world entirely new to him, and it doesn't seem to have had any effect on him at all.

With all that said, there were some parts of the book I really did like. As I said before, showing the lifestyle of dragons and some of their culture was something I enjoyed reading a lot. I personally liked the explanation that the reason dragons hoard treasure such as jewels and coins (having to eat to them in order to make their scales hard). That was an interesting twist! There were a few moments in the book that I liked and wished were expanded upon or had more of an impact on Auron / the story (such as living with wolves).

Dragon Champion isn't a bad book in my opinion, just one that's...okay. I still went through it and didn't mind it too much, but it fell short. It is a book with some interesting bits to it. If you like fantasy (and dragons!) books, I would still recommend that you at least take a peek at it and see if you like it. If you can get past the flaws and enjoy it, it's not a bad book at all and can be an enjoyable read.

Note: There are some plot spoilers revealed in this review, so please read with caution if you don't want things spoiled!

I'm going to preface this review by being completely honest. When I see a book that has “James Patterson” co-writing with another author on it, I already get an expectation of what's written inside, and it may not exactly be the most flattering thing. I don't read them if I want a deeply rich and engrossing read. I don't read it if I want a compelling story or richly-written characters. None of that kind of stuff. Patterson to me has always been quick reads with entertainment as the priority.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting nothing more than an exciting and/or entertaining story. Sometimes, that's all you need for a book to be good. I respect that and understand that. But, I will say, that as a result, these Patterson collaboration books can come off as rather shallow to me. I don't know how much of it can contributed to Michael Ledwidge and how much is attributed to Patterson. I don't really read Ledwidge, so I can't personally anything on his behalf. I've heard from rumors that books like these, Patterson only writes a small chunk or more or less “produces” the book. Who knows? I don't, so I won't really be focusing on who might've done what. That being said, I went into this with sort of low but understanding expectations, and Zoo doesn't really do anything to change that for me. Without spoilers and without rambling on, Zoo has an interesting premise that's filled with areas of mediocrity in execution in character, plot, and prose, but is entertaining enough if you don't ask for much out of this book.

Open discussion of plot past this point, including spoilers.

The premise is intriguing enough, and one that sounds like it could really lend itself to be a cool science thriller of some kind. Animals are seemingly attacking human around the world on a widespread scale, almost in a coordinated way. The main character, nicknamed Oz, is trying to prove that this phenomena exists to the skeptics who refuse to believe and find its cause as everything descends into chaos and humans are subject to an onslaught of attacks from the animal population.

So, first things first: About the writing, I know Patterson books has a sort of style of writing where they focus on shorter chapters and sentences. It quickens up the pace and keeps things moving, which I appreciate. I can't Zoo being twice its length and having denser writing, I probably wouldn't have the resolve to finish it. And it really helps with a book like this in its job, which is to be an engaging page thriller. I will admit though, it does have the effect of making the writing feel choppy. Chapters will end quickly, scenes will come and go. It doesn't help that there's a five year time skip in the middle of the story which comes out of absolute nowhere. It's the most jarring effect. Its placement doesn't make any sense to me. Oz finds out his girlfriend has been killed by his pet chimpanzee (a bit more on that later), and he just makes some little quip about it to his new and very obviously written love interest (also more on that later) and then...time skip? No reaction to anything else? No retrospect on the firsthand data he's collected? No little narrative transition of “And Oz realized the journey had only just begun.”? It's like there was a chunk of the story that was lost in the fire, and the authors really didn't want to try to rewrite it or make smooth transitions, so they just put a time skip in there and called it good. I'm not saying that they had to write 100 extra pages of story to link together the two parts of the book (though I think it maybe would've been better, more on that later as well), but...I don't know. It's a move that utterly confuses me as a reader.

Second, something that personally stood out to me as being weak: the characters and how they're written. Oz himself doesn't really stand out to me in any way, or at least in a way that I think is good. I guess I do appreciate that he's more of an outcast in the scientific community instead of established and respected scientists, it's different and a source of interesting conflict. Or actually, it should be a source of interesting conflict, but it's only that way for about 30% of the story and then it's disregarded after the time skip (when he's now the head authority and being consulted by the President of the United States). It's like he was trying to be written as an antithesis to a stereotypical scientist protagonist, which I respect, but it comes off as Oz trying to be too cool. Cracking one-liners, being witty, listening to AC/DC and Metallica, giving thongs to his girlfriend and making hot jungle love with her. It comes off as trying too hard, but I understand that might be more a personal thing than anything else.

Any other characters besides Oz are thoroughly uninteresting and don't stick out in any other way. I can say right now that it's an absolute struggle to remember any of their names. I can remember Claire's, but only because she's the only other character in this story who gets any sort of meaningful focus, even if it doesn't fall out of the range of “obvious love interest later turned obvious family baggage for main character.” I get that the book is written from Oz's perspective, but when I can tell exactly what kind of shallow role a character is going to play just from Oz's shallow and blunt narration, it makes it harder to remember or care about them. I can say right now that Natalie's death registered very little reaction from me, something I share in common with Oz (yeah, Oz. Just a witty quote and then barely think about her afterwards. But I guess that's good, now that your Modern Ware 2 playing, high-libido, beer-drinking, one-of-the-guys neuroscience-studying girlfriend is dead, it lets you quickly move onto your second girlfriend). I guess I remember the chimpanzee. Maybe for not the right reasons. But hey, I understand that in this kind of book, it's not meant to slow down and give any kind of focus on any of the characters. Still, it would've been nice to see other written characters that weren't just walking cardboard cutouts for the story or obvious tropes that are only meant to be baggage.

Now, the last thing, and the thing where it all falls apart for me. The execution of the plot and characters, or I suppose the writing itself. Okay, I get it. This is no Jurassic Park. This is no Relic. This isn't supposed to be some deeply researched, deeply thought-provoking, multi-layered story. And I like I said before, that's 100% okay and there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, I like for things to still be cohesive and logical, for things to still make sense to the reader. Things that characters do and say can be utterly confusing from a reader's perspective with little to no explanation, and you just have to connect the dots yourself. And I think this is greatly illustrated in Attila, the book's chimpanzee character. So, we know Oz. He's a fringe scientist who's desperately researching the phenomena of animals attacking humans, trying his best to convince people of the danger they're finding themselves facing. He's obviously very committed to this, spending all of his money traveling to different countries to research it, risking his romantic relationship, dropping out of school to pursue it...

...so why the hell would a guy like this have a pet chimpanzee in his apartment???

Why? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. And there's no explanation for it at all. There's never a “this chimpanzee will save the humans from animals,” “this chimpanzee is different from the animals,” or even “i'm keeping it as an experiment to study animal attacks, let me sic him on the entire apartment complex.” I don't need to go into details of how chimpanzees are extremely dangerous without an apocalyptic animal attack scenario going on, especially a male chimpanzee cooped up in an apartment complex in an unfamiliar setting. And Oz is shocked and surprised when this chimpanzee goes ballistic and kills and eats his girlfriend? How is the reader supposed to take any of that seriously? I do recall that Oz briefly thinks something to the effect of “Oh damn, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. I messed up on that call.” Uh, yeah. You think, buddy? You need to use all two of your brain cells to figure that out? For being the only scientist in the world who can figure out the animal attack phenomena, he sure doesn't seem all that intelligent. I get this is a book that is meant to stretch your suspension of disbelief, and I accept that, but things should still make at least a tiny bit of sense.

There's more examples, but this review is getting way too long and I think I need to stop. All in all, Zoo's nothing more than one of those shallow thrillers that get you through a long airplane ride. And if that's all you're looking for, great. That's all this books really is. But think about anything past a shallow level, and it falls apart and becomes that much more flawed.

If Oz is the kind of hero who will save our world, maybe our world deserves to be doomed.

(Interesting little side note, I just want to say that my friend who is majoring in biology looked at the explanations for why the animals are becoming more aggressive, and laughed at it a bit. I don't understand biology at all, so the scientific explanations were okay to me, but she saw the explanations given about hydrocarbons and animal pheromones and thought it was funny. I'm not holding it against the book at all, since it's obviously just a fictional book and not meant to be taken super seriously or be super realistic. Just thought I'd point it out as a little P.S. to my review.)

This is one of those classic pieces of literature that has been dissected, discussed, and reviewed, almost since time immemorial, so I can't really add anything of substance to it. I'll just put down my quick thoughts.

This is my favorite book of Kafka's, and I really like Kafka. One of my favorite things to read and explore in a book is the intersection of the absurd and completely mundane, two conflicting aspects of reality, and seeing how people try to wrangle with them existing in the same spot.

You woke up as a giant insect one day? Yeah, well, people still gotta work and pay their rent. You're just going to have to chill under the couch and eat rotten vegetables while your family tries to wonder how they're going to feed themselves without your paycheck. Even as a giant insect, you're still trying to get out the door and tell your boss you can't make it into work.

It speaks to some kind of existential aspect to all of us that I love exploring. Because...it is kind of absurd, isn't it? The fact that even through the most surreal nightmare, we still have the compulsion to continue the daily grind. I've absolutely had nightmares that were crazy and bizarre, like finding out I had no mouth or my arms had been replaced with knives, but I was still trying to wake my mom up and so she can drive me to school. Isn't that so uniquely absurd in how human it is? Humans might be the only creature that will wake up as a giant bug and have their main priority be, “I still have to catch the train to go to work.”

Maybe it's because I'm a disgruntled millennial that this work kind of speaks to me; the sheer incredulous nature of it all, of knowing that just because you woke up as a giant insect one day, it doesn't mean your crushing obligations of daily life magically go away. To me, that's where the fascination and beauty(?) of Kafka's writing comes into play: The intersection of nightmarish surrealism with nightmarish mundane life, two different kinds of horror.

I'd be really interested to see how different generations react to this story. I'd be especially interested to see who sympathizes more with the family versus who sympathizes more with Gregor? While I sympathized with both parties, I definitely found myself feeling almost heartbroken for Gregor in the story.

So, if you're a nerd for classic literature like me, you'll probably like this book.