Will

Wow, I managed to read a fucking BOOK! Been too long...

Really enjoyed the Gunslinger. Obviously this is part 1 of 7 and it's the shortest in the series (I believe) so I've got a long way to go. The Gunslinger does a lot of very specific world building for the Gunslinger himself. You get some back story in the form of flashback and retelling of his past to his companion. But there's less BROAD world building than I maybe would have liked. There's hints at stuff, some much more overt than others, and it thinks it's very clever all the way to the end each time it throws a “real” word in there that Roland doesn't understand.

Overall I liked the prose and the characters, which does a lot of carrying in this book. It's grim and The Gunslinger himself is often pretty harsh, but I liked it. It's certainly an interesting approach to fantasy and I'll be reading on in the series for sure. Though I might read the new Crichton/Patterson book first because it's a silly book about volcanoes.

3.5 Stars.

This was a weird one. I started off REALLY liking it. But it takes a long time to get where it's going, so long in fact that pretty much everything I was thinking would happen by the end of this book is more likely to happen in the next one. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but there are elements of Heretics that I didn't quite understand completely, and other elements whose importance I don't see at all. I did like it, it's got a decent amount of action, it's intriguing and pretty significantly less philosophical than God Emperor. I'm interested to see how Chapter House expands the story at least.

Of the four Dune books I've read so far, this is the one that would most benefit from a re-read, by far. Leto speaks in such a way that often times even the people he's talking to are like ‘huh?' It's not always like this, and it's easy enough to see his surface intentions and follow the primary arc of the book. But he speaks in riddles and there are often interactions where Leto is explaining something to someone, they don't understand, he keeps explaining, then they suddenly understand, but I don't. I often re-read paragraphs like “what did I miss there” and rarely found an answer. I am not the best reader. My mind drifts and I'm not super well read, especially in philosophy in which Leto peddles heavily. So I was lost pretty regularly.

This doesn't make the book BAD in my opinion, but I will need some YouTubing to get some clarity on the ultimate point of this book beyond simply learning what Leto's Golden Path is and how it will carry forward (or not carry forward) after he's gone.

It was interesting, but like I said I just wasn't always “with it”.

Can't give half stars, but this is a 3.5 star book for me on first read. This is my first experience with Hemingway and while I liked the prose I wasn't super into the story. I found myself bogged down by descriptions of what Santiago was doing with his line each of the many times it comes up. I am not a fisherman and I just could not get my head around some of the mechanics of what he was pulling off while being dragged about the ocean by that fish. It certainly wasn't bad, but it broke the flow of my reading every time I had to stop and say “huh?”

I also found it pretty slow for about 60% of the book. The back half moves at a pretty good pace, once the fish is on the line and quickens furthers when it's caught. So I blew through the last 40 pages or so. It was just kind of slow going getting there.

The last thing that didn't work for me really is that there's a good deal of time spent talking about how Santiago pretty easily butchers some smaller fish in the boat. I don't really understand why the approach was to strap this huge, bleeding carcass to the side of the boat, instead of trying to butcher it down. He's this extremely seasoned fisherman, he knows the sharks will come, and doesn't use this other option to better get the fish meat to shore to sell it. I just found it odd.

It sounds like I didn't like it, but I promise I did. I'd definitely read more Hemingway and I'd even read this again. If I put my mind to it I could do it in one sitting. It had just been so built up that it couldn't possibly live up to my expectations.

Was reasonably intrigued when I started reading this. Characters were interesting if a little plain/cliche (I basically read Mac as Tommy Lee Jones' exact character from Volcano), and the prologue was a decent hook. Unfortunately, once there was an insane “radioactive waste has been hidden in a volcano” plot I really couldn't get over how absurd that seemed, regardless of how hard Patterson was trying to convince me that our dumb government would let that happen. And it never really recovered from that tbh. They brought in a pretty large handful of opposing force characters that amount to nothing, barely even a roadblock to Mac, and they just die at the end. Speaking of dying at the end, they randomly introduce so many unmentioned people just to kill them off and they all played so false and weird. Nothing they spent 200 pages planning amounted to anything. I guess you could say that illustrates the power and unpredictability of nature, but boy am I reaching for that one.

It's been a while since I've read Crichton, and I've never read any Patterson so take this with a grain of salt; but it really felt like I could tell where there were passages directly from Crichton's hand because they stuck out as so much better written than the rest. Hard to say if that's true, but it felt that way.

Overall this is a schlocky read that doesn't do a great job convincing me of the science, the locations, or the stupidity of some of the characters including the aforementioned government. However, on film I've never had huge issues with schlocky movies as long as they aren't boring, and I wasn't ever THAT bored of Eruption. And I watched Dante's Peak last night for fun for like the tenth time, so who am I to judge. I think if you're a fast reader something like this would be more appealing, but I'm a bit on the slower side and I only read every other day or so. Dedicating like 45ish days to this isn't something I'd recommend.