Wednesday Reading Meme
What I Just Finished Reading: Four books this week: Game Changer by Neal Shusterman, Serpico by Frank Maas, Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Cadaver Dog by Doug Goodman.
What I'm Reading Right Now: I just started Murder Never Knocks by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins. This is a new genre for me, so fingers crossed.
What I'm Planning to Read Next: I've got 5 more books up on Give Me Five so I'm waiting for someone to pick for me.
44. Game Changer by Neal Shusterman
Great concept, dismal execution.
After a bone-crunching football hit, a player finds that he has shifted the fabric of the universe in a small way - in this world, stop signs are blue instead of red.
Now, I LOVE premises like this. Yesterday is an amazing movie with a similar concept. Then of course there’s the real life counterparts - is it Berenstein Bears or Berenstain Bears? And why do so many people remember it “incorrectly”? Have we had a minor alternate universe shift? It’s fascinating to me.
And I feel like so much could have been done here, but as our MC Ash tries to fix things and just makes them worse, the book got more and more heavy-handed and preachy. Its attempts to show Ash, a typical male white teen, coming to a greater understanding of prejudice, homophobia, and domestic violence is just clunky and cringey. He had to experience these things to understand them, which is just insulting.
Maybe the author just tried to tackle too much.
Dates Read: April 15 to 18, 2024
Page Count: 389
3 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - September P - with a pushy character (44/74)
45. Serpico by Frank Maas
It’s been a billion years since I watched (and loved) the movie starring Al Pacino, so when I saw the book in the library I thought I’d pick it up. (For those that don’t know, it’s the true story of a cop who refused to accept the bribes common among his peers and fought to stop the widespread corruption in the NYPD.)
This was definitely an eye-opener about just how deep the corruption ran (and I’m sure still runs to this day, Frank Serpico’s battles notwithstanding.) Serpico is portrayed as a freewheeling hippie accepts-everyone type who comes across as though he’s on a bit of a pedestal, but I don’t know if that’s how the man actually was or if the author put him there. Nevertheless, it’s a really fascinating and frustrating story of his struggles to first just get by and try to turn a blind eye so that he could live out his childhood dream of being a cop, and then determining to stop the corruption when he realized how much could be accomplished in cleaning up New York if his fellow officers would put as much work into cleaning up the streets as they did from profiting off the crooks.
Dates Read: April 18 to 20, 2024
Page Count: 402
4 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - November R - 3 or 0 in page count (45/74)
46. Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Before his death, the author told his family that he wasn’t happy with this book and didn’t want it published. They went ahead and published it anyway. They should have listened to the author.
Every year, a woman travels to the island where her mother is buried to lay flowers on her grave. One year she decides to randomly have sex with a stranger, even though she’s in a happy marriage. She then becomes sort of obsessed with her yearly trips to the island so that she can find a new stranger to have sex with.
That’s… basically it in a nutshell. The book is, in my opinion, overwritten and pretentious while at the same time extremely basic. It’s mostly a “tell” - each step by step of Ana’s journey laid out - so there is no emotional connection with her or her situation. And the ending is just annoying and weird.
Dates Read: April 20 to 21, 2024
Page Count: 129
1 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - June N - new release (first 6 months of 2024) (46/74)
+ Around the Year in 52 Books 51 - published in 2024 (43/52)
47. Cadaver Dog by Doug Goodman
The author does his best to put a unique spin on the traditional zombie story. Here, he takes a hint from real life and invents a wasp-like creature that attaches to a human and animates them. The MC is asked to train a dog to hunt these wasps, not to find zombies themselves but because zombies are suspected of kidnapping children and the elderly to feed their larvae.
None of this is particularly well explained, which would have done wonders towards helping the believability of the story. The characters are all one-dimensional and we know little of their inner workings. The story moves at a breakneck speed so nobody has any time to breathe, let alone let in a little nuance. I did, however, love the chapters showing how the dog was trained, and that earned the book an extra star.
Dates Read: April 22 to 23, 2023
Page Count: 129
3 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - August U - ugly cover (47/74)
+ Around the Year in 52 Books 31 - related to going for the gold (44/52)
.
What I'm Reading Right Now: I just started Murder Never Knocks by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins. This is a new genre for me, so fingers crossed.
What I'm Planning to Read Next: I've got 5 more books up on Give Me Five so I'm waiting for someone to pick for me.
44. Game Changer by Neal Shusterman
Great concept, dismal execution.
After a bone-crunching football hit, a player finds that he has shifted the fabric of the universe in a small way - in this world, stop signs are blue instead of red.
Now, I LOVE premises like this. Yesterday is an amazing movie with a similar concept. Then of course there’s the real life counterparts - is it Berenstein Bears or Berenstain Bears? And why do so many people remember it “incorrectly”? Have we had a minor alternate universe shift? It’s fascinating to me.
And I feel like so much could have been done here, but as our MC Ash tries to fix things and just makes them worse, the book got more and more heavy-handed and preachy. Its attempts to show Ash, a typical male white teen, coming to a greater understanding of prejudice, homophobia, and domestic violence is just clunky and cringey. He had to experience these things to understand them, which is just insulting.
Maybe the author just tried to tackle too much.
Dates Read: April 15 to 18, 2024
Page Count: 389
3 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - September P - with a pushy character (44/74)
45. Serpico by Frank Maas
It’s been a billion years since I watched (and loved) the movie starring Al Pacino, so when I saw the book in the library I thought I’d pick it up. (For those that don’t know, it’s the true story of a cop who refused to accept the bribes common among his peers and fought to stop the widespread corruption in the NYPD.)
This was definitely an eye-opener about just how deep the corruption ran (and I’m sure still runs to this day, Frank Serpico’s battles notwithstanding.) Serpico is portrayed as a freewheeling hippie accepts-everyone type who comes across as though he’s on a bit of a pedestal, but I don’t know if that’s how the man actually was or if the author put him there. Nevertheless, it’s a really fascinating and frustrating story of his struggles to first just get by and try to turn a blind eye so that he could live out his childhood dream of being a cop, and then determining to stop the corruption when he realized how much could be accomplished in cleaning up New York if his fellow officers would put as much work into cleaning up the streets as they did from profiting off the crooks.
Dates Read: April 18 to 20, 2024
Page Count: 402
4 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - November R - 3 or 0 in page count (45/74)
46. Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Before his death, the author told his family that he wasn’t happy with this book and didn’t want it published. They went ahead and published it anyway. They should have listened to the author.
Every year, a woman travels to the island where her mother is buried to lay flowers on her grave. One year she decides to randomly have sex with a stranger, even though she’s in a happy marriage. She then becomes sort of obsessed with her yearly trips to the island so that she can find a new stranger to have sex with.
That’s… basically it in a nutshell. The book is, in my opinion, overwritten and pretentious while at the same time extremely basic. It’s mostly a “tell” - each step by step of Ana’s journey laid out - so there is no emotional connection with her or her situation. And the ending is just annoying and weird.
Dates Read: April 20 to 21, 2024
Page Count: 129
1 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - June N - new release (first 6 months of 2024) (46/74)
+ Around the Year in 52 Books 51 - published in 2024 (43/52)
47. Cadaver Dog by Doug Goodman
The author does his best to put a unique spin on the traditional zombie story. Here, he takes a hint from real life and invents a wasp-like creature that attaches to a human and animates them. The MC is asked to train a dog to hunt these wasps, not to find zombies themselves but because zombies are suspected of kidnapping children and the elderly to feed their larvae.
None of this is particularly well explained, which would have done wonders towards helping the believability of the story. The characters are all one-dimensional and we know little of their inner workings. The story moves at a breakneck speed so nobody has any time to breathe, let alone let in a little nuance. I did, however, love the chapters showing how the dog was trained, and that earned the book an extra star.
Dates Read: April 22 to 23, 2023
Page Count: 129
3 out of 5 stars
+ Lost Challenges 74 Letters - August U - ugly cover (47/74)
+ Around the Year in 52 Books 31 - related to going for the gold (44/52)
.