What I’m Reading: (InteractiveReader Edition)

So titled because it covers not one but two YA books! And InteractiveReader is certainly the best (*ahem* only) such blog that I read.

I am just over half way through Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and I already have to blog about it. If I remember correctly, this book was actually recommended to me by two people independently: Jackie and Barb (Do you want a link somewhere?) So when the two most qualified book suggesters I know both come up with the same idea for me, I thought I better take them up on it. And they were sooooo right!

I am a sucker for end of the world stories, I don’t really know why exactly. But this was a little bit different. An asteroid hits the moon moving its orbit slightly closer to Earth, affecting the tides, etc. It was interesting how this was sort of a slow decent into chaos over the course of months instead of the instant disaster usually associated with the zombie apocalypse. For example, in this book food is a big issue and it slowly runs out over time (well, slowly for some, faster for others). In the case of a zombie apocalypse, most people die pretty fast leaving a decent amount of food lying around. Since I don’t usually read YA, having a teenage girl as the main character was sometimes annoying. I could do with out the boy talk, day-dreaming about figure skaters, etc., but that being said the choice of narrators did make it interesting. For example, going alone into a lawless town was a big concern, whereas growing up as a boy it’s not something I even really think about.

I would definitely recommend this book. I would listen to the audio book in the car on the way home from work and I would get so absorbed that it would take me a little while to snap out of it when I got home, like I would have to remember that we don’t need to conserve food, or that we could just go to the store and get things if we wanted them. I already have the pseudo-sequel the dead and the gone lined up for when this is done, which is sort of a retelling of the same disaster from a totally different viewpoint (for example, New York city instead of small town PA).

Before Life as We Knew It, I read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

I like vampire books. I have spent a lot more time reading about, thinking about, and watching movies about vampires than I ever have about zombies, and yet nobody ever accuses me of being obsessed with them. Maybe that is because everybody knows that vampires aren’t real as opposed to the zombie menace. I don’t know. But either way, I am inclined to look favorably on the subject matter.

So my review of this book is:  Eh. ::shrug:: I know this is a really well known, well selling book with a lot of hype, but I’m not sure why. The characters are likeable, and they better be since the vast majority of the book is setting them up. I have to admit that the book gets interesting once some action kicks in, you know, right at the very end. It ended well enough that I will get the next one in the series.

I don’t know, to be fair I’m not exactly the target audience. I can only take so much high school melodrama and staring into someone’s eyes and thinking about how beautiful they are. If I have to have one more description of someone’s eyes…sheesh. It was worth a read, but I don’t know that I would recommend it to anybody unless maybe they were a teenage girl. But then there aren’t a lot of them asking me for book recommendations.

The strange thing is that reading the book made me more likely to see the movie. They always have to cut a lot of things from books to make them into movies and in this case it would probably help the story. I can certainly think of a few “longing glance” scenes that could go.

What I’m Watching:

Synecdoche, New York. Anybody who tells you this is a good movie is lying to you. Either they want you to waste a lot of time on this horrible movie, or they are lying to themselves. In the second case, they might not realize they are fooling themselves, but even still they are only telling you to watch it so that you know how sophisticated and smart they are, which isn’t very nice. I don’t know why they don’t like you; you’ll have to figure that out on your own. 

I like all of his other movies, but world? Charlie Kaufman played a joke on us with this one.

What I’m Listening to:

“Jenny Says” by Cowboy Mouth. Do people know this song? I can’t remember if this was on the radio or if we just listened to it. I also like “How Do You Tell Someone” if you’re looking for another good one.