Reading Stephen King

My oh my. How time flies. My first Stephen King novel was the doorstopper Under the Dome, published in November 2009 and probably read shortly thereafter when the OCR'd copies were still pretty crappy.

Maybe that's what colored my perception of the book. But then I read other reviews on Goodreads, and I realize that it probably wasn't the quality of the OCR. The book could be divided into two parts. The first showed the characters reacting to the dome's appearance, while the second... I don't even want to think about the second part. It was just that bad. The ending... It was not well-written, and I feel like I was cheated by the lack of foreshadowing. Maybe there were some hints, but I doubt it.

FINAL GRADE: C-

Turning my attention to the present time, I managed to finish reading Bag of Bones from September 1998. My interest in this book was first sparked by the A&E miniseries of the same name, but the first copy I got was a whopping 1400 pages long. Yeah. That number does not inspire excitement towards reading the book. The next copy was a lot more manageable at 770 pages. In May, I started to read the book. And promptly forgot to finish it until about 3 days ago.

I think it was the beginning that got me for a while. It was slow, but I think that it was a good kind of slow, showing the difficulties of the main character that led him to return to his little cabin by the lake where all of the really good stuff happened. The book had a lot of twists and turns, and even though I ended up awake at 4 in the morning today (and had been awake for about 25 hours), I couldn't put it down. I had to see what happened to the characters. I feel like even though 11 years separated these two books, Bag of Bones stood out as being better written.

FINAL GRADE: A


Just curious, but have you guys read anything by Stephen King? And if so, what books and what did you think about them?

Images from Goodreads, with links to the books in question.

Finding Everett Ruess

I recently won a free copy of Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts. I can't say that I was all that impressed with it. I had read a bit about Everett Ruess, a young man who disappeared into the Southwestern wilderness in the early 20th century, in Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, so I was interested in a book about him.

The book's premise was interesting. What caused a young man to wander around the Southwest for years, and what happened to him? But I feel that the author dropped the ball on this one. I couldn't keep interested enough to finish the book. It's too bad though, because like I said, the idea was interesting.

Overall Grade: D

Image from Goodreads.

Ring

Ring by Koji Suzuki is a trip through the disturbing. It is not true horror like I had thought, and I think the movie was a bit different from the book (at least from what I remember from my teen years). I was never really scared, per say, but the book was just that level of... unnerving to be more terrifying than most. It was a little like the beginning of Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Creepy, but not scary.

The characters are good, but my favorite has to be Sadako, a character you never actually meet. I want to learn more about what her deal is, and I'm going to spending a bit of time to find the next book in the series, Spiral.


Final Grade: A

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

I finished the book Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, and I have to say that I was quite impressed. There were some things that could have been elaborated on, but all in all, the book was good.

Miss Peregrine's opens with an old man telling stories to his grandson. The majority of the book takes place later in the grandson's life after his grandfather is murdered by... something. He finds the home where his grandfather grew up, and there he finds far more than he bargained for.

The idea behind the story was good, if a little outdated with the whole "mutant people living in hiding" thing, but there are some interesting twists to the story. I'm curious to see what he has in store for the next book in the series, and I'm hoping that he reads some of the reviews on Goodreads and polishes up some of the problems.

Final grade: B+

Image from Goodreads.

Mass Effect 3 Demo Review

So I played the ME3 demo on my XBOX360 yesterday, and I must say, I am impressed. I still haven't finished the first game (a failure on my part), but I enjoyed the changes to the combat system in ME3.

ME3 introduced Jane Shepard, a fan-created version of the main character John Shepard, as an alternative to the male character. The features of Jane (and I'm guessing John) are adjustable, allowing for a new level of customization. I will admit that while it was interesting to play as a girl, I did not care much for my dear redheaded Jane.

Now, the demo was broken into two parts. The first part is probably going to be the tutorial level of the game. It introduced the basic controls of the game, though I don't think it told me how to use the special skills, like the biotic skills that my class gave me. The combat and AI were just hard enough to pose a challenge but not too difficult as to sink the player in frustration. It also set the stage for the game in a series of cut-scenes that were not skippable.

The second half of the demo was an interesting escort mission that brought back characters from at least the first game. Again, the combat was not too difficult, though I had a bit of trouble finding ammo for my rifle. Nothing like finding yourself duking it out with the boss with nothing more than a pistol. Though I did find some ammo about half-way through the battle.

All in all, the demo for Mass Effect 3 was satisfactory. It did its job by introducing the story better than mere trailers, showed off the graphics and combat system, and allowing players to...well... play and get a taste of the game. I'm excitedly waiting for the release on 6 March, and you can bet that I'll be at the GameStop at midnight.

"The River" premier review

ABC premiered their new show The River this past week, and despite my aversion to creepy looking shows like that, my attention had been captured by the trailer. Now, I was a little hesitant when I saw that it was done by the same people who did Paranormal Activity (a movie that did not impress me). I still gave the show a shot though.

My first impression were neutral. The acting was a bit... stilted. The characters, with what felt like the exception of Emmet (the missing father), did not garner any sympathy from me. Even after the first episode ("Magus"), the characters had changed little. The wife (whose name I can't remember at all) remained an almost obsessive woman who (shocks of shocks) had an affair while her husband was away. The son, London, seemed to flop between his original stance of "Leave me alone" to "Let's go find Dad"...

I was also expecting a bit more horror. The scare factor seemed a little low for even TV. American Horror Story was scarier than this, though I did not see much of that show either, thanks to that incredible thing called college. The first monster had not been as interesting as I hoped once it was revealed that it was the ghost of one of the crew members who had died before the rest of the Magus's crew went missing. I think that they could have drawn out the monster a little more, filled in a few details, before finally killing it, but they didn't.

Even creepiness seemed a little weak in the first couple of episodes. Episode two brought the first "interaction" with Emmet Cole, where the daughter of the mechanic is possessed by his spirit. She moved through the ship with jerky movements before lying down next to the wife. One of the first things out of the wife's mouth was "You can speak English?". Seriously? You've been basically living with this girl for almost a week or so, and you think that she's been hiding this ability to speak fluent English? The special effects in that scene were not particularly well-done either...

The only redeeming value of the show so far is the story. Granted, it's a bit of the stereotypical hunt for the missing person, but adding in the aspects of monsters in the Amazon and magic, especially "The Source" that Emmet was looking for, and this show has an otherwise interesting plot.

All in all, I'll place this show on my "let's see if this gets any better" list. The storyline is interesting, but if the actors don't learn to relax and play their characters believably, then I'm booting this show into the dead pile.