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alobearI've been watching an awful lot of John and Hank Green YouTube videos lately, and John Green told me to read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut so many times, I just gave in.
I started it first thing on Wednesday morning, and finished it just before 9pm last night. Less than fifteen minutes later, I was watching Grave of the Fireflies at the BFI.
Then, today, I finished my latest audiobook - Feed by Mira Grant, the first in the Newsflesh trilogy.
Fun times!
I knew nothing about Slaughterhouse Five going in, and it turned out to be a very interesting read. It's the kind of science fiction I don't normally get on with - remote and very plot-based. The authorial voice actually points out part way through that there aren't many characters or dramatic confrontations, and it was that which pretty much saved the book for me. It's very self-aware, with commentary about its own literary merits, with is a meta kind of narrative that really appeals to me. I also have an idea what it might be about (or at least what it seemed like to me) - the aliens who abduct the protagonist tell him they can visit any moment in time within their own lives, so they only focus on the good moments and just ignore the bad ones. The protagonist likes this idea, but can't control his own time travel ability, and so keeps revisiting bad moments that he cannot escape. As I see it, the author wanted to apply a fantasy scenario to his own experiences, in order to escape the horrors he witnessed in World War Two, but failed, and so kept ending up back in Dresden.
Grave of the Fireflies was a tough watch. I found the relationship between the brother and sister to be very affecting, particularly on the couple of occasions when the brother broke down, demonstrating how out of his depth he was, and reminding me that he was only a child himself, despite the large age gap between him and his sister. I can't say that watching a five-year-old starve to death was an entirely enjoyable experience, but I thought it was an excellent film, and I'm really glad I went to see it. My favourite moment was the little girl playing "rock, paper, scissors" with her own reflection in the lake. The whole thing was an incredibly effective combination of really sweet and really harrowing events that have really stayed with me.
Feed is the first in a series set in the near future, where the zombie apocalypse has already happened, and the world is now just trying to get along with the constant threat of attack by the living dead. Interestingly, it's actually not really about the zombies at all - it's about two journalists following the presidential campaign of a particular senator, and its themes are mostly political, looking at different presentations of the news and the growing impact of the internet in disseminating information and garnering support for causes. It turns more into a thriller as the story goes on, and does something I thought should have been impossible - killing the past tense narrator - but the characters are strong, the ideas are good, the world is interesting, and I do want to see what happens in the next book, particularly now that the protagonist of the first book won't be in it any more.
I started it first thing on Wednesday morning, and finished it just before 9pm last night. Less than fifteen minutes later, I was watching Grave of the Fireflies at the BFI.
Then, today, I finished my latest audiobook - Feed by Mira Grant, the first in the Newsflesh trilogy.
Fun times!
I knew nothing about Slaughterhouse Five going in, and it turned out to be a very interesting read. It's the kind of science fiction I don't normally get on with - remote and very plot-based. The authorial voice actually points out part way through that there aren't many characters or dramatic confrontations, and it was that which pretty much saved the book for me. It's very self-aware, with commentary about its own literary merits, with is a meta kind of narrative that really appeals to me. I also have an idea what it might be about (or at least what it seemed like to me) - the aliens who abduct the protagonist tell him they can visit any moment in time within their own lives, so they only focus on the good moments and just ignore the bad ones. The protagonist likes this idea, but can't control his own time travel ability, and so keeps revisiting bad moments that he cannot escape. As I see it, the author wanted to apply a fantasy scenario to his own experiences, in order to escape the horrors he witnessed in World War Two, but failed, and so kept ending up back in Dresden.
Grave of the Fireflies was a tough watch. I found the relationship between the brother and sister to be very affecting, particularly on the couple of occasions when the brother broke down, demonstrating how out of his depth he was, and reminding me that he was only a child himself, despite the large age gap between him and his sister. I can't say that watching a five-year-old starve to death was an entirely enjoyable experience, but I thought it was an excellent film, and I'm really glad I went to see it. My favourite moment was the little girl playing "rock, paper, scissors" with her own reflection in the lake. The whole thing was an incredibly effective combination of really sweet and really harrowing events that have really stayed with me.
Feed is the first in a series set in the near future, where the zombie apocalypse has already happened, and the world is now just trying to get along with the constant threat of attack by the living dead. Interestingly, it's actually not really about the zombies at all - it's about two journalists following the presidential campaign of a particular senator, and its themes are mostly political, looking at different presentations of the news and the growing impact of the internet in disseminating information and garnering support for causes. It turns more into a thriller as the story goes on, and does something I thought should have been impossible - killing the past tense narrator - but the characters are strong, the ideas are good, the world is interesting, and I do want to see what happens in the next book, particularly now that the protagonist of the first book won't be in it any more.
