You can know anything. It's all there. You just have to find it.

-Neil Gaiman

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Monday, February 28, 2011

February Recap: Booklist

So because I read six books last month I took a little break and read only 2.5 this month.  I'll hopefully finish the rest of that book this week.

So the two books I read are classified as science fiction, which is also how I'm classifying the novel I wrote.

These books, however, are completely different.

The first one is Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Very well written, nice pacing, and even though I already knew what the book was about, the author had the ability to construct each chapter with enough tension that I felt like I needed to continue to the next.

The downside of this book?  Depressing material.  Depressing ending.
The upside?  There is a movie you can watch if you don't have time to read the book. 

The second book is I am Number Four, by Pitticus Lore (aka James Frey - yeah, the same one who brought down Oprah's wrath for his "memoir" A Million Little Pieces).

Anyway, this book was interesting.  At first, I didn't want to read it - I thought from what I had heard and seen from the movie trailer that the book I wrote was very similar to this.  I was thinking, "Crap!  Someone already had the same idea as me."

However, the book is not the same at all.  Which is a relief.  I've noticed with this book and several other YA books that I've read that are on the best seller lists have something in common.  They are written in first person, PRESENT tense.  I notice sometimes that using present tense can give an urgency and immediacy to what otherwise might be a regular scene.  I also wonder if I should be doing that with my book.  My novel is first person, past tense, which tends to be the way a lot of people write stories.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a book this way.  However, the first chapter of my book is written in the present tense, which I think a lot of agents liked.  I got a lot of good feedback and requests to see more based on this first chapter, so it makes me wonder if that should be applied to the rest of the book as well.

So this book was pretty good but at the same time I didn't really connect with the characters.  And the climax at the end seemed a little anti-climatic for some reason.

The upside?  There's a movie you can watch!

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