I went into Suzanne Collins’ The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes thinking it would be a real eyeroller as I’m not to fond of YA dystopian sci-fi, but seeing as how the film adaption was around the corner and the time I sank into the Hunger Games trilogy (and being the unapologetic asshole who believes the words “the book was better” to be Mosaic Law), I said fuck it and gave it a read.
And I was surprised be how I wanted to keep going after the end of every chapter. I enjoyed getting into the head of Coriolanus Snow and his possessive infatuation with Lucy Gray and the inner working of Capitol class structure.
That’s not to say I don’t have issues with the book. The pacing is inconsistent, the actual Hunger Games are a relative bore, and some characters could have benefited from more focus.
But through it all, I don’t feel my time has been wasted reading it and am curious to see how the film adapts it.
Any books you’ve read that you thought you’d hate but ended up enjoying? Why?
War of the Worlds. I didn’t think Wells could possibly hold up to what came later in science fiction, and to this day War of the Worlds is a top 10 novel of all time
I was really impressed by how entertaining the Time Machine was
I’m reading the Time Machine right now, and I think I was surprised about how little sci-fi there actually is (by today’s standards at least). Does War of the Worlds stack up in that way too?
H.G. Wells has a specific style of writing science fiction that I really enjoyed.
I honestly don’t remember if I liked War of the Worlds or not, I mainly remember one ridiculous part that taught me the word “ejaculate” has more than one meaning, or maybe had… and I guess it stuck out for a lot of others too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/TpERqLpDR4
I read the book before the Internet really existed for regular people… so it may have taken me a while to figure out what this really meant…which in the whole mad this a lot more funny