Books

Red Rising

Oppressed poor boy who’s Ackchyually Super Awsome sneaks into the rich kids’ hunger games summer camp. He sees through the meta, crushes the game, and gets the girl, even though she’s not as good as his old ride or die poor girl.

The writing at the end is mediocre, which comes as a huge relief after the atrocious writing at the beginning. The author was apparently figuring out how to write in real time over the course of drafting the book. God awful prose, even by the most tolerant standards. 

The storytelling, as distinct from the language itself, is passable, if unimaginative. The character development is laughable. The thesis is exhausted, the tropes are threadbare, and the relationships are entirely implausible. 

Absolute slop, a waste of attention, almost no redeeming qualities. 

My 5yo loved it. 

Two stars, only because I have a soft spot for Battle Royale stories.

A Tramp Abroad

Mark Twain does Central Europe. It’s all the usual wit and humor, applied to the very low hanging fruit of Teutonic seriousness and bumbling tourists. 

He lays it on unusually thick in this one, telling patently fictional stories, including one about preposterously over equipped alpine adventure. He’s also a good deal more harder on “himself” (as a stand in for the prototypical tourist) and the things he encounters in this book. The idea is at least as much to parody the typical travel book as it is to report his own experience.

But as always, between the lines there’s an excellent travelogue. The section on German academic fencing sticks with me in particular. 

The appendix on the German language slays and can be read independently. Highly recommended for anyone who has studied German at all:

https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

Four and a half stars. It’s the weakest of the Twain travel books I read, but it’s still outstanding.

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