Recent Reads

72. Under the Dome
The audio book is wonderfully narrated by Raul Esparza. I've been living under the dome for the past couple of weeks, and thirty five hours of listening later, I am gratefully gulping down some fresh air. 

King gripped me by the throat with the opening pages, and never really let go. The story is relatively simple. A dome drops and cuts off a little town in Maine from the rest of the world. The interesting thing about this book is that the why-did-the-dome-drop-and-who-did-it is not the major focus of the story. It is all about what happens to the people in the town. How fear and uncertainty changes human behavior. What people give up when they are scared. And those who take advantage of that fear.

King does a masterful job of pacing the story, but the characters are caricatures of sort. People are either so good that they should have had wings, or so bad that they should have had horns. There is not much nuanced character development, and at over a thousand pages, I would have expected more.

Overall though, I was highly entertained, but would not recommend reading/listening to this story at bedtime. It will not put you to sleep. I know of what I speak. 

As an aside, I watched the first episode of the new TV mini-series, and shouted no, no, no the entire time. I have since calmed down, and have decided to think of the show as "loosely based" on the novel. Keeping some chocolate handy will probably help as well. Rating: 4 stars.

73. Wool
I love when a self-published series of novellas gets a cult following, and the next thing you know it is picked up by one of the publishing houses, and is a bestseller. How can one not root for the underdog?

This omnibus version combines novellas 1 through 5, and in my opinion is the only way to read this work. The first novella is only 40 pages long, and you don't want to have to hunt down the next one, especially late at night.

What about the story? It is a dystopian one. The world outside is deadly, and the air you breathe can kill you. How do humans survive? They live in a silo buried in the earth. A silo that is over a hundred and forty floors deep. People know their place, and it has been a long time since the last uprising. But things are about to change. The world created by the author is an interesting one, the pacing is good, and I do love a strong woman protagonist. Go Jules Go.

It looks like there are 4 more novellas in this series, and I liked this collection enough to read those as well. Also, read that Ridley Scott bought the film rights, and I for one cannot wait to see it. Rating: 3 stars.