I
try to avoid fad books. I haven't read The Da Vinci Code or The Girl
With the Dragon Tattoo, and now that their moment in the spotlight has
passed, I suppose I never will. It's funny how these books seem to be
everywhere at the time: in the Summer of 2005 (or thereabouts) beaches
everywhere were packed with people reading Da Vinci, and only six months
ago I would see at least two people a day on the train with Dragon
Tattoo, now I don't see anybody. These books seem to quickly slip into
obscurity after their initial burst of popularity, never to return
again. I'm generalising, as obviously there are some exceptions, but I
mostly don't find these books to be very well written, although the
basic stories are always exciting. They're usually a bit like watching a
mad action film, and while I love Die Hard and its kind, when it comes
to popular books I'd mostly rather just watch the inevitable Hollywood
version than sit and read the book. I also feel a bit embarrassed
reading a book that's very popular in public: I know I shouldn't care
about what people think, but I really worry that people will see me
reading a popular book and think that I'm only reading it because I've
had it advertised to me. This is silly I know, but I can't help it. Even
writing this, I feel as if I'm being judged as some wannabe cool kid. I
feel ashamed.
I
love dystopian stuff, so when I heard about The Hunger Games coming out
at the cinema I was itching to see it, and it didn't disappoint me. I
just found the whole thing so exciting, the world that was laid out in
front of me was captivating. There are a few plot-holes and silly bits,
but who cares when a film is this much fun? I immediately wanted to
watch the next film, which I knew I'd have to wait years to see. In the
following days I became obsessed with the world of the film, desperate
to find out any little extra detail. I did a Wikipedia search but had to
abandon it for fear of finding things out about the rest of the
trilogy. I wasn't really interested in reading the supposedly
Twilight-esque teenybopper books, but when I found out that the mad
freaks at The Book People were selling the box-set of the three books for only £4.99 (!) I gave into the temptation.
So
now I'm in the process of reading the first book, holding it flat on my
lap on the train so that nobody can see I'm reading something popular,
instead of a book by a Nobel Prize winner that nobody's heard of. And
it's really, really good. It has this indefinable quality,
page-turnability or something, that just means I have to keep reading
and reading, even though as I've seen the film I know everything that's
going to happen. It might just be that it's so easy to read that your
eyes just flow onwards and onwards, never interrupted by having to stop
and work out what's going on. Whatever, it's a brilliant book, and so
much better written than I expected it would be. The only other faddy
literature I've read has been the Harry Potter books, where I find the
story and imagination to be really good, but some of the writing
dreadful. Originally I planned to just satiate my appetite with the
first book and wait for the films, but with a hundred pages left, I
think the book has now overtaken the film in terms of how much I like
it, so I might have to whizz through the rest of them too.
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