Lee Hunts

The Tower of Babylon So far, I'm kind of in the middle. I might be disappointed with the first two stories for different reasons, but there were also aspects that I enjoyed. I think I might be able to appreciate idea stories if they are short stories. I know I have read idea stories that were novels or novellas, and at the time, they just annoyed me. I would rather have an essay just share the ideas, you know? But I didn't mind that as much, this time around, idk. The prose in the first one was a problem. It was very workman-like, lacking in the flourish that makes narratives so compelling. I could get used to it, but that doesn't fix things. I think I liked the first one more. It didn't really go the way I was expecting—I thought the vault would just be an illusion, meaning they would have to keep building—but the ending worked in a different way. I saw readers trying to rationalize the logic of the world that was "revealed" at the end, but I got the impressi...

I just finished reading Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. This is a reread of the book, given I read it some time ago when I was a teenager. I generally did not read any of the required books at school, so I am not sure if this is one of the few that I did end up reading, or if I read it later in my free time. Either way, I knew what I was getting myself into from the outset, and I can say that I got the reference from the fourth season of The Walking Dead, when that came out. If you didn't get it, just go outside and look to the flowers. This book is written about two men in the Great Depression. They are consigned by circumstances to walk the landscape for any odd job they can find, just so they can make ends meet. But behind all that is a dream. The American Dream: where the two of them can be wholly self-sufficient, livin' offa the fatta the lan'. They will have their own tract of land, their own food production, and won't have to answer to any one. This ideal emb...

I just finished reading The Prince of Thorns, by Mark Lawrence. This is the first book in The Broken Empire trilogy, and it follows Prince Jorg Ancrath, a decidedly nasty protagonist who is about to return home after multiple years of raping and pillaging the landscape with his band of outlaws. You get a sense of the kind of character you are dealing with from the very first chapter, where Jorg steals, rapes, and kills people with his troupe of men for no reason but loot. And this is the crux of the book, the major selling point. Jorg is the most unlikeable character imaginable, treating everyone around him like they are pawns in his schemes. The cherry on top is that this story is told from the first-person perspective, giving the reader a close telling of his actions and psychology. Also, he just turned fourteen. No Spoilers Character I was drawn into this story from the very beginning. And I am happy to say that I was satisfied with the story throughout the course of the novel, and ...