Lee Hunts

I just finished reading the Death Note Manga by Tsugumi Ohba, which is almost a decade after watching the anime several times through, so I was actually quite familiar with the story going in. This was one of those life changing stories that shattered my understanding of storytelling, so I wanted to go back and revisit the story to see if the merit still held up after writing my own books, and reading countless others since. What we have in this story is a game of cat and mouse. It starts when a high school student finds a Death Note that allows him to kill people when he writes their name down inside, while thinking of their face. He starts killing people in the name of justice in order to create a new world where only kind and good people live. L, the world's greatest detective, recognizes this pattern of deaths and understands that someone is behind this. What follows is the investigation, as the two track each other down in an attempt to capture the other. Scheming I was partic...

I just finished reading The Stand, by Stephen King (finally). I split this one up into chunks, due to the length of the novel, and only read a third at a time. I reviewed the first third, giving it a glowing review (indeed, it is the only 10/10 I have given up to this point). I didn't get around to reviewing the second part when I finished it, but now that I have finished the whole novel, I will now give a review of the latter two parts. The Stand is a massive novel, the longest that I have ever read, almost 500,000 words, and in its pages, it recounts a pandemic that wipes out the entire population of the world save for a small segment. And in the aftermath, the survivors in America split into two budding civilizations, one built under Mother Abigail, and the other built by the Dark Man, Randall Flagg. The first third deals with the pandemic and the collapse of civilization. The second third deals with the struggles of establishing a civilization as it follows Mother Abigail's...

I just finished reading The Burning God, by R.F. Kuang. This is the final book in the Poppy War trilogy, a grimdark fantasy series based on Chinese history. This book picks up right where the previous one left off. Yin Vaisra has made a deal with the Hesperians, and he is now the ruler of the Nikara Republic. Rin and Kitay are now in the South, taking part in the Southern rebellion against the Republic. This book details the next bloody chapter in Nikara history as Rin and her followers fight against an insurmountable enemy. Overall, I am not sure what to feel about this book. I did not hate the book by any stretch. At the same time, I continually come back to specific parts of the book that I thought could have been handled better. Overall (No Spoilers) My favorite part of this book was the beginning sequence of events. I thought it did a good job laying the groundwork for everything that was to come, especially the depiction of the fighting: namely, their brutality, how the killings ...