Book #14: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

OH MY GOSH. OH MY GOSH. I am totally converted to Brandon Sanderson. He has a SERIOUS talent for creating the best, clearest, most detailed worlds and plots that I have ever read. It's flat-out amazing to me the amount of planning and pre-writing and mapping out that this series (and his other books) must have taken before he even started writing. Because this book just confirms it--everything, EVERYTHING is was planned from the beginning. Even the smallest, most insignificant details from the first book come back to be important later on in this third book. There's not really a way to nutshell the plot because it's so overwhelming. Vin and Elend and the rest of the crew are basically trying to stop the world from collapsing on itself, both physically and politically.

I absolutely loved seeing how well everything fit together and how everything got resolved at the end of the series. The first book was so interesting and kind of Ocean's Eleven-esque, with a crew getting together to do a totally impossible job against a big bad evil guy. It was fun to read but kind of localized in its impact, as far as you read. The second book was a lot slower and less interesting with a lot of politics and the crew trying to run the country after they'd taken it over, so it seemed like they were working on a much larger scale. But this third book--it was asking questions about God and forces of nature and saving the world from being destroyed by ash and volcanoes and rampaging herds of wild animals, and it was so huge in scale and in the impact that it's hard to even believe that someone could even imagine something that big. I loved how everything wrapped up at the end, loved loved LOVED how it ended and who ended up being the "Hero of Ages" after all, and how he ended up saving (or re-creating) the world after all was lost.

I really liked the religious undertones of it all. Sazed, the Keeper who has always studied and believed in all religions, goes through a serious crisis of faith after the woman he loves dies at the end of the second book. This whole book he loses all interest and he decides to go through every different faith he has collected to decide which is true, and he eliminates all of them. But in the end, he learns and realizes the fact that faith has to be chosen, and religion in its essence is not based on logic. And his ability to believe, and his knowledge of the religions he has studied his whole life, ends up saving the world and enabling him to create a new, better world than the one they were fighting to save. It was such a beautiful ending. I also loved the epigraphs to each chapter, how they kind of gave hints of what was going on and what the writer had learned.

I have a lot of other things I could say about this book, but I don't have time. Totally loved it--I would recommend this series to anyone, not just fantasy lovers.

Book #13: The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

This is one of the first John Grisham books I read maybe 8-10 years ago. I guess it has been a while since revisiting it, but I loved it as much as I did before. Honestly, you can't read too many John Grishams at once or else they all start to blend together. When I first discovered them, back in high school, I read five or six in a row--and I got TOTALLY sick of them. I knew exactly what was going to happen and I was done. But it's been so long since I've read any Grisham at all, so this felt fresh and it was fun to revisit Darby Shaw and the Pelican Brief.

The whole premise of the book is pretty amazing, and brilliant, in the most evil way possible. A guy pays to get two Supreme Court justices killed off so that a court case coming up the rounds will be decided in his favor. Nobody can figure it out, but Darby Shaw, a second-year law student at Tulane, does. She writes a brief about it and it makes its way up to the FBI--and when it does, people start getting killed left and right. Darby goes on the run, and most of the book tracks how she keeps herself alive by running from hotel room to hotel room and escaping from murder attempts. Eventually she makes contact with a reporter in DC who helps her to prove her theory and expose the bad guys. It's a pretty enthralling story, and isn't exactly mysterious as much as it is thrilling, like a James Bond movie or something.

I don't like how Grisham writes about women. I remember in some of his other books that he kind of objectifies them a bit, and just writes about how attractive any female characters are. That totally plays out in this book too--Darby is apparently the most attractive woman any of these people have ever seen, and everyone falls in love with her at first sight. Also, the romantic storyline of this book is pretty unbelievable and annoying too--why on earth would Darby even be thinking about getting interested in anyone else ten days after her lover is murdered in front of her eyes? She goes through a two-day mourning period and is then like, "I'm good." I don't know, it doesn't seem realistic. That's bothered me about this book every time. But otherwise, it's a good read and definitely a quick, fun one to distract you from real life for a while.

Book #12: Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

I don't know why this book has been on my "to-read" list forever. But I think it's because a friend from my master's program talked about it on Facebook one time, because the author teaches in the MFA program at NC State. But I ignored it until I happened to see this book on a shelf at the library while I was there last time and I picked it up, spur of the moment (I know! I'm wild and crazy!), and proceeded to leave it unread on my shelf until it was demanded to be returned. But I just sped through it the last few days--and I actually really enjoyed it. (Except for the end, but not because it was poorly written--just because it was sad.)

Life After Life is about the residents of a nursing home in Fulton, North Carolina, and how each one is adjusting to the new expectations and situation of this new life that they are living. Some of them have known each other their whole lives, while others are transplants. But they each have their own private story which nobody else really knows about--no matter how long they've known each other--and we learn about each person's secrets through individual narratives from the perspective of each character. There are also a few people who work at the nursing home, and people who visit, who we get to know. Almost everyone has a kind of tragic history, even the little twelve-year-old with a sad home life who comes to visit an old resident every day to escape from her home. I didn't love that about this book--everyone had hidden, dark, sad secrets--although I know that's more realistic than I'd like to think about this world. I just really hated the ending--it kind of came out of nowhere and I didn't feel prepared for it. Maybe that was an authorial choice, to surprise you with this dark twist at the end, but it seemed like there should have been more build-up or hinting at what was going on before we got there. Additionally, there were a few characters that didn't seem fully real--like the super catty, self-obsessed mom who's having an affair and thinks of nothing but wearing designer clothes and hates her husband for not being ambitious. Are there really people that are that one-dimensional? I think the answer is probably YES, but I always expect to find more interesting people, with more than one characteristic to define them, in books (at least, in well-written books). My favorite character was Sadie Randolph, one of the older residents of the nursing home, who was a third-grade teacher her whole life and knows all the kids in the town. She is cheerful, sweet, and had a happy life with her husband and kids--but it doesn't seem cloying or fake. I want to be like her when I'm 90.

Overall, this book got to me. I think I felt that by how depressed I was by the ending. I felt like I really got a glimpse into each character's head and that I really knew them by the end. It was a good read.