A Fairy Tale

This week I finished reading two books. One about angels and fairies and other supernatural creatures and the other helpfully subtitled ‘a fairy story.’

Let’s start this review with the latter, Animal Farm by George Orwell.
Honestly I don’t know why I have never read this book before. It took me a couple of hours and was riveting, even if it is a story about animals. I think I chose not to read it because I had read 1984. I did not enjoy that book. It is so depressing and awful. It put me totally off Orwell’s writing. And because I’d never been made to read Animal Farm at school there was no chance I was going to read it.
Until some people at work started talking about it, and my husband kept telling me how good it was. And they were all right.
I am not one of those people who won’t read a novel because everyone else says you should, or because everyone else is reading it (unless it is something truly awful like Dan Brown or Fifty Shades) I just kind of missed out on this book.
After reading it I do have some questions though. Like how do animals start a fire? And since when are pigs the clever ones? Maybe it’s like the whole ‘if you’re not pretty you need to be clever’ kind of thing.

The other book I finished was City of Glass.
It is the best in the Mortal Instruments series that I have read so far. It had a couple of good twists and a nice romance plot. One thing I don’t understand though is why you would create a character just so you can kill them off. I know it probably has ramifications for later, but it seems pretty pointless and a waste of characterisation time.
I did start the next book in the series as well, but things haven’t been going so great there. I got a bit bored with it earlier in the week, so I skipped ahead to the end and I didn’t like what I saw so now I don’t know if I want to finish reading it. And then I discovered that there is another book in the series after that. Young Adult fiction is supposed to be three books long, not five. I wish I had stopped at this novel. The only reason that I have kept going is because I have nothing else to read and I have to get to 100 books by the end of the year.

Coming up on my next blog: I wish all things had happy endings.

City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare (Friday Book Club)

Honestly, I don’t know how good this review is going to be. I finished this book last weekend and am about half way through the next one in the series. I keep reading because I kind of want to know what will happen, kind of because I want to say that I have, but mostly because I don’t really have anything else to read at the moment. So I am just really reading them because they are there.

So this is the second book in the series, and while it is not getting any better it isn’t getting any worse either. More stupid things happen and the whole love interest thing gets a bit tedious.
But there is action and some interesting twists and it did make me want to pick up the third book so I guess the author does have some skill in telling a story.

I guess, for me at least, the reason I can’t get into this series (or like it as much as some of the other teen fiction I have been reading lately) is because its not a dystopia. I think I am over just your general run of the mill fantasy stories. I don’t really care much for the genre anymore. And these books are just so fantasy. There are so many fantastical elements to them it is a little overkill.

And yet, I am still reading them.

Coming up in my next blog: I have some more ideas about time…