Weekly Reading Roundup (Nov. 13-19)

I decided this morning that I'm going to try to blog about books more.  Usually, at the very end of the year, I'll do a blog post with a list of all my favorite reads from the past year.  But I never do much in the way of actual reviews, or warn people to steer clear of all the bad books out there!  So in the tradition of of a few favorite authors whose blogs I follow, I'm going to attempt to do a post each week about what I've read over the course of that week.  A word of warning: if you're not a fan of YA lit, you probably don't even want to bother reading these posts, since that's mostly what I'm into these days.  That disclaimer being said, here is my inaugural weekly reading roundup. 

What I read this past week:

Crossed by Ally Condie -

This is the second in a trilogy that takes place in a dystopian America controlled by a government called the Society.  The Society controls everything, including the person with whom you are Matched (the main premise for book 1).  In this second installment, Cassia has rejected the strictures of Society and rejected her Match (sort of, she still waffles back and forth between her feelings for Ky and her feelings for Xander a little too much for my taste) and headed to the Outer Provinces in search of Ky, who has been sent away basically to die.  This book is very different from the first one, mostly in tone and setting.  The author is from Utah and she does an amazing job describing the canyons the characters travel through.  The writing is beautiful and the story develops well, but I was a little disappointed with the ending.  Spoiler alert: after spending the majority of the novel trying to find each other, Ky and Cassia are shipped off in different directions immediately upon their arrival once they finally reach the Resistance.  That kind of bugged me, but what bugged me even more is that they both seemed totally okay with it.  Having been right there with them on their journey, I wasn't really okay with it and thought they should have protested.  I felt like the entire journey was rendered a little bit pointless.  But that's my only real beef with the book.  Overall, I really liked it.  And since there's still a third installment to come, I'll try not to put too much stock in the ending of book 2 just yet.  

Seizure by Kathy Reichs -

This is the second of a new YA series written by forensic anthropologist, murder mystery novelist, and producer/writer of Bones, Kathy Reichs.  I really liked this book.  I thought it was even better than the first in the series.  This may be because the main plot centered around a search for a long-lost pirate treasure, buried somewhere near Charleston.  I am a bit partial to all things pirate.  But I truly thought she did a great job of setting up all the clues for the treasure hunt, and everything came together very cleverly and believably.  The only thing I didn't like about this was that the dialogue between the teens seemed a bit contrived and kind of got on my nerves occasionally.


The Death Cure by James Dashner -

This is the final installment of the Maze Runner trilogy.  This whole trilogy reminded me a lot of The Hunger Games.  And like The Hunger Games, I was kind of bummed as the books got progressively less great.  I loved the first book in this trilogy; I couldn't put it down.  I was less into book 2 - it got really zombie apocalypse-esque which is just not my thing.  I am only about halfway through book 3 and so far I'm struggling to even want to finish it.  Right now I feel like it is just a ton of pointless action happening sporadically without much of a plot.  Some of the main characters (ie, Teresa) have completely disappeared from the pages as well.  I'm going to try to finish it but I'm not loving and don't anticipate that my opinion will change much.  I strongly recommend book 1 but in my opinion, 2 and 3 aren't worth your time.

And now as I'm finishing this blog post, Cy just suggested that I should blog about watching Green Lantern last night.  Speaking of things that aren't worth my time, suffice it to say that I thought Green Lantern was a horrible movie and I wish I could erase the memory of watching it from my brain because it was that bad.