The Pen Pal Club

            I actually wouldn’t mind continuing this series. Although I wasn’t too excited about the ending and I felt that there were a lot of interesting, unexplored subplots, one can only hope that they grow and develop in the following books in the series. There were a lot of questions posed that I felt never got answered and even if a book is part of a series, I believe that it needs to be a whole piece. That is the problem with most sequels in a trilogy that you are left with an ellipsis at the end. But overall I enjoyed the relationships and felt that it had a lot of potential to continue the excitement. I wasn’t too large a fan of the Raiders ability to turn the people into zombie-like shells of their former selves. I wanted the strange dynamics of the royal family, servants and soldiers to be explored a little more. And what is up with the Fool? Is he a prophet? What is his connection to Fitz and why does he take it upon himself to steer him in a certain direction or not? Also, I felt like the book kept hinting at the secret past of Burrich’s that I never quite understood. Even though I enjoyed the book, it left so many questions unanswered. I also feel that it could have been simplified a lot and still been enjoyable because they instead of a ton of little stories interconnected, their would be few fleshed out storylines driving the central plot. But that’s just my personal opinion and preference.  

            Side note unrelated to this “assignment;” after a couple of months of struggling through reading one of the “classics of literature,” I also finally finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although I have to admit I did enjoy it much more than Love in the Time of Cholera, I was still not a fan of Marquez or the magical realism genre. I know that it is a symbolic literary choice to make all the characters have the same name, but it makes for very difficult and confusing reading when people live to be over a hundred years old and are living in incestuous relationships and then naming their children the same names as their grandparents. Yet again, I am adding another literary classic to the list of books that I was not that impressed with. Maybe I just don’t give these epic novels the time and attention necessary to truly enjoy them but I’m finding it hard to stay engaged in these gigantic books. Atlas Shrugged made me angry with its black and white view of the world and its tendency to redundantly over-explain its methodology. Don Quixote I gave up reading three quarters of the way through because I was sick of all the side stories that took forever to tell and ended up going nowhere. I supposed some day I’ll pick it up again to finish so I can officially say I read it and disliked it but I was tired of spending so much time on a character that I didn’t find that sympathetic or heroic, but arrogant, selfish and foolish. I hope that my next epic classic, War and Peace fares better. I also want to finish the Sherlock Holmes series since I enjoyed the first couple of books I did read and I recently finished watching the television show Sherlock on Netflix, which was highly rated by both of my siblings. Although each episode is almost an hour and a half long, they are fascinating and I eagerly watched both seasons. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a contemporary look at some old classics that I can get behind. Although, I did find it interesting that they chose to give Sherlock an addiction to nicotine patches instead of his cocaine habit that he indulges in in the novels.