The Da Vinci Code Controversy...

The Da Vinci Code was not only controversial for its false claims about the Christian belief (even though the book is ficitional), but also a topic that is still hot today.  The power of women is a topic discussed that is quite recurrent in the book as it talks about Mary Magdalene and the present time character Sophie.  Mary Magdalene is seen today in the Bible as a powerful woman because she was an apostle of Jesus whom he revealed deep insight too and she was the first to encounter Jesus over anyone else.  This is important because Jesus knew she wouldn't be taken seriously when she said she saw the risen Jesus.  In the book she is claimed to have been married to Jesus and had a child with him whose bloodline is still around today.  The book talks about the old view of women which was seen as less then men and adds a modern woman to compare the progress that has been made and is still to come.  Sophie was this female character that is shown as powerful.  In the book Sophie is often underestimated, but she has pulled off no feat that a man could have accomplished.  She was able to save Langdon from arrest but wasn't expected to be able to in the eyes of Fache.  Fache didn't see much in her as he called her a female cryptologist.  Also she was left out of examining the clues hidden in the rose box, but when she sees the box she understands how to interpret the clue.  Countless of other women are seen as underdogs in the book but they are actually greater than men.  Overall the power of women is often seen as less than men but should be seen as a threat.

Mothers Day Surprise (The Da Vinci Code)

For Mother's Day I decided to get my mom the book Inferno by Dan Brown.  She has always enjoyed this series and I wondered what was all the hype about it, so I decided to read The Da Vinci Code.  As soon as I started reading I realized what was so good.  I really liked the setting and topic of conspiracies within Rome.  When I began I thought it was going to be another religion-basher like His Dark Materials by Pullman but Dan Brown decided to not look at religious people as ignorant.  Dan Brown refused to look at religion as a form of ignorance of the truth.  Dan Brown sort of made a great push for religious people with all the criticism they've been receiving lately.  He wanted to show that being a believer in God and in science is possible as opposed to atheists thinking all Christians are creationists.  He kind of pushed this idea in the wrong way but he had good intent.  In the book the Church was misleading the people about the existence of Jesus' descendants (which really isn't true), keeping believers ignorant.  Dan Brown was saying that the Bible isn't a literal book (which Catholics already know) and is full of metaphors.  The book was really thought provoking because this same situation could be applied to our very lives.  How do we know that we aren't being told false truths about our history because this actually happens in real life (i.e. Nazi Germany during World War II).  Propaganda used to be a tool to provoke similar thoughts about a subject in a population which was really no different than the Church making people believe a similar false idea.  The Da Vinci Code was a very fun read because I got to see why it was so controversial when it was published.

Gone Girl: Nick & Amy

In Gone Girl the marriage between Nick and Amy was very interesting. Both Amy and Nick describe their first few years in a positive light. They seemed very much in love, yet toward their third and fourth years, things quickly went downhill.  The marriage failed, but why? Whose fault was it?  In the beginning of the book Nick gives off very good signs that he isn't trying to bring the marriage back together as each anniversary get progressively worse.  But we then see Amy could just be very annoying.  If Amy was annoying I think Nick was doing great by not lashing out at her for so long, but he showed no signs of wanting her to stop being annoying which is why it is mostly Nick's fault.  If one side in a marriage is unable to express his/her feelings toward their partner then they can't possibly have a good marriage.  In the events that Amy disappears he shows great distress showing that he didn't give up completely on the marriage.

Amy could also have failed in her part by letting this whole ordeal get worse.  What she did was let the marriage get worse by thinking it would just blow over.  This could have led to her going missing because she thought it was better to just be understanding while Nick was in his dark phase.  But we figure out Nick is not what we found him as in the beginning of the story.  Nick becomes a character we don't want to hate but are forced to because of what he does.  Nick skips the anniversary and goes to a strip club, cheats on Amy, and much more.  When we see Nick be suspected of killing Amy it isn't too far fetched because he comes off as very creepy on the very first page when he says, "You could imagine the skull quite easily."  One doesn't normally talk about skulls or how perfectly shaped a skull is unless you're a little morbid.  This book had characters that ended up being contributors to the very own problems they were involved in. 

Gone Girl: Thriller Lovers Need to Read This!

Gone Girl was a story with great characters that had me going through an emotional roller coaster.  If you love books that mess with your head and get you obsessed with trying to figure out the mystery yourself, this book is perfect.  The author really did a good job at writing this book and the complexity amazes me.  I've read a good few books this year and a few decent ones and I never thought I would find a book that would get me excited to read again.  The story introduces characters and the way you see them in the beginning is completely altered throughout the book.  You would never guess these normal people, through their actions, would seem to be killers or anything.  These characters really open up your eyes to the mind games a mystery book plays and it's quite addicting.  The book is getting a movie which hopefully won't ruin the complexity and the psychological elements that you can only see in the book (however most movies are never as good as the book).  I really liked the diary entries of Amy because they were very enthusiastic and showed how some writers actually think.
In recent news, the book gained a new ending.  I have not read the second ending, but I do not really like when an author makes a second ending.  This shows that the author was uncertain that the first was good enough and didn't trust their work.  It may add a different perspective, but it shows that the book wasn't really complete when it first came out.  Breaking Bad did this as well and it left me feeling unsatisfied.  I doubt I will read the second ending as I will love the book for what it was.

Gone Girl: Reaction/Thoughts

Gone Girl talks about two characters named Nick and Amy.  These characters seem complete opposites  in ways, but also compliment each other.  The fellow, Nick, is more in sync with his twin sister Go than with Amy.  Nick and Amy have a different relationship than he has with Go.  They met at a party and according to Amy they fell in love on the first day.  Continuing in the story to a year later it seems that they no longer have that spark when they are married.  Today is their wedding anniversary, their 5th to be exact, and something unexpected happens.  Amy disappears.  The story revolves around Amy disappearing and gives some real suspense.  A relationship that seems to be dying is alive and well when we see how much Nick is concerned about her missing.  A man that could barely remember important moments of their relationship must find his wife that is missing.  The people of the town become suspicious as he showed a strange relationship with his wife and Amy was a girl that could put anyone on the edge of anger.  The town suspected that Nick killed her.  I became suspicious of a different person, his sister.  Their relationship was too perfect and she didn't really like Nick and Amy's relationship.  Go said things jokingly about how she didn't really like her but Nick never really made anything of it.  The book is really great by the way it introduces the characters.  The couple seems to be somewhat annoyed with each other, but murder was never hinted as one of their motives.  Neither of the people showed any hate to each other so it leaves the reader wondering who the killer is.  But the book couldn't have introduced these characters in such detail for no reason, the people introduced were suspects except for, of course, the victim Amy.  Go and Nick had a relationship that was being interfered with by Amy.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

In the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Li Mu Bai and Jen have a fight in a forest of bamboo.  In China bamboo has great significance with righteousness.  Righteousness can be defined as morally justifiable or right.  Because of this battle between a master and what is to be seen as a pupil, this battle could be seen as Li Mu Bai trying to teach Jen something.  This lesson could be how to be morally justifiable or righteous.  The scene that precedes this is when Jen is in a bar being very rude and ends up beating up everyone in the bar.  During the fight between Li Mu Bai and Jen, the two handle their surroundings very differently.  Li Mu Bai moves gracefully through the bamboo and Jen is very wobbly and new to her surroundings.  This is shown to emphasize how righteous of a man Li Mu Bai is and how new this whole experience of being righteous is to Jen.  A good example of how righteous Li Mu Bai is when he gets hit by a poison dart trying to protect Jen.  At this point he realized protecting the potential of this girl was worth more than his own life and maybe through his acts Jen could learn to be righteous.  Jen was able to see how Li Mu Bai held no resent towards her even after she got him killed.  Although Jen wanted to be a warrior she skipped the lesson of being righteous.  Li Mu Bai saw this and realized that he needed to teach her this in order for her to become a great warrior.

Incarceron: Setting

Incarceron takes place in a time in the future that man has succeeded in creating an inescapable utopia for mankind.  This utopia becomes hellish when it becomes self aware and starts to torture the now prisoners of this place.  The setting takes place in the future, but the inhabitants are quite reminiscent of the 17th century.  This time period should be brimming with unimaginable technology besides the prison that amazes us, but these elements remain unseen.  This is due to the king sending the prison's inhabitants back to this kind of era.  This brings up a very interesting setting that no book has.  Books are able to bring us into situations we can't encounter on earth, but only in our imagination.  Fisher took advantage of this element of book writing to create a very interesting setting that I have not seen in my small library of books.  My experience with this book was fun because I was able to be brought in to an interesting idea that had a developed story around it.  The summary of an inescapable self aware prison is alluring enough, but when it is put into a book it draws the reader with its uniqueness and brings them along for the dramatic twists it has in store.

This book had some predictability to it in which we could expect what would happen, but we didn't know how that result came to be.  For example we knew they were living in a self aware prison, but how does such a setting emerge unexplained.  The reader frantically searches for the answers to their questions this book surfaces.  As the reader looks for these answers they can guess what can happen, but the book is just one step ahead of your theories and surprises you with an answer that you wouldn't have expected.  What made it so enjoyable was as you try to guess what will happen, you end up getting some right and some wrong.  The predictability and unpredictability of the book brings the reader to enjoy the twists that they experience and leaves a lasting impression upon them as they experience the plot alongside the characters.

Incarceron: Characters

Incarceron had some very lovable characters in which I couldn't like just one.  The variety of the characters is very well chosen.  These characters fit within the qualities of most fantasy characters.  For example, the orphan thief who wasn't evil and wanted to save the land; the intelligent, rebelling, future queen; the evil, cruel queen; and the morally ambiguous best friend of the thief.  These characters can all be traced back to ancestral fantasy stories.  But as shown in many books, there is character progression, characters change as the book progresses.  The characters all become more complex as we learn about their desires and goals in the story that engulfs us further into the plot.  An example could be the father-daughter relationship between Claudia and The Warden.  The Warden is seen as this powerful man that handles the prison, yet he can't handle his own daughter.

Out of the protagonists, Claudia is the one who has the deepest development, but Finn is the one we all love as he comes in and gets our attention with his courageous acts and visions.  Another interesting character is Finn's best friend, Keiro, who is quite experimental with his moral choices.  Finn and Keiro have a special bond in which they both have each others backs no matter what.  Finn stays with Keiro despite his bad qualities that may make him undesirable to others, but Finn has a heart of gold and looks past his flaws and thinks Keiro would do the same for him.  Although Finn puts Keiro on a pedestal, Keiro is only using Finn to get out of Incarceron.

Overall these characters allow the reader to pick any one to focus on as their favorite as Fisher gives them a good amount of attention even though some may have more than others.  The character progression deepens the bonds the reader has with that character as we follow their journey through this hell and how they try to cope with living in such an environment.  Incarceron does something that many books like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are doing by giving the reader more options to choose from in terms of protagonists that broadens the spectrum of readers that may be pulled in.  This is one of the main reasons I liked this book so much, bringing me back to the days of middle school sitting down and cramming a book in one day because I refused to put it down out of enjoyment for the book.