Diego's Reading Blog

So in the past week I've only read into 25 pages into The Bourne Identity , this includes the first chapter and the beginning of the second chapter.  Chapter 1 is... intense. I can assume that it's in the perspective of this so called "Bourne Identity" or whoever this man calls himself. However, it's hard to tell because the chapter moves so quickly and the character you follow is unnamed. He is only given a "name" until later in the chapter, but I'll get to that later. Anyways, the chapter starts off like crazy, immediately throwing down quick events left and right. All of sudden somebody is thrown off of a ship and into the crashing waves, the next moment a man is chasing him down with a loaded gun. In a flash, this portion of the chapter is over and you are greeted by a scene on the gentle coast somewhere along the Mediterranean Sea. I liked this chapter very much because of how much the two settings contradicted each other. It made the two scenes...

So I finally got my hands on a new book at the local Half Price Books and my mom insisted since I was looking for a good mystery novel ('cause why not), then Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity  series is the series for me. So we got the whole series for around $20 and I got to reading. Sort of... Okay, I read the 3 page introduction. So I decided to do research on this Ludlum guy. Robert Ludlum was an old guy. He was born on May 25th, 1927 and died on March 12, 2001. Surely enough, his most notable work was the Bourne Trilogy and it was later carried on by Eric Van Lustbander in the form of The Bourne Legacy . Both of which, you might already know, were turned into movies, and I have not seen either of them. I also found out that most of Ludlum's books featured one man against a powerful adversary. This leads to my first impressions of the book and where I predict it may lead. Once I read the introduction and the summary on the back cover, I immediately thought of Jame...

So I know that I finished Night Shift, but I realized that there's still one more thing I'd like to talk about that I never did in a previous post, and that thing is the short story, "Children of the Corn". "Children of the Corn" was the cover story of Night Shift (at least on my copy it was) and because of this is like to give it some recognition. After doing a little bit of research before I read the story I learned that the story has been turned into a movie. I also learned that this must've been a pretty popular movie when everyone was like, "Hey 'Children of the Corn'? I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE'", every time they see the cover.  Anyways, let's get to the story. One of the main villains, Malachai with a crucified skeleton of a police officer in the background (as depicted from the movie) "Children of the Corn" is about a married couple, Burt and Vicky, who are constantly bickering about something. One day w...

So I just finished Night Shift, and as the first horror novel I have ever read, it was pretty great. I still enjoyed the book very much, but some of the stories, in my opinion, were not that great. Some of them were just plain ridiculous and some were boring. But I could call a quite handful of stories ones that I liked. Among these stories are "Jerusalem's Lot", "Strawberry Spring", and "Quitters, Inc.". I did dislike a few of them though, stories such as, "The Lawnmower Man", "Night Surf", and "Gray Matter". With the flaws, this book did some great things. For instance, in "Strawberry Spring" I talked about how it had great foreshadowing elements in a previous blog post. In "Battleground" it was able to turn a bizarre plot into an enjoyable story. This book had very great writing in it, and so I made a list of things that it did right. Pros: -handful of actual scary stories -writing incorporates ...

This story, "Strawberry Spring", was actually a story in Night Shift  that I read quite a while ago. 129 pages ago to be exact. I wanted to post about this story a while ago, but I couldn't get around to it because of "Battleground". Anyways, I enjoyed this story because it employed many writing elements that caught my attention. In this post I will review one of them, foreshadowing. "Strawberry Spring" is about life on a community college campus that is haunted by a serial killer dubbed "Springheel Jack". The campus is brought strawberry spring, a sort of "fake" spring. This spring brought along an occasional thick fog, and with this fog brought Springheel Jack. Every time the fog shrouded over the campus, a person was killed. It is unknown who the killer is until it is revealed in the end of the book. WARNING * SPOILER ALERT * THE KILLER IS THE NARRATOR * SPOILER ALERT * WARNING That's right the killer i...

By now, I've read a pretty large chunk into Night Shift  and my thoughts about it have gotten better since last time, though I don't think a can really call it a horror novel anymore. It might be personal preference but the stories have lost that "spine-tingling" feeling as promised by the back cover. Many of the stories, like I said last time, are very bizarre and sometimes even hard to take seriously. In spite of all this I still enjoy some of the stories, and some of them don't make me laugh but rather enrapture me. This leads me to this particular story, "The Ledge". "The Ledge" is about a tennis coach who is in quite the conflict with a man named Cressner. Norris, the tennis coach, is having an affair with Cressner's wife, and Cressner is alright with that. In fact, he offers Norris his wife along with $20,000. But there's a catch. Cressner's and Norris's wager takes place on Cressner's apartment building which is 47...

I don't know much about this movie, but  I heard it's about a rubber wheel that kills people. I dunno, don't ask. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For this blog post, I will still be covering the book Night Shift  by Stephen King. Right now I am a little over 100 pages and honestly, the stories have been getting to be a little lackluster lately. I mean, there's been one called "The Mangler" and it was about a possessed ironing machine that enjoyed killing people. Yeah. Kinda like that movie over there ------------> Anyways, let's get on with Night Shift . After all the dumb stories about killer rats and ironing machines and whatnot, I reached a story that I knew I would enjoy at the very beginning. It's called "Battleground", and it starts on page 117. And I don't like this story because it was actually scary like it was supposed to be. I liked it because of its absolutely novel idea of conflict. In "Battleground" you follow a man na...