Diego's Reading Blog

So. Since I need to read two more books in the span of two more weeks and I'm a slow reader, I decided to pick up a book that wasn't 500 pages long. Sorry, Bourne Identity , but I'll have to finish you in the second semester. So instead, I'm going to read Grendel . This book... I was reluctant to start this book because I've seen the movie of the story this book is a spin-off of. Let me tell you, Beowulf  is one gory movie. Grendel as depicted in the book. Trust me, you don't want to see him in Beowulf. He looks 10000% more disgusting. Grendel  is based off of the story Beowulf , except instead of the perspective of the "heroes", it is in the perspective of the "monster", Grendel. Grendel is... a monster. I don't know how else to describe him. He didn't really describe himself at the beginning of the book, so I'm going off of the cover. He seems to be a sort of human shaped beast. It is also stated that he is much larger th...

So in the next pages I've read into The Bourne Legacy  were more focused on the nameless man, who we later find out that his last name is Bourne. Anyways, to summarize what I read very briefly... - the nameless man beats up a bunch of fisherman on their ship because he got hit in the sun don't shine - he needs to get out of town because he beat up those fisherman real good  and he doesn't want their relatives and friends to come after him - he leaves Washburn (sad) and leaves toward Zurich, where the chip found in his body suggested he go to in order to find out about his past - while gathering supplies to head to Zurich he stops by a few towns, stealing money and clothes from a rich guy and creating a fake passport - he is still confused as to how he did that If you're curious as to where Zurich is, here's a map. Bourne came to Zurich from France. I left off on the man reaching a hotel in Zurich to find that he's actually been there before and the ho...

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...