Fantasy AdventureAThon Day 6 Progress

6:00 AM:  Last night, I read a little of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, but I didn’t get too far before I fell asleep.  Still, I’m far enough in to know that I enjoy it, but I find the writing style strange.  Heather Morris states that her original plan for this story was to turn it into a screenplay, and I think that shows in her writing.  It’s too light on descriptions for my taste, to the point where there are sometimes nearly full pages full of nothing but dialogue.  The story is important and I’m still interested in seeing how the events unfold, but I’m not sure that I care for the stylistic choices made here.

This morning, my plan is to play some Borderlands and relax, continuing my playthrough as the soldier class.  I’m enjoying the Fantasy AdventureAThon and it’s helping me get through a number of books I have been meaning to read for a while, but at the end of the day, I have another readathon starting on Monday and I need to rest my brain a little.  My goal today is to get at least halfway through each of my books today so I can finish one or both of them tomorrow.

10:30 AM:  Borderlands is continuing to progress, as I’m now in the Rust Commons as my soldier.  After I have finished this playthrough, I’m going to jump into Borderlands 2.  When I first played with friends, I picked the siren class and I really didn’t enjoy it that much, which actually hurt my experience with the overall game.  I’d like to give it another shot with a different class, probably Krieg, and see if I enjoy it more this way.  If I do enjoy it, then I can join up with my friends and play true vault hunter mode as my new class.  For now, however, I’m going to take a lengthy reading break and get some progress made in Throne of Glass.

4:00 PM:  I have accomplished a lot with reading today!  Since I am now over halfway through both The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Throne of Glass, I thought I would give a reading update with my impressions of both books thus far.  In short, I am enjoying both books, but both of them have some glaring issues that I’m struggling with.  In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the lack of any real description is getting more and more irritating.  It actually makes me wonder if this book would have been more effective as a full screenplay, given that this was the original plan for Lale’s story.  I appreciate that it’s a novelization of a true story and I believe his story is important for others to hear, but I also think it could have been handled better.

Throne of Glass, on the other hand, is difficult because I just don’t understand Celaena’s character and I’m struggling to connect with her.  She’s slowly growing on me, but her constant insistence that she isn’t like other girls because she has a brain and likes tough work is consistently annoying.  There’s also the weirdness that Celaena is supposedly a master assassin, but the reader doesn’t actually get any proof of this.  Instead, the story just consistently says, “We swear, she’s super strong and sneaky.  Trust us.”  I don’t really find this method of character development engaging, but I hope it gets better as the series opens up.

I will say one positive about Throne of Glass that I never would have expected:  I actually like the love triangle unfolding.  Hopefully, this isn’t a trope that follows through for the rest of the series, but so far, there’s no immediately obvious choice and both options seem actually concerned for Celaena’s well-being.  For what it’s worth, I like Dorian because he loves books and Chaol is a bit too brooding for my tastes.  Since I’m going to do a full review on this book because Sarah J. Maas is on my list of ten authors I need to read, I will leave it there and keep reading.

9:00 PM:  I didn’t anticipate finishing a book today because I wasn’t very far in either of my reads, but The Tattooist of Auschwitz turned out to be a fast read and I found myself turning to the final page faster than anticipated.  While my issues with the writing style are still present and I also would like to further research how accurate this historical fiction story is, I’m still glad that I read it, so my final rating will probably be about four stars.

At this point, I just have to finish 150 pages of Throne of Glass in order to accomplish reading seven books in seven days, which is absolutely crazy.  My plan is probably to play Borderlands tonight instead of reading, so I will leave the rest of this book until tomorrow.  Let me know in the comments below if you have read any of these books before!