AJ Dunn Reads

  Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer Okay, so I don't think sci-fi is my jam. I will not likely pick up another one. This book was so difficult for me to get through, the prose just hard for my brain to grasp. The sentence constructions, the asides, the circle-talk...it was all just too much. Needless to say I didn't like it. It was as bad a read as the first in the trilogy. The second book was the best one, by far. The only thing I liked about this book was the gay lighthouse keeper and his story line. This book gets 3 stars, only because of that. The trilogy as a whole I'm giving 2 stars. That's all I have to say about it.

  Authority by Jeff VanderMeer Authority is a better book than Annihilation . At least this one has character names and descriptions, which helped to invest me more in the characters. However, something about the writing of these books isn't to my taste. I can only really pinpoint a couple reasons for why that is: the author never uses contractions, which is unnatural in regular speech patterns; far too many unnecessary asides in the sentences; I didn't like the characters; and there's just something about the construction of the prose that bothers me and is hard to read. All that said, the second half of the book is better than the first. The biologist from the first book in the trilogy is a side character in this book, which is fine because I didn't have any sort of attachment to her. Control, the main character in this book and the director of this organization (whatever it is, that's how lost I was), is a more interesting and better-developed character. What th...

  Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer I'm not really a science fiction reader, but I thought I'd give the Southern Reach trilogy a shot. Annihilation is the first book in the series by Jeff VanderMeer. One of the weirdest things about this book, and I think the thing that most inhibited it for me was that there are zero descriptions of what the characters look like and they are not named. As a result, I couldn't get a picture of them in my mind as I was reading. The story vacillates between the present mission of a group of researchers in the abandoned Area X and the main characters past relationship with her husband, who was a part of the previous expedition's team. I liked the bits about the biologist (the main character) and her husband and could have read a whole book about that. But the present parts were pretty boring to me until about the last third of the book, where some interesting stuff happens. I will read the other two books in the triology, Authority and Acc...