Book # 16 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

You know how sometimes there's a film or book or record that you've heard about your entire life as being such a classic and then when you finally getting around to watching,reading, or listening to it you can't tell what all the fuss was about.... and it isn't that you didn't enjoy it or see some good qualities in it, you just don't see how it is ranked as one of the best ever? Well that sums up my feelings on Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

The story is fairly simple, yet the structure of the story and the way that everyone has multiple names which keep changing and are shared among each other made it a bit confusing to really get into. Basically this man adopts a boy, Heathcliff, and as they grow up he and the man's daughter, Catherine, fall in love with each other. Yet she marries their neighbor Edgar which causes Heathcliff out of spite to marry Edgar's sister. And from this point on everyone acts miserable all of the time and tries to destroy each others' lives. The story continues on with the kids from each pairing, who of course fall in love with each other but are made miserable by the feud between Edgar and Heathcliff.

I enjoyed Bronte's style even if the structure made it a bit confusing. I thought by introducing the children from the end of the story first made me unnecessarily try and figure out all of the relations between all of the characters right away. Also most of the characters were pretty unlikable. Catherine is a total brat, Heathcliff is incredibly selfish and is pretty much always being mean. At first I felt bad for Edgar and also Heathcliff's son, but by the end they both bugged me too.  I'm going to have to give it a B+.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

I saw the review for Red Rising in Entertainment Weekly a couple of weeks ago and I figured I'd give it a shot since it said it was pretty much just a mix of Ender's Game and The Hunger Games... and I did enjoy it. The story is about Darrow, a teenager working in a mine on Mars. Of course his people are oppressed by the rulers of Mars and he ends up with a shadowy group that transforms Darrow into one of the elite ruling class "Golds" in order to infiltrate the government and help take them down. But in order to get a good position in society he must first go through a year long competition in which young Golds are put into groups and forced to play a sort of Survivor/Hunger Games thing first in which a whole bunch of them die. While the book isn't a classic like Ender's Game, it is somewhat better than The Hunger Games and is a bit better written. Of course it is only the first book in a trilogy, so the ending leaves you wanting to know what happens next. B+

Also, the book mentions Ulysses, The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, 1984 and The Great Gatsby.