Wednesday, February 20, 2013

My #NaNoReMo Update

First off, here's the first post I made about my month of #NaNoReMo (National Novel Reading Month). As you can see from that, I chose to read Edgar Rice Burrough's A Princess of Mars. If I finished that, I had two others I planned to tackle. I've finished A Princess of Mars, though it took longer than I'd hoped (not because it was a hard book to read, get into, stay interested in, or anything like that, but simply because I didn't carve out as much reading time as I should have), so I won't be able to get to both the other books I'd planned. Since it is still February, I will continue on with one of them - The Phantom of the Opera. If I finish it in the next week, great, but if not, I'll continue on with it in March. Two classics that I likely wouldn't have otherwise picked up is a huge bucket of win in my view.

As for A Princess of Mars, I enjoyed it, and highly recommend it. At some point, I'm going to have to continue on with the series, as this one ended on a real cliffhanger. I also want to watch the movie, John Carter, again, as I saw it last summer, well before I'd even planned on reading the book. The only thing that really stuck out in the movie for me was that I was underwhelmed with the special effects, though I did enjoy the story. I honestly don't remember how well it followed the book, so that's why I need to see it again.

As for a review, I did post one on my Goodreads site. You can click to view it here, though I'll post it for those of you who don't like clicking links:

This was a fun read. The look at a Mars that could have been played out like any contemporary science fiction story. John Carter was certainly a hero in this, a step above basically every other character, both physically and morally, but he couldn't simply get whatever he wanted all the time, which made for a better read. It was a neat way to look at this land of Mars through his eyes, which were from Civil War Virgina. Description didn't always rely on images from Earth, but when they did, it flowed well with the story. All in all, even though this book is almost 100 years old, it still holds up, and I recommend it to any science fiction and/or adventure fan. 

That's it for now. I'll post one final update about Phantom of the Opera when I finish it. Hope everyone else who is participating is having a great time with their choice(s)!