It’s the first lazy reader’s guide of 2016! Apparently you’re already behind. It’s ok. That’s what this post is here for.
Left Behind
This year we started Left Behind, which Wikipedia describes as a book about the “Christian dispensationalist End Times: the pretribulation, premillennial, Christian eschatological viewpoint of the end of the world”. Which is a lot of words I don’t know.
All that’s happened so far is some people have disappeared on a flight from Chicago to London, and then they learned that this mysterious event is happening all over the world. There is not much to catch up on yet.
- Main character #1 is Rayford Steele: a married man whose wife has turned to religion, which is super annoying, and now he wants to bang his flight attendant, Hattie. This is not a book that is subtle about its themes.
- Main character #2 is Cameron “Buck” Williams: “the youngest ever senior writer for the prestigious Global Weekly“. As this is a work of fiction and he is a journalist, you already know that his entire personality is single-minded focus on getting hot scoops.
- Buck became religious when he went to Israel to do an interview at the same time that Russia staged a massive military assault, which mysteriously resulted in zero Israeli casualties while a simultaneous “firestorm, along with rain and hail and an earthquake” destroyed the Russian planes. So this book takes place in a world where that happened, and people are still pretty surprised by this whole Rapture thing.
- It’s also worth noting that his interview was with a scientist that invented a secret formula that allows crops to grow in the desert. Which made Israel “more profitable than its oil-laden neighbors”. Just like the infamous corn barons of Ohio.
- ALSO, “Flush with cash and resources, Israel made peace with her neighbors”. Apparently 8000 square miles of crops is the solution to that whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict thing.
- Sorry, I had a lot of thoughts about the set-up here, because I’m calling bullshit on so much of this book and we haven’t even gotten to the Rapture yet.
- Suddenly, over 100 people disappear on the plane, leaving behind only their clothes. People wonder what’s up with that.
- Buck checks his email. There are pages dedicated to this.
- The plane gets contact with the outside world and learns they have to go back to Chicago, because this same thing is happening EVERYWHERE.
- Rayford realizes this is totally the Rapture, is suddenly much less horny.
House of Night: Untamed
Zoey and co. mourn the insanely sudden loss of Stark, who was introduced and died within about eleven chapters. Then Zoey skips five years of primary education because she’s special.
- In the immediate aftermath of Stark’s death, everybody cries a lot. Except for Neferet, who is turning dead kids into zombie vampires, so she’s only pretend crying because this is totes her shit.
- Zoey takes a shower. Aphrodite has a fancy shower. More pages are spent informing the reader that Aphrodite has a fancy shower than have been spent developing this book’s plot.
- Zoey realizes she was already in love with Stark. Except then she says she isn’t over Erik and Heath and laments that “no one told my heart it wasn’t ready for another guy”. Girl.
- Zoey prepares to leave with Aphrodite and Darius to go organize a partnership between the House of Night and a local charity in the human community and then sneak off to meet the secretly still alive Stevie Rae. But before she leaves, Shekinah asks her to perform a cleansing ritual with her friends later. Which is a problem because APHRODITE ISN’T A VAMPIRE ANYMORE. What suspense! And it’s pretty much the only suspense, so I guess this is literally the only thing driving the plot at the moment.
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If Zoey knew that Neferet is doing suspicious shit with the dead kids why doesn’t she make a bigger fuss and try to protect the corpses? I mean if the guy I was suddenly in love with died in front of me and I knew my teacher was taking him away to turn him zombie, I’d try to stop it from happening, you know? Or at least follow the bodies in secret to find out what happens to them.
That’s like a serious mystery right? Harry Potter would have been right on top of it. I don’t recall him ever being like “nah we can’t follow the spiders and clear Hagrid’s name. We have a transfiguration test tomorrow.”
Good point! Although I’d like to amend Zoey-Harry’s logic to “nah we can’t follow the spiders. BLAH BLAH CHO CHANG BLAH BLAH GINNY WEASLEY”