Top 5 Wednesday: Futuristic Books

Okay, so another Wednesday is upon us, so it's time for another Top 5 Wednesday!

As I've mentioned in the previous post, this series was created by Lainey (check out her Goodreads page). There is a group on Goodreads, which anyone can join and begin participating. Also, here is a list of all people who are a part of this series.

So this week's topic is Futuristic books, and let's get right into it, shall we?

5. 1984 by George Orwell

This is actually one of the first futuristic book I've read and I loved it. I felt eerie everytime I read this book and I just think it has really strong writing, which sucks you in and makes you think

4. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

This was one of my favorite books of 2014, so that goes to show that I loved it. After reading The Hunger Games and Divergent I had a lot of trouble finding a futuristic/dystopian book that I loved as much, and I've tried many well-loved books and just disliked them. Until I read this one, and fell in love with it. The story is fast paced, griping, exciting and unpredictable. And the characters were awesome.

3. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Again, a book I read a long time ago and it was flipping amazing. It was funny and witty and insightful. I just loved the characters, the setting, the whole concept was just spot on.

2. Divergent by Veronica Roth

I am kind of chucking all three books together, and cheating a bit, but I want to point out the story, not necessarily a particular book. I loved how Divergent started out to be one thing and kind of progressed through out the series, and just threw away everything that was believed in at the start. I loved the characters, the story, the writing, but what really did it for me was the whole progression of the plot line.

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

First dystopian YA book that I read and my favorite of the bunch. Great concept of a futuristic world, vividly depicted and so well written and imagined. The characters were amazing, the plot was great, and even though I really didn't like Mockingjay, it still was way better than some other dystopian books I read. So yeah, amazing.

Legend by Marie Lu

I really enjoy dystopian books, and this one was everywhere. So it was only natural for me to pick it up. I can't say I loved it. It was fun, but there were some things that I really disliked, so they affected the way I feel about this book.

Legend is a story about two very different people, with different lives and backgrounds. One of them is a boy called Day, who is an outlaw basically. There is a test that everyone must take at a certain age, and it predetermines what they are gonna do, and whether or not they would be allowed to continue to live their lives as planned. And Day failed that test. So he ran away and started doing things against the Republic, which is the "evil government" in this book. And he became the most wanted criminal.

On the other side, we have June, who is the only person in the Republic who got a maximum on that test. So she got to go to the best college in the Republic and to prepare to be a military agent of the Republic.

But their paths cross when June's brother is killed, and Day is the number one suspect. So she has to go undercover to catch him.

This was a fun book. Just a fairly entertaining read. It was nicely paced and flowed really smoothly. But I had a couple of problems with it which led to me liking the book a lot less. First of all, the story is told from both Day's and June's perspectives. And they alter. But, they seem like the exact same person. Their narrative voices are very similar. They are both perceptive, cocky and determined. At one point one of them even says they are like one person. Which I hated. It was so unnecessary and made their whole relationship really corny and stereotypical to me. That was the second problem. I didn't care for their relationship at all. It had no feelings in it. It was flat and underwhelming. And really predictable. 

Still, this was a fun and intriguing read. I was entertained by the whole dystopian aspect of the book and I am looking forward to see how it develops and what does it all mean. This was very similar to other dystopian books, which was fine, but I am still waiting to like a dystopian book as much as I liked the Hunger games or even Divergent. And this wasn't the one. Sure, it was fun enough, but for me it wasn't anything special and I wasn't blown away with it.
So I gave this book 3/5 stars on Goodreads. If you're into dystopia, you will probably enjoy it, so you can give it a go.

Review: Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

This is a pretty popular book. People seem to talk about it a lot. So, I decided to see if it was any good. Honestly, not so much.

Just to give a sort of a rundown, this book is about Tally Youngblood, who lives in a (future) world in which every person, upon reaching the age of sixteen, has to undergo a cosmetic procedure which makes them "pretty". So "uglies" can't wait to finally turn 16, so they can become beautiful like everybody else and join the New Pretty World where life is an endless party. All is fine and well, until Tally meets a girl named Shay, who, get this, doesn't want to have the surgery and would rather remain herself. Very controversial. Right before their "shared" birthday, Shay tells Tally she is running away to live in a secret community outside of town called the Smoke, and Tally is recruited by special forces to find the community. She is faced with the choice of either being ugly forever or betraying her friend.

I kind of formed a sort of love-hate relationship with this one. More of a like-hate relationship, but still.

On one hand, I think that the whole universe in which the story is set is quite interesting. I find it believable. People are very preoccupied with their looks, especially young ones. We tend to judge each other based solely on how someone looks, and these differences between people had had catastrophic consequences in the past. So this sort of a dystopian future felt real and believable to me. Whenever someone branded themselves or others as an "ugly" and truly believed it, I got this weird, unpleasant feeling. So I feel that that whole aspect was well written and imagined.

But, on the other hand I hated the character in these books. Detested them really.

I didn't feel for them at all. They could've been plummeting to their deaths, and I just thought meh. I couldn't care less. They had no depth to them whatsoever. They were just dull, plain and one-dimensional. I honestly can't point at one characteristic of the heroine and say "there's something that defines her" because there isn't any. At all. Except maybe her shallowness, but that's more due to the society she lives in than anything else. Her character just doesn't offer anything. For me, it was completely unrelatable. And when she met David, her "love", she really started getting on my nerves. One moment they didn't even acknowledge each other, but the next they were in love. I could've gone past it, if I just felt it, but I didn't. I was reading about their shared moments and again I was just like meh. Oh, and David? Even worse than Tally, even more plain and uninteresting. Obviously, the secondary characters are non-existent. They are there, for the sake of the story, but they don't bring anything to it. 

This book was a letdown for me, because I feel like people love it so much, and I just didn't. It was okay, but there were things (as stated above) that really irritated me. I am not even sure I want to keep reading these series. I might get back to it, when I am bored, but the first book didn't really make me want to keep reading. Which is too bad, because there were things I thought were good. 

Review: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

So, here we are again with another cult classic, Fahrenheit 451. I feel like everyone has read this book and I think that a lot of people loved it. I didn't.

This is a dystopian novel which follows Guy Montag, who is a fireman. But in this post-literate future, firemen don't put out fires, they start them. More specifically, they burn books. Books are not allowed as they are thought to be the source of everything bad that has ever happened. But, Guy isn't happy. He finds himself questioning his life with his wife and the whole prospect of burning books. As always, there are people who defy the law, and they hide books and try to sustain the fashion of reading. Guy slowly becomes that guy (ha) and finds himself on the run from the fire departments Mechanical Hound which hunts those who try to preserve books.

There are several reasons why I didn't like this book. Firstly, I don't share Bradbury's concerns. In his futuristic society, people are engulfed in technology (Guy's wife is a huge fan of these soap-opera thingys which are broadcasted on huge screens in their house) and they don't really care about each other and generally have short attention spans. I just don't think that technology does that to people and that it will do that. When it comes to it, I am all for moving forward. I think that the Internet and computers have made possible to connect with people more. I find that a lot of people have made lasting friendships because of it. Also, it enabled to sustain friendships in spite of distance. (This is in my own experience, since my two best friends moved away and we keep in contact thanks to the Internet). Even writing this, and some people (very few, but still) being able to read it, it's because of the Internet and technology. I feel that the whole premise of people losing touch and becoming unsociable is misplaced.

So I think that the focal point here is that technology made people unsociable and led to their short attention spans which then led to them not being able to concentrate on books. But what I found is that people choose to view that burning books is about censorship. This makes it so much more relatable to today's reader. And in that view it is. So in terms of viewing this whole book in that way, I could've surpassed the main source (i.e. technology), and still liked the book.

But we come to the second problem which was the writing. I just didn't like it. I felt that it had so many unnecessary metaphors and I just think that it was sometimes going in to such detail which didn't bring anything to the plot. Furthermore, I feel like there really wasn't a plot there. I felt that the book wasn't going anywhere and wasn't explaining anything. I felt that it kinda went in circles.

I believe, that this book is overrated. And yes, I do believe that there isn't any real plot here, but maybe this is just about the message and not so much about the writing itself. Still, I can't say that I enjoyed it. I am glad that I read, since it's considered such a classic, but I just don't think that this book is good. I know that a lot of people will disagree but for me it was almost unreadable. Almost.

Review: The Maze Runner series by James Dashner

There's a lot of hype around these series and it's recommended to everyone who loves a good YA dystopian novel, which I totally do. So, I decided to give this one a try and I didn't quite like it.

In the first book, The Maze Runner, a boy named Thomas wakes up in this strange place, remembering only his name and nothing else. He is surrounded by a lot of boys who are in the same situation as him. They don't remember anything at all, except their names. They are located in the central part of a maze, which everyone calls the Glade. The maze outside is ever changing and the boys are trying to map it out so they can find a way out. They are organised by the type of job they do and the ones that go out in the maze to find a way out are called the Runners. But, there is a great danger lurking outside of the maze, hence the runners (because they have to run in order to avoid being caught). Also, right after Thomas appears in the lift of the Glade, a girl comes. The first girl ever. And she delivers this scary and weird message to the boys and they start to work together on getting out.

When I read the plot summary, I thought it was fascinating. And it was. But that is the only thing that's good about the book. I don't really like the style of writing in this book. There was zero characterization. I couldn't relate to Thomas at any point in the book. You can read that he is sad, or scared or confused, but you don't feel it. I thought that the secondary characters were a lot more interesting, like Minho, who is a fellow runner, or Newt who is kind of the leader of the group, but they were pushed aside as secondary characters even though they had a lot of potential. The female lead, Teresa, was awful. She is described as this smart and pretty girl, but you don't really see that, which is annoying, so she kind of becomes this stereotypical female character that hasn't got anything special about her. None of the characters are developed. 

The plot was interesting enough, and even when I didn't like the first one (which I found the best out of the three), it ended on such a cliff-hanger that I had to read the next one. 

The second one, The Scorch Trials, was really strange and jumbled and nothing really happened. There were a lot of new, confusing elements which were supposed to begin to explain the plot, but they were kind of bleak and didn't really tell anything new. I liked this one less than the first, but now I was deep into the story and again it ended on a cliff-hanger so I had to pick up the last one too.

The last one, The Death Cure, was just plain disappointing and annoying. I didn't get any satisfactory conclusion or explanation to the whole story. I don't even think there was one. Nothing was quite thoroughly explained. The ending was a total cliche, starting a new, better life and all. I was quite angry with it. I kept reading in order to get some kind of closure on the plot, but I was left empty handed.

All in all, I don't get the hype around it. It was enjoyable enough, but it can it even get close to the other YA dystopian novels that I read. The plot was intriguing, but don't expect the ending to be this huge revelation, because it's not. I wouldn't say that you can definitely skip this book, but I also don't think that you will be missing out on anything. Nevertheless, there is a movie coming out that is based on these books, so I am looking forward to seeing how well executed it is.