Weird Looking: review: books I bought at wal-mart

So, I was at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago.  It was around 2am, and I was pretty bored.  So what I decided to do was, I decided to buy a bunch of New York Times best sellers and all – you know, the kind of books they sell at Wal-Mart.  I generally consider these types of books trash, so I avoid them like the plague they are.  But now I’ve read them, and I’ve decided to quickly review some of them so I can save you the pain!

Marker by Robin Cook

“A compelling medical mystery” titled Marker… so you pretty much know right off the bat that it’s going to be a rehashing of GATACA.  In the first chapter, healthy young people under the care of a certain evil managed healthcare facility start being murdered in their hospital beds.  A little while later, you learn that one of the main characters has a genetic marker for increased risk of breast cancer, and that she might have to go into the hospital for an appendectomy.

Have you figured out the whole plot yet?  Good, you just saved yourself 658 pages of pain.  This book moves at the glacial rate of 100 pages per day of storyline, and the author never misses a chance for the dialogue to devolve into a technical treatise on genetics.  Seriously, the only way I could get through this book was by reading it with Strong Bad’s voice in my head.

The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

The scariest thing about this book was the cover.  It shows the top half of a little girl hovering around in the woods.  Talk about creepy!

But then you read the book, and you realize it’s just a terrible photoshop that’s supposed to be a girl up to her waist in water.  Get it right, Stephen King – disembodied children are WAY scarier than water.  The bad guy in this in this book is that she’s lost in the woods, and there might be something following her, and it might be a bear.  The bear is supposed to represent the inconquerable nature I guess, except that sometimes the bear talks, which nature rarely does.  The only good part about this book is that, at 262 pages, it’s roughly 1/16th the size of a normal Stephen King book.

Demon Seed by Dean Koontz

The cover of Demon Seed has a picture of a hot chick all pixelated.  Oh baby, it’s like my interlaced porn is already halfway downloaded!  Actually, I don’t have any complaints about this book.  It’s short, quite readable, and the character is interesting.

A++++ WOULD READ AGAIN!

The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown

Around the time I read this book, I had figured out the template for writing worldwide best sellers.  Take one disenfranchised scientist, one hot chick love interest, one conspiracy and mix well.  Also, pack in as many technical details as possible.  If you can find a reason to insert a wall of text about the subtleties of biochemical gene manipulations or the maximum data output rate of a hard drive, do it!

This book is nothing special.  If it hadn’t been for the whole Jesus/Mary Magdeline controversy, nobody would have even paid attention to it… and if your head wasn’t firmly entrenched in your rectum for the last decade, you’ve already heard that theory before anyway.  The albino bad guy was kind of sweet, though.  Why aren’t there more albino bad guys?  Do they have a lobbying organization or something?  “The National Albino Men’s Betterment League of America, or NAMBLA…”.

Second Genesis by Jeffrey Anderson, M.D.

If you saw that movie Deep Blue Sea, this is basically the same story, just replace sharks with chimpanzees and the sea with a rainforest.  It didn’t get very technical with the transgenetic stuff, which I found odd, but it did have a four-page dissertation on the iterative prisoner’s dilemma, which I found odder.  All in all, a pretty ho-hum book.

Hoever – do you remember that worldwide best seller template I just mentioned?  This book totally turns it on its ear by making the disenfranchised scientist a woman and the hot love interest a man!  We’re through the looking glass here, people.

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

I’ll admit, this isn’t your normal grocery store book fare.  But I enjoy a vampire story as much as the next person, so I decided to give it a go.  Don’t let this book’s size fool you!  It uses a tiny font and line spacing, very thin pages, and was easily the longest read I embarked upon here.

This is the sequel to Interview with the Vampire, but I don’t remember Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt ever making out very much in that movie.  Every time you flip a page in this book, boy vampires are making out.  The only girl Lestat ever makes out with is his mom, who then turns out to be a super bulldyke butch vampiress anyway.  Creep me right the hell out, why don’t you?

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