Divergent

I'm usually pretty good at suspending my disbelief. I'd rather be immersed in a different world and accept the fact that the rules are a lil' bendy, than read tomes filled with the details of a depressingly plausible life. There's a place on my bookshelf for Jonathan Franzen, but it's not my HAPPY place, you know?*

A dystopian tale though, now that is definitely my happy place (irony alert lulz). Divergent is set in a future Chicago, where the population is divided into five factions based on the values humanity has considered necessary for balance and order: Abnegation (they run the government...wouldn't that be nice?), Amity, Erudite, Candor, and Dauntless. I would have also included Lusty, Witty, and Goofy - but that's just me. Anyway, five factions, all with different tasks and duties, and kids get to pick their factions (and their futures) when they turn sixteen. The novel follows one girl, Beatrice, who chooses to leave her birth faction for the brave and thrill-seeking Dauntless. The COOL KIDS FUCK YEAH! They do mixed-martial arts and get tattoos and pierce their FACES. Do you even DAUNTLESS, BRO?

And here is where my belief, floating happily along, is rudely kicked in the nards. Poor guy never had a chance. Apparently, to get around future Chicago, the Dauntless run alongside moving trains and jump on them. When they want to get off, they jump off. *Record scratch*

Yes: their system of transportation is jumping on and off moving trains. Because they are brave. At this point my belief is writhing on the ground in agony, struggling with the following:

• During one of the first train-jumping scenes, someone dies. Does this happen often? At what point do they reconsider their everyday mode of transportation due to the fact that it's killing their troops? 
• Who is driving these trains? When they start up for the day, are people allowed to get on then? Or do they have to wait until the trains get up to full speed?
• The trains seem to run all around the city but then also into the country. Who designed these trains?! They seem to use them for training exercises/to move troops but then also they are just running all the time for people to jump on them whenever. Is there a schedule? Is there a plan?
• It's not like they are so brave, so lacking of daunt, that they have to do everything in the most extreme way possible, because obviously that would be ridiculous. They don't eat by shooting potato cannons into their face-holes, they don't get dressed by jumping into their outfits from the roof, and they don't have sex by loading their naked bodies into giant slingshots and trying to collide in mid-air at 90 mph (yes - I've been reading your diary. WEIRD, DUDE). They do many, many normal things in non-brave ways so WHY THE DEATH-DEFYING PUBLIC TRANSPORT?
• I KNOW YOU ARE BRAVE BUT YOU ARE LITERALLY JUMPING ON AND OFF RANDOM RUNAWAY DEATH TRAINS WITH GHOST PILOTS FOR NO REASON JUST TO GET MORE MILK OR VISIT YOUR GRANDMOTHER. 

And so I spent most of the book thinking about the above, unable to focus on Beatrice's angst, teen romance, or the intricacies of inter-faction politics. 

RIP to my belief. He was hit by a train. Never even saw it coming.

1.5 teeny tiny British conductors out 5.

*Sorry, Franzie. Maybe throw some dragons in your next book?

Congo

Emboldened by my enjoyable revisit to Jurassic Park & the Lost World, I thought I’d pick up another Crichton novel I barely remembered but knew I’d read in my early teens. Foolish, foolish, Jane. This. Book. Is. Bananas.*The plot DID give me some great ideas for band names though:

• Corporate Jungle Heist
• Parachuting Gorilla
• Killer Police Apes
• Gorilla Ticklers
• Stone Skull Crushers
• Amy & The Blue Diamonds
• The Japanese Consortium

Sure, there is some action when the aforementioned killer police apes start busting out the aforementioned stone skull crushers, but mostly the book is concerned with how one company is going to beat another company to a source of rocks that will make computers faster. There are a lot of sentences that begin “Karen had to upload the data to the satellite uplink to get the new probability for the desired outcome.” Nerds, do NOT tell me if I got that wrong.

So unless you like reading a lot about old technology, just see the movie. Or, don’t – because apparently it’s also pretty bad (Amy the Talking Gorilla was nominated for worst supporting actress and LOST TO MADONNA. BRB going to be laughing about Madge being worse to watch than this for awhile).  

1 out of 5 playtime sessions with All Ball & Koko.

*Um, YEAH pun intended. Are you new here?

Jurassic Park & The Lost World: A Dinosaur Twofer

Jurassic Park might be the movie I have seen the most. I was 10 when it came out, and my dad took my brothers & me to see it and then hid in a bush on the way home and jumped out and scared us. Great parenting, Dad! Dr. Alan Grant was one of my first crushes (don’t panic, Indiana Jones-era Harrison Ford – you’ll always be #1. Apparently I like gruff older men who are frequently exasperated while wearing dusty fedoras....Paging Dr. Freud!). We got a VHS tape of the movie and played it every single day after school. My family quotes it constantly (Mom: “Finish your dinner.” Me: “Now you will eventually have DINOSAURS, on your dinosaur tour? Hmm?” Mom: *Cries silently and wonders where she went wrong*). I just had my bachelorette party and my bridesmaid designed Jurassic Park themed t-shirts for us all to wear, and, spoiler alert: my bridesmaids are going to walk down the aisle to the theme song (What? It’s PRETTY).

So when the movie was re-released in 3D IMAX, I was psyched to see it on the big screen again. It did not disappoint! Haters to the left. My mom says I read the book when it came out, which would have made me 7 (?!). Did I understand ANYTHING ABOUT IT? What a weird kid. Anyway, 20 years later, enthralled once again, I decided to re-read the book and the sequel, The Lost World.

Lessons learned:

• Movie Alan Grant is way better than book Alan Grant. Book Dr. Grant actually LIKES children. Terrible. 
• There's an awesome T.Rex river chase that never made it to the big screen - probably because actually seeing the T.Rex dog paddling makes it look cute instead of scary? Too bad.
• The book is less scary, though, overall. My theory is that dinosaur names are too nerdy on the page: "The dilophosaurus attacked!" Oooooh I'm sooooo scaaaaared. "The razor teeth terror beast attacked!" *shits pants, cries, puts book in freezer*
• In both the novel & the book, Ellie is the coolest and consistently shows the men in the room what the hell is up.  I want to be a paleobotanist!*
• The Lost World is pretty much just Jurassic Park, again, on a different island. NOT COMPLAINING.
• Michael Crichton can't write children - the ones in both books are one-dimensional plot devices. "Oh no we've lost little Billy! Time to move from plot point A to B!" And scene.

I am regretting reviewing these books. They're neither bad, nor good - they simply are (Jurassic Park). Okay, they're probably not great - but they are a million times better than anything Dan Brown ever wrote, paleontogists > symbologists 4EVA. 

Jurassic Park: 4 Dodgson's out of 5.

The Lost World: 3 Goldblum cackles out of 5.

*You're right - I just want to look good in short shorts. 

The Help and Mockingjay - a Books with Birds on the Covers Twofer

So you'd *think* that these books have nothing in common. One is the final book in a trilogy about an emo girl with badass archery skills fighting an evil government, the other is about...holy crap as I am writing this I realize it's about an emo girl with badass writing (interviewing?) skills fighting an evil social system. My system of pairing books together based on the animals on their covers WORKS.

Anyway, the battle against the evil social system that was segregation in Mississippi in the 1960s was definitely the more compelling of the two. The Hunger Games trilogy could not have ended on more of a whimper. One of the evil forces Katniss had to fight against was black goo. GOO. Goo doesn't have the villainous charisma of a pudgy bigoted socialite like Hilly Holbrook. Anyway, read the first two Hunger Games books, spare yourself the last one which is fighting goo but mostly just sitting around like a whiny B saying "Gale, Peeta, Gale, Peeta". Read Battle Royale instead - now *that* was a book about high school students fighting each other to the death!

Oh, just see the movies when they come out.

Mockingjay: 1 sad-sack emo angst-filled teenage inner monologue out of 5 (except really 5 out of 5 of those because that is all the book is! But also, it's terrible. So, 1 out of 5).

The Help: 3 WASPY bridge parties out of 5.