The stars seem pretty dull thus far

I promised my best friend I would read a book she recommended and I was jazzed about it too - she said it was one of the best books she'd ever read and I guess it's touted as one of the best SciFi books ever written as well. So I jumped in raring to go.



Now, I want to make a disclaimer here! Everyone has different tatstes and what appeals to one person for one reason may appeal to another for a totally different reason or not appeal at all and that is why the world is so cool and we all can be different and have intellectual debates and argue points of opinion. So, (here's the disclaimer) while I love and appreciate my best friend and her opinion - I don't have to agree with it.



I think, normally, I would not write about something I have not finished, but I will return to this post after I am done and we'll see how it all ends together. I am half way thru "Harvest of Stars" by Poul Anderson and thus far I think it is wordy (which is funny considering my all-time favorite book is almost 1300 pages long and this one is less than 400), and I am so uninterested in what is being said that 70% of the time I can't stay tuned in long enough to even fully grasp all of a paragraph and sometimes even sentence. At first, I kept rereading passages but now I just continue on so I can finish this thing.



On the plus side, the concepts in it are thought-provoking (like what is freedom of thought and what happens when we lose it? Think Orwell's "1984" set hundreds of years in the future), and it's interesting to see the main protagonist try to out-think himself in order to escape and thus save humanity (the bad guy government has a duplicate of our hero that they have brain-washed to their way of thinking). After that though, so far, I just don't care. I'm not a big fan of the lead female character or any of the secondary characters ( and honestly - I'm not sure I really care if the hero wins either). I am definitely anti-bad guys in this but even they sort of bore me.



I was ready to quit reading it, since it's taking me forever (2 pages at a time and I'm dead asleep), so I wrote my best friend and begged her to please give me one good reason to continue reading this book. Oooohhhhh, she's a tricky one, she is! One of the things we are always telling each other is "If you're going to make sense, I'm not going to argue with you." So, with that in mind, (I hope she won't mind me sharing part of her email) this is some of what she resonded with...

"I guess you should read it for the same reason I read 'Atlas Shrugged' [my favorite book], I wanted to see what moved my best friend to say this was the best she ever read...Stop fidgeting, breath deep and just be open to experiencing something new without 'getting something out of it' - this book affects you subliminally, during the read and after. Besides, then we can argue about it when you are done!!!"



See what I mean - tricky....darn it - if she's going to make sense, I can't argue with her. Thus, I continue to read - slowly, very, very slowly. In my defense though - she had my abridged audio book version of 'Atlas Shrugged' she listened to driving across the country - she didn't actually read the entire 1200+ pages : ) This will be discussed again!