What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment
"A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”
While not 13 anymore, the desire to read almost anything and everything in order to read for fun and for experience is still around. I'm currently working on my PhD in a physical science, but I love to read and books are one of my non-science hobbies.
Voyager
This one needed an editor. After the first two Outlander books, Diana Gabaldon has returned back to Claire and Jamie Frasier's story, almost picking up exactly from where the last one left off. Gabaldon does know how to build tension and make the reader invested in the characters. I tackled a 1000 page paperback in three days right at the beginning of my academic semester, that's dedication.
Unfortunately, the success of the previous two volumes may have damaged Voyager. There are points where the narrator quotes chunks of other books (real or not), where Claire will go off on tangents about physical anthropology or the genetics of race that are painfully out of date, and after a while I can't really believe that Jamie almost dies again, or gets lost, or is grumpy and Scottish. These things could have been tightened up significantly and cut out a couple hundred pages or spent the time to craft a more compelling mystery subplot.
All of the Outlander books I've read so far are highly readable and addictive, but this was not quite up to par with the first two. Let's see how long it takes for me to forget the negative and get back to this series, the addictive junk food of my reading diet.
