February 28th

Day 59

Shutter Island - pages 3-4, 7-27 (23 pages)

Goal - 8 books 103 pages

Total - 6 books 207 pages

Result - 1 book 156 pages to reach goal

Ugh, the general book club chose Shutter Island as the March selection for the thriller category. It really sucks because I was interested in 7 out of the 10 choices, and the two that made the run-off vote were two of the three that I had no interest in. So ugh.

I'm not a huge thriller person anyway. I do like mystery, but I'm not big on procedural/serial killer/crime type stuff unless it focuses more on a mystery or is old fashioned like Agatha Christie. But being part of my challenge, I'm bound to give it a go.

I've already seen the film to Shutter Island, and there are some major twists and turns that really make it almost useless to read the book once you know them. But I did prefer Shutter Island to the other run-off choice, Along Came a Spider, as I've already seen that one too and I didn't think I'd get anything out of it at all. But really, it was a matter of "don't want to read" and "really don't want to read", so yes I'm happy the "don't want to read" beat the "really don't want to read", but that still doesn't change the fact that I don't want to read it! LOL

So I started it and it's worse than I was thinking - not only does it follow the film pretty closely so far (so less new stuff to find out while reading), but I'm not a huge fan of this guy's writing either. I'm sure Patterson would've been worse, but generally Lehane has been regarded as one of the better thriller writers, so I was disappointed with his writing. Especially his dialogue, it's pretty atrocious so far. And reading it from the point of view of someone who knows what all happens, it makes it seem even worse.

I don't want to elaborate any further and spoil anything for anyone who hasn't read it, but perhaps I will speak more freely once I get to later on in the book, since, if you haven't read it, you probably shouldn't read my posts talking about the later parts of the book anyway.

I will say this - I did like the film pretty well. It had great atmosphere and a good mystery and story. So I'm expecting the same from the book. I just hope that once I get into it I start enjoying it more, as it's bad enough reading something where I know the ending, but not not even like the writing on top would be pretty bad.

There are a few differences so far between film and book. I don't think the prologue was in the film, but I could be wrong. Also, it seems in the book, the island is smaller and the institution is near the dock and there's no cars; they walk up to it upon arriving. In the film, if I remember correctly, the island seems much larger, there are cars, the institution is farther away from the dock and upon arriving they must be driven in cars to the institution. Wonder why they'd change that? I like the book description better for some reason. But the actual story so far besides those things, the film followed the book very closely.