Post apocalyptic schmost apocalyptic....

So I just finished a book that was on a few end of year best of lists last year. It was a YA novel set in a post apocalyptic world. No not that one, not that one either...another one...

And yeah, that's how I felt about it. A lot of pieces from other books and ideas put together in a new(ish) story. Maybe if I hadn't read the others I would have liked this one more. But probably not. It was a little too predictable. A little too much insta-hero, not enough growth. And a good dose of unnecessary sexual violence.

So then I started to wonder if I just have read too many of that particular genre and that's why I didn't care for it. I hit that wall with mysteries for awhile. I read a lot of them in my early 20s. It was pretty much all I read. And then I hit the wall where I didn't want to look at another mystery. Didn't pick up a Reacher, a Spencer or a Warshawski book for a long long time. Probably 15 years. Then I did. And remembered that I loved them. Just not as a steady diet. A mix in.

So maybe I just need to take a little break from the doom and gloom starting over after it's all been ruined world.

Probably a good idea.

On another note, watching TV today at the gym but with the sound off. Ancient technology, to hear the TVs I need to bring a radio, who carries a radio anymore? So anyway I'm watching TV and CNN and FoxNews are the competing channels. So watching and reading the closed captioning and see stories on the forest fires raging in Southern California, the failing infrastructure of the US, the end of the reserves for fixing our highway systems with no plan in site on how to get the money needed, the missing school girls in Nigeria, talking heads on Fox trying to explain how the presidential approval ratings going up really doesn't mean they went up, it means they are down see watch our new math, a story on Benghazi (surprisingly CNN not Fox so much for the "you won't see this on mainstream..." though seriously if Fox isn't mainstream I don't know what is), multiple stories about the upcoming elections and how the partisan divide is just going to get broader, a story on how the latest report on climate change is a scare tactic not something that should be taken literally, a story on an oil spill and...

Okay, maybe it's not the book's fault that I need a break for awhile.

Maybe it's that it's not so much like fiction anymore to imagine a world on the brink of collapse.

God I hate the news.

EDIT:

Not five minutes after posting this blog a friend of mine posted this as their status update:
Looking at the technology headlines today: The FCC is destroying the internet instead of regulating it, ISPs are working on new schemes to extract more money from customers while giving them less service, the DOJ is lying to the supreme court on the behalf of spy agencies in the name of "national security," the NSA is intercepting commercially purchased tech hardware and implanting it with spy equipment before it reaches customers, and the list goes on.
Is the internet a benefit to the populace, or just a honeypot for those with the power and money to exploit it? There are times I wish I could just take it completely out of my life.

So yeah, add this to the list...