It was a busy week for me of not only watching movies, but I was also able to finish a new book.
To begin, I watched the entire second season of “Game of Thrones“, finished watching Before Sunset and finished the week off with viewings of The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious as I’m trying to come up with an idea on a feature to write centered on the franchise before the release of Fast & Furious 6. Any ideas or anything in particular you’d like me to explore with regard to the franchise?
As for the book I read, it was “[amazon asin=”0670025860″ text=”The Office of Mercy”]” ([amazon asin=”B008EKOMQ6″ text=”buy it for Kindle”]) from new author Ariel Djanikian.
Here’s the description:
Weaving philosophy and science together into a riveting, dystopian story of love and adventure, The Office of Mercy illuminates an all-too-real future imagined by a phenomenal new voice in fiction.
Twenty-four-year-old Natasha Wiley lives in America-Five–a high-tech, underground, utopian settlement where hunger and money do not exist, everyone has a job, and all basic needs are met. But when her mentor and colleague, Jeffrey, selects her to join a special team to venture Outside for the first time, Natasha’s allegiances to home, society, and above all to Jeffrey are tested. She is forced to make a choice that may put the people she loves most in grave danger and change the world as she knows it.
That’s a pretty good little teaser, not revealing too much, it gets you hooked and yet leaves a lot to discover.
The dystopian future the story describes is a future Earth long after the events of a massive “storm” that resulted in a world where the privileged live in glass domes referred to as the Inside. They’ve gained the knowledge to keep themselves alive for centuries, with the ability to regenerate body parts and replacement organs are created as soon as you’re “born”.
On the Outside live the Tribes, people initially not deemed worthy enough to live on the Inside who now struggle for survival off the land. Instead of letting the Tribes carry on, the first generation of people living on the Inside (the Alphas) have developed a department known as the Office of Mercy, where the employees carry out “sweeps”, killing those on the Outside in the largest groups possible with what are essentially nuclear blasts. Why? As the department is named, it’s deemed a merciful act to stop their prolonged suffering and misery as a result of their living situation, the knowledge they will die and their inability to prolong their lives.
This last bit I had an issue with throughout most of the book’s brisk 304 pages, but by the time you reach the final chapters Djanikian really nails it to the wall using religion, philosophy, science, politics, morals and all that you have read to her advantage, causing you to question not only the story you’ve been reading, but the world around you.
For the first several chapters I wasn’t ready to declare “The Office of Mercy” as anything all that great, but with those final chapters there really is something to look at closely here and something that would make great book club fodder if you belong to one.
You can buy it from Amazon [amazon asin=”0670025860″ text=”right here”] and get it for the Kindle [amazon asin=”B008EKOMQ6″ text=”here”] if you’re interested.
Otherwise, your turn… What did you watch and if you read anything worth discussing share away. I think I am going to turn my attention to George R.R. Martin’s “A Storm of Swords”. I read “Game of Thrones”, skipped “Clash of Kings”, but think I’ll pick things up with the third book.
