Angel Beats

So I just finished Angel Beats, a 13 episode anime. It was very interesting. Not the best anime i have ever watched but it was fairly good. It was a tad confusing at first and you really don't get into all of the characters very well. It was mixed with humor and utter sadness. I'm not gonna give anything away really but it's worth checking out if your into anime thats humorous, romantic, sad and slightly odd.

Blindness

Now Originally I was reading It's Kind Of a Funny Story, however I wasn't able to finish the book. Now I wasn't about to write a review on a book I didn't finish because that is ridiculously unfair to the author Ned Vizzini. So here is a book review for Blindness By Jose Saramago.

Blindness.

You are going about your day, everything is average. The sun is out, you’re doing your usual morning routine. All of a sudden you’re blind. But it’s not a black abyss you see. No. It’s milky and white. And the next thing you know, everyone around you is blind and you are all thrown into an abandoned building to rot or lose all humanity. “That is precisely what takes place in Blindness by Jose Saramago.          Through the story you follow a variety of differBook Trailer For Blindness ent characters. The first blind man, the doctor, the girl with the dark glasses, the thief, the small boy with a squint, the man with the eye patch, and the only one left with sight is the doctor’s wife. They all are quarantined in an abandoned asylum while the government tries to figure out how the white blindness started. Normal tasks become almost impossible. Finding a bathroom for example. “Let’s form a line, my wife will lead the way, everyone put their hand on the shoulder of the person in front, then there will be no danger of our getting lost.”  (49) Weather it be attempting to find the bathroom or food, there is always a fight for survival.

There are parts in this book that were very difficult to read, while the characters were in the asylum they had power struggles and issues over food. There was a gang of blind people that had guns and began making demands in trade for food. At first it was just valuable items but slowly turned into a sick orgy type situation... “Unless you bring us women, you don’t eat.” (167) However the conditions in the ward were also becoming repulsive, poop and urine everywhere, bed bugs, fleas, no showers, no working toilet. Nothing was clean and no one was set to care for them. The whole book was pretty gruesome.

The group of main characters finally got out of the asylum when a fire broke out and went in search of food, and their homes. They all managed fairly well and even had the dog of tears to help protect them. However they quickly learned that things in the streets were about as bad as they were in the asylum. Fecal matter everywhere, food shortage and dead bodies being eaten alive by wild dogs wasn’t what the doctors wife entirely expected.

Though at the end of the book you get a very pleasant surprise that I can’t give away.

Jose Saramago’s writing structure was very different, I could see how it could be annoying to some and where it would be a challenging text to read, there wasn’t any marking for dialogue except a capitalized word when a new person spoke, there wasn’t any chapter indications and there wasn’t any indents for paragraphs either.

Over all I found this book widely interesting. It showed a very different side of humanity and how one small thing can completely tear apart society. Though I could have done without some scenes this book gives a powerful message and I highly doubt another writer will be able to flawlessly write something so contradictory and moving and sometimes stomach turning novel like this one. 

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