Gear Shift: Forget About Nutrition, Let’s Talk About Justin Cronin

This post has absolutely no nutritional merit. In fact, it’s chocked full of airy nothingness as I type out my giddiness and delight over the anticipation of the sequel to the best book I read last year. Yes, I read! Something other than recipes and nutrition articles!

My book tastes are kind of all over the place. A variety of classics, historical and genre fiction, and more recently (an embarrassing admission), contemporary romance all float my boat. Damn you Nora Roberts-you get me every time!

Justin Cronin’s The Passage completely blindsided me. I bought it in my pre-Kindle days and quickly found myself dragging it around with me everywhere. No easy feat, as this book clocks in at 784 pages. Even more difficult when you’re traveling for over 30 hours to Asia as I was last fall. Thank goodness for the Kindle, by the way. After lugging around five heavy books in my backpack for over a week, I was done.

Cronin weaves a story so epic and so fraught with human emotion that I was absolutely riveted from the jump. The Passage illustrated with gut-wrenching imagery how our drive to push science to reach our selfish goals of immortality can ultimately destroy the very fabric of humanity. With a slow and steady drumbeat towards the climactic cliffhanger ending, I ate up each beautifully written word, greedy to find out how it would all end. When I found out that it would be a trilogy, I was beyond thrilled. I love trilogies! And I mean, I love trilogies for exceptional stories. This doesn’t mean you, Stephanie Meyer!

I’m a bit (actually, a lot) obsessive compulsive with things that I adore. I can watch movies and TV shows dozens of times and never get bored. I’m one of those people that can recite lines back word for word, annoyingly so as my siblings often tell me. So it’s with lots of excitement that I’m about to embark on my 4th (yes, fourth) reread of The Passage to prepare myself for the release of the sequel, The Twelve, next Tuesday. I’ve already pre-ordered the upcoming book for convenient digital delivery to my Kindle. I love this technology! I haven’t anticipated a release this much since the seventh Harry Potter book! I. Can’t. Wait.

This now concludes my crazy-fan ode to Justin Cronin’s genius. 🙂

Have any of you read The Passage? Are you also waiting for the sequel? What books are you equally obsessed with and should I read them? I’m always open to new book recommendations, so let me know what you’re all reading too!