I found this book in the library called Camp 38: A Current Model of Northern Europe Before Christianity (something like that) by Jill Von Konen, and since someone(s) had checked out the book I was reading (and am still “reading”), Cat’s Cradle, I picked it up. This was during the spring.

Earlier this week I tried picking it up again to finish it, but I just had to stop reading. Normally I finish books that I start, even if it’s just an okay book. But that book, I really don’t enjoy it. >_> I can’t exactly place my finger on what I don’t like about it.

It’s about, it’s kind of like all those other books that comment on society or government or both by using a different society to compare with. This lady is taken away to some place in the woods where these people have left modern society and gone back to some basic social structure.

I guess what I don’t like about it is how the main character, the lady, keeps comparing this society to the other one, and she keeps insisting these people have it right, they’re superior to modern society and such, and that she’s wrong, no matter what she thinks. In other books I’ve read there’s no such direct commentary, it’s all supposed to be inferred by the reader. When I read Camp 38 I just have this knee-jerk reaction to what the lady is thinking, that she’s stupid and mindless and easily swayed, that I can’t even think for myself about the book’s ideas.

The other characters, too, they keep thinking they’re superior and they wait for the lady to fit in with them. That part’s not that bad, I guess, can’t explain it well, just adds to the annoyance somehow. I just can’t figure out exactly why I don’t like this book. ^_^;;