Book of the Month - The Transall Saga

Image from No Man's Sky

A new year, a new Book of the Month! I hope your holiday season was filled with fun and merriment. If not, here’s hoping it’s better this year.

For this month’s book I chose a book I haven’t read since I was in middle school. Partly because I want to read it again personally, but also because it’s a fairly affordable book that’s not too long, and I felt like it was a good fit right after the holiday season. Something with enough meat to satisfy, but not so much as to overwhelm and that’s not too hard on the wallet either. And of course, as it’s a book I have read, I can assure you it is worth checking out.

Book of the Month - January 2018

The Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen

256 pages

Genre(s): Survival, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Physical, Digital, and Audio copies available on Amazon (including an audio cassette, you know, for those of you with an old tape deck I guess?)

The Transall Saga is written by Gary Paulsen, the author behind the book I’m sure many of you had to read in school Hatchet. I used to read a lot of Paulsen’s books back in elementary and middle school and have been collecting them recently. I really enjoy the way he writes about young characters put into survival situations in the wilderness.

The Transall Saga, while still a survivalist story like Hatchet, was a departure for Paulsen’s previous work in one significant aspect. It’s a sci-fi/fantasy story. Paulsen’s previous works had all been fiction, but had been grounded in reality. The Transall Saga was his first attempt to write something more fantastical. And it was a very successful attempt.

The book is about 13 year old Mark Harrison, a young man that loves backpacking and hiking. While on a trek across the old Magruder Missile Range he encounters a strange blue light. Like any young kid that has discovered something new and mysterious, he touches it. Mark then wakes up in a new, strange world in patch of red grass. And from here on out we enter spoiler territory. Sorry, but discovering this world and what it’s about is part of the fun of reading The Transall Saga. I hope this was enough to get you intrigued.

Like always, the goal of this Book of the Month series is to encourage us all as a community to read more and discover new books. If this book interests you, I recommend giving it a look. While I haven’t read it in years, I remember finding it to be quite intriguing and while not the best book ever written, it is a solid read. I’m doing away with the idea of “deadlines” from here on out. The idea is to encourage reading, and I’ve always found that putting a time limit on it does the opposite. No joke, school pretty much beat my love of books out of me by doing that shit, and it took the internet to bring it back. So read at you leisure, read what you want, and write a blog when and if you feel like it.

See you next month with another book. Happy reading!

Previous Books of the Month: Lucky Penny by Ananth Hirsch and Yuko Ota and River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

- Thank You For Reading, And Remember: Hot Dogs are Sandwiches. #TeamSandwich

LOOK WHO CAME:

dephoenix   

CelicaCrazed   47

Chris Moyse   44

Boxman214   33

LaTerry   22