Up In the Air Reaction

After reading Up in the Air by Walter Kim, I must say, I was less than impressed. I had an extremely hard time getting into the book because I felt like it was so boring and uninteresting. Walter Kim's writing style is not my particular taste, because he does a lot of fill in stuff, like babbling on and on between the parts that actually matter. He also doesn't write smoothly, and by this I'm meaning his book is hard to comprehend and follow. At times, I read paragraphs over 3 times because I found myself drifting off and thinking about other things. I tend to do this with books like this, books that I would never choose to read myself. If a book can't keep my interest, I drift off in my head somewhere else, and it takes me twice as long to read it. Not a sign of a page turner for me.

So basically this book is about the main character Ryan Bingham, whose career as a Career transition counselor (basically someone who fires people) leads him to live a life on airplanes and in hotel rooms. Ryan enjoys this "airworld" as he calls it, which in my opinion shows that he is unable toform  healthy relationships because he is content with lifeless trivial human contact. Perhaps the stress of work, or years without proper and healthy relationships, Ryan is mentally unstable, narcissitic and detatched. His only relationships come from 2 sisters, one of which also has incredibly unhealthy relationships, his mother and woman he meets in airworld. Ryan's ultimate goal is to reach a million frequent flyer miles before his boss returns to find his resignation letter on his desk. Between the complex and unrelateable writing, uninteresting plot of the book and the awkwardly self centered and mentally detatched main character, this book was a nightmare to read. I'm hoping to watch the movie version of this book soon because I hear it's a lot better then the book (which in itself says a lot about how bad this book is) and also because I'm a big Clooney fan, but overall my reaction to this book was not good and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

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