I breezed through Alan Dean Foster’s Lost and Found, about a man who gets taken hostage by aliens. They are bandits who capture different species and sell them.

I got absorbed by the story pretty quickly. However, I started reading at around chapter 5, instead of at the beginning. The first chapter actually didn’t entrance me as much. In fact, when I jumped back to the first chapter (after I was a few chapters from the end), I noticed that some of it was unnecessarily verbose, which was sometimes distracting. For example, I seem to remember the use of the word “simian” in lieu of person.

Another flaw was that the characters were kind of flat. That’s okay, though. I don’t need complex characters; I enjoy watching sitcoms.

It is interesting to note that after I read this book, I read Man’s Search for Meaning, which talks about the psychology of being in a German concentration camp. After that, I tried to find parallels between that book and Lost and Found. I didn’t really see anything other than “not giving up” is important. This is not surprising, given that I already said the psychology of the characters wasn’t too complex.