| Currently reading… “Birthright” by Nora Roberts Friday, Nov. 21, 2003 “Grave Secrets” by Kathy Reichs, installment number 5 with Tempe Brennan, sleuth and forensic anthropologist. Unusual setting this time – our heroine is taking part in a dig in Guatemala, to recover bodies that were hastily buried 20 years previously after a massacre by the Guatemalan army. She very quickly sticks her nose into places where it doesn’t belong. Especially when the local police asks her to consult on a current case that smells of serial killer on the loose. Took me a bit to get into it, but then I could not put it down again. Fear not, Tempe is still good for another couple of books. The characters are well established now and everybody is guessing, when she will finally get to do the deed with Ryan? Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003 "The House” by Bentley Little…Teddy had….Patty was….Jennings followed….Shelly emerged….Daniel heard…..Laurie looked….Norton hated….Stromy drove…Mark was… Snoooooore! 80 pages of one prologue after the next and no story line to be found anywhere! Stephen King thinks this guy is “A Master Of The Macabre”. Oh yeah? I was jumping paragraphs after about 40 pages, because nothing was happening. Ok, ghostly shapes here, scary things there, but no indication of where all this was supposed to be going and no build-up of suspense at all. I briefly flipped through the 300 pages that followed and it looked as if this style of very brief chapters and constantly changing characters stays the same throughout the book. Thanks. Fuggit-about-it. Monday, Nov. 03, 2003 “The Pilot’s Wife” by Anita Shreve…. A pilot’s wife receives word that her husband’s plane has exploded in midair. While she is trying to deal with her grief, she realises that he has kept secrets from her. She begins to wonder if she ever really knew him. As she digs deeper and deeper into his life, she finds out more and more troubling details… How do we deal with grief? Do we ever really know a person? How much are we willing to accept and forgive? And how does it affect our past life? A very good book, I enjoyed it a lot. I found the final revelation at the end a bit over the top, but still highly recommended. Saturday, Oct. 25, 2003 Stephen Hunter, “Pale Horse Coming”…the first book I read by Stephen Hunter was extremly good, a lot of suspense, I could not put it down. So I had equally high expectations for this one. It is an almost classic tale of vengeance. Our hero Earl Swagger goes down south to a penal farm, to find a friend that has disappeared while investigating the whereabouts of a client. I don’t want to give too much away of the storyline…. He barely gets away, with his life and sanity intact…just…. And swears to come back to give them hell. He gatheres some tough and trigger happy gunmen around him and they go back…. So far so good. I really liked the first half of the book, up to the point when he escapes from the penal farm. But then it gets pretty weird. The gun fighters are just too over the top and I think he tries too hard to make them all these unusual characters. But what puts me off the most is probably the style the book is written in. It is set in the 1950’s and written like that. Fair enough, he tries to create the correct athmosphere. I just don’t like it, it keeps me dropping out of the story because it feels so unrealisitc to me. So basically a good book, but just a bit too weird to be really great. Thursday, Oct. 09, 2003 "The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. Very good! Really enjoyed that. Harvard professor is in Paris for a lecture, gets called to the corpse of a Louvre curator. Next to his body the police has found a serious of mysterious codes and they want his help to solve the riddle. The clues lead to Leonardo da Vinci and one of the biggest mysteries of history. But at that time our hero is not only running from the police but also for his life…. Could not put it down and will definitely look for his other books. Nicholas Guyatt, “The Absence of Peace. Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”. Boooooring! Living in den neighbourhood, I am obviously intersted. But this was just too dry. Thursday, Oct. 02, 2003 Paul Sussman, “The Lost Army of Cambyses”, not bad, picks up a lot of speed towards the end with some very good parts in between. Every now and then a bit lame though. The characters are a bit stereotypical and wooden. Set in Egypt. A dead body turns up in Luxor and another one in Cairo, seemingly unconnected. An archaeologist is found dead in his house at Saqqara. His daughter is suspicious and starts to investigate. Everything points to an important archaeological find and all of a sudden she is running for her life…. |
| Books, books and books......... |
| The last 10 books I read: Kathy Reichs - Grave Secrets Bentley Little - The House Anita Shreve - The Pilot's Wife Stephen Hunter - Pale Horse Coming Dan Brown - The Da Vinci Code Nicholas Guyatt - The Absence of Peace. Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Paul Sussman - The Lost Army of Cambyses Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time 1: The Eye of the World Aimee E. Liu - Cloud Mountain Bill Bryson - Mother Tongue |
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| ...in October & November 2003 |