Read one book a month

I read The Golden City. Took me less than a week. It’s an easy read, sweeps you along well. Read the review at allconsuming.

I just finished reading Tell No One. I’d already seen the movie, but it was still worth reading.

I just finished Mary Doria Russell’s Dreamers of the Day: A Novel. This is a sort of timely travelogue and historical fiction piece about the middle east and western imperialism in the early 1900’s.

It starts out pretty slow going. We follow the narrator through a rather dull, dreary childhood. In that sense, it brought to mind Of Human Bondage. The plot picks up when the heroine inherits a fortune and kicks up her heels. Unfortunately, the story does not wander off into Somerset Maugham’s transcendentalism, but instead follows the narrator through some rather more mundane experiences.

The book is marginally worth reading. Mary Doria Russell is an accomplished author, no doubt about that, so anything she writes is probably worth reading. But I’ve never been keen on historical fiction because I’m never sure what’s supposed to be real and what’s made up (even though this book has a short appendix going into some of that). I didn’t like the way the book ended, with some pseudo-mysticism or magical realism, whatever that was. And like I said, the beginning was a bit of a yawner. I found the narrator only mildly interesting – i.e. sympathetic, but kind of boring. I suspect this book was much more fun to research and write than it was to read. Perhaps fans of historical fiction would differ with me.

I see the author has a new book planned which is based on the life of Doc Holliday. I’ll definitely take a look at that when it comes out; sounds more interesting to me.

Kind of a yawner, but OK for an intro.

I finished The Joy of Living today. It’s a good discussion of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices. The only part that didn’t interest me was the attempt to bring in quantum physics. In contrast, the descriptions of brain studies were pretty interesting. Good book!

I finished Firewall in a few short days. Police procedurals are not my usual fare, but I found the story pretty suspenseful and easy to speed through. The end was a little bit of a disappointment, but it’s still very well worth reading.

I finished Greg Bear’s Quantico, yesterday, a speculative fiction novel about bioterrorism. It’s so-so.

I just finished The Genesis Code. It’s a much easier read than Free to Choose, which is boring the heck out of me.

This morning, I finished reading The Dark River, book two of “The Fourth Realm Trilogy”, written by John Twelve Hawks. This is an excellent suspense, fantasy/science fiction novel.

I finished The Traveler today, and I’m eager to start The Dark River.