Villa of Mysteries April 30, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book Reviews, Mystery.Tags: David Hewson, Season for the Dead, Villa of Mysteries
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—2.5—
Well, I wasn’t super impressed with the second in the Nic Costa series by David Hewson, The Villa of Mysteries. In this mystery, set again in Rome, a mother insists to the police that her 16-year old daughter has been abducted from a busy square. While the officers aren’t concerned, Nic Costa believes there’s a connection to a recently unearthed corpse currently being examined. Teresa Lupo, the head police pathologist, begins to find similarities between the two, including a mysterious tattoo. Lupo fears that the girl has been abducted to play a role in a strange ancient ritual, one involving disturbing sexual aspects and sometimes murder. Soon, a connection is found between this abduction, the ritual ceremony, and Rome’s organized crime ring. Nic and Teresa must work from both sides of the crime to save the innocent, if anyone involved actually is innocent.
I like the character Nic Costa a great deal. He is intelligent and caring, but not without his own demons. However, Costa’s role was much smaller in this novel than in Season for the Dead, the first in the series. More time was spent with his new partner, his boss, the leader of the Mob, or with the pathologist Lupo. I would have liked more time seeing the crime from Costa’s point of view, however, I think Lupo’s expanded role is because Hewson plans on making her a larger part of the rest of the series. I didn’t enjoy the large sections narrated by the Mob boss; I felt it dragged the story down, and made it more confusing. There were a lot of characters in the book, and it took a long time for any of them to progress to something new. I often felt like everything was at a standstill, which may have been intentional by Hewson, but it also made the book hard to pick up sometimes. My last complaint may seem silly, but I hated the length of the chapters. I suppose they were more like “sections” or “parts” (they were over 100 pages), but there were no good breaks within them. I felt it hurt the mystery’s flow and continuity, and the storyline got bogged down with it. Overall, the storyline was interesting, and the I enjoyed the pathological research from Teresa Lupo, but The Villa of Mysteries wasn’t as good as Season for the Dead due to it’s lack of flow and excitement. I think I will, however, continue reading this series by David Hewson.
2.5/5
Try The Villa of Mysteries by David Hewson if you liked the first in the Nic Costa series A Season for the Dead.
50 Best Cult Books April 29, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book News, Randomness.Tags: 50 Best Cult Books
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Saw this article on The Telegraph of their 50 best cult books. I thought the choices were good. Unfortunately for me it seems, I’ve only read 4! Slaughterhouse-Five, The Bell Jar, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Jonathan Livingston Seagull I will be reading probably in the next month, since I just bought it and am apparently the only person who’s never read this. And I have started and failed at Siddhartha, and Catcher in the Rye.
This is how they determined which books qualify as “cult” books:
“In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.”
I like that.
The Trench April 26, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book Reviews, General Fiction.Tags: Meg, Steve Alten, The Loch, The Trench
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—2.5—
As those who know me can attest, I occasionally (often) like to read bad books. But not just any bad books, but books that are meant to be bad, and therefore are just entertaining, mindless, and sometimes a bit humorous. That is why I forayed, once again, into the work of Steve Alten. This time I read his sequel to MEG, called The Trench. As you may or may not remember from MEG, we left paleobiologist Jonas Taylor, after the death of Meg, the Megaladon (huge prehistoric shark) he unleashed from the Marianas Trench. Now he works with his father-in-law in an aquarium who’s star attraction is Meg’s offspring, Angel. Angel is bigger and badder than Meg, and trying to escape. Of course she does, and The Trench is the story of the destruction she causes, and Taylor’s attempt to stop it once and for all. Of course, there are terrorists, a seductress, the CIA, nuclear fusion, and pliesiosaurs, because what good novel wouldn’t have all these?
So is this a life-altering book? No. Is it fun and entertaining? Yes. Fans of MEG will certainly enjoy this sequel. And even though I knew it was going to be my kind of a “bad” book, I was still left with two questions: 1) Who seriously names a character Captain Morgan, and 2) If the escape of a terrifying prehistoric shark is international news, and it is common knowledge that her location is unknown, why do all these people still go to the beach, go on fishing trips, or even get into boats at all? I mean, really.
2.5/5
Try The Trench if you liked MEG by Steve Alten, or Steve Alten’s other novel The Loch.
New York Times Bestsellers 4.23.08 April 23, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Randomness.add a comment
Top 5
1. WHERE ARE YOU NOW?, by Mary Higgins Clark
2. UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, by Jhumpa Lahiri
3. CERTAIN GIRLS, by Jennifer Weiner
4. BELONG TO ME, by Marisa de los Santos
5. SMALL FAVOR, by Jim Butcher
Top 5
1. HOME, by Julie Andrews
2. MISTAKEN IDENTITY, by Don and Susie Van Ryn and Newell, Colleen and Whitney Cerak, with Mark Tabb
3. BEAUTIFUL BOY, by David Sheff
4. LADIES OF LIBERTY, by Cokie Roberts
5. ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT, by Kurt Vonnegut
Blasphemy April 22, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book Reviews, General Fiction.Tags: Best Sellers, Blasphemy, Douglas Preston, Fiction, Religion, Science, Tyrannosaur Canyon
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—3—
I really need to stop reading books where religion plays a major role; I’m getting tired of it. Lately, it’s been my own fault, I’ve chosen these books right? But this time I plead ignorance (a scary word, I know); I saw this on the library’s shelf last week and didn’t have something to read next, so I brought it home.
Blasphemy by Douglas Preston pits science against religion, and in the end turns science into a religion. At Red Mesa, on Navajo territory, the government has spent 40 billion dollars to build the most sophisitcated particle accelerator the world has seen in an attempt to rejuvinate American science. This accelerator is lovingly dubbed Isabella, and it’s purpose is to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, to learn about the event that started the universe, and perhaps aquire a new source of energy. At least that’s what the public and scientists are led to believe, but Isabella’s creator, Gregory Hazelius, has something else in mind.
Soon, the government finds that Isabella is not functioning as it should, and ex-CIA man Wyman Ford (previously in Tyrannosaur Canyon) is hired by a presidential advisor to go undercover and discover why. What he discovers is that something claiming to be God is talking to the scientists, and this voice has a mission for them.
Meanwhile, a televangelist and a crazy Born-Again Christian pastor decide that Isabella must be destroyed. They promote their agenda by arguing that because Isabella is about researching the Big Bang, it is trying to disprove God. What results is a mob of excited, violent fundamentalists, the threat of a nuclear explosion, and the possibility of a God that certainly is not the one Christians imagine.
While it sounds exciting, and was in some portions, I found Blasphemy’s progress too slow. Some days seemed like needless repeats of the ones before. I liked the physics and science in the book, and Preston does raise some interesting questions about faith, what science might some day discover while probing the unexplored universe, and just how gullible even the most educated and intelligent of us are.
3/5
Try Blasphemy by Douglas Preston if you enjoyed his other novel, with the character Wyman Ford, Tyrannosaur Canyon.
Will Books Survive the Internet? April 20, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book News, Randomness.Tags: Julia Keller
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Here’s a neat article from the Chicago Tribune by Julia Keller from today, called “Relevance of the book questioned in Internet age?”. The basic question she raises is:
Yet in an age in which computers are as common as cockroaches, in which the Internet is king, in which seemingly every crumb of information is being sucked up and digitized in a busy blur, does the book—the tangible kind, not the virtual version—have a future?
But it seems that library usage is up, as well as book sales. It’s a interesting article, check it out.
A Season for the Dead April 18, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book Reviews, Mystery.Tags: A Season for the Dead, David Hewson, Villa of Mysteries
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—3.5—
A confession. 200 pages. It took me 200 pages. I read 200 pages before I realized I had already read this book! First of all, what does that say about the book? Secondly, and more importantly, what does that say about me?! I’m losing it.
In David Hewson’s A Season for the Dead, Nic Costa is a young detective brought in to solve a series of murders in Italy meant to reflect the deaths of martyrs. While Professor Sara Farnese sits in a Vatican library, a former lover brings the skin of a man to her desk and then is killed by security. Now Nic must solve a series of crimes that seem to stem from this woman. Along the way, he himself becomes entranced with Sara, and therefore vulnerable to the serial murderer.
This is an entertaining police-procedural, full of suspicious characters, immoral religious leaders, and of course the religious-zealot serial killer. Nic Costa’s character is the one stabilizing force that keeps A Season for the Dead exciting, instead of veering off into the ridiculous. This is the first in the Nic Costa series by David Hewson, and I look forward to reading more of them. Although, perhaps I’ll only read these the one time though. It was a good book, but I don’t think good enough to read twice. Oops!
3.5/5
New York Times Bestsellers 4.14.08 April 14, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Randomness.add a comment
Top 5
1. UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, by Jhumpa Lahiri
2. SMALL FAVOR, by Jim Butcher
3. COMPULSION, by Jonathan Kellerman
4. THE APPEAL, by John Grisham
5. BELONG TO ME, by Marisa de los Santos
Top 5
1. MISTAKEN IDENTITY, by Don and Susie Van Ryn and Newell, Colleen and Whitney Cerak, with Mark Tabb
2. HOME, by Julie Andrews
3. BEAUTIFUL BOY, by David Sheff
4. ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT, by Kurt Vonnegut
5. VINDICATED, by Jose Canseco
The God Delusion April 13, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book Reviews, Nonfiction.Tags: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
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—4—
I’m really not interested in getting into anything controversial on my book blog, but I just finished Richard Dawkins’ work The God Delusion so I’m going to say a few things. I have mixed feelings about this book. Dawkins is very insightful, and I found he about covered every type of bizarre confrontation I’ve had with overexcited believers in the past. But the book also made me sad because, does it do any good? It’s still going to be taboo to argue against religion, and only non-believers will ever pick up this book. Overall, without going into too much, Richard Dawkins presents well reasoned and researched arguments, without being dry or condescending. I disliked much of the middle section, however, because it seemed to veer off-topic. Or, more likely, he stayed on topic but I wasn’t capable of following it. The book’s main topics include: how religions form, why human morality does not come from the scripture or religion, and the facts of science which are based on evidence, not faith. Anyways, I don’t want to upset any of my religious friends and family (I love you!), so I’m not going into it anymore. It was a good book for those interested, and even believers might be curious about its perspective.
4/5
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” — Douglas Adams
It’s Library Week! April 13, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Randomness.Tags: Library Week
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National Library Week is April 13-19!
Celebrate your local library and check out a good book.
