Topic: Books Bookpile

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4:22pm, Tuesday 5 July 2005

I haven't done a reading round-up for a while so here's another...

  • Baudolino (Umberto Eco) - Fun premise based on truth and lies. Evocative and usually entertaining text, but rather too long to sustain the story. An engaging twist at the end.
  • Digital Fortress (Dan Brown) - Engaging level of detail let down by poor pacing, particularly right at the end. The last few scenes were very drawn out and could have been despatched much more quickly.
  • The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) - Taut and gripping. A real page-turner. The level of detail shows that a lot of research went into this.
  • Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) - Engrossing, almost as good as the Da Vinci Code. The twist near the end was somewhat predictable but that didn't detract from the story.
  • The Lighthouse Stevensons (Bella Bathurst) - Now this was fascinating, both from the technical point of view (how did 19th-century engineers construct a 100-foot tall lighthouse on a partly-submerged rock 11 miles off the coast?) and the social aspect of the Stevenson family -- some of whom are portrayed as almost socially disfunctional in their obsession with work.
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon) - I read this in just a few sittings because I found it so attractive. Several times I read a passage and thought "That's me! I think like that!" which is disconcerting, to say the least. The ending felt a little terse, which was disappointing.

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Dave Holland <dave@biff.org.uk>
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