Monday, August 01, 2005

Book Review #1

One of the few advantages of using public transport is that you have a little "quiet time" to enjoy some high quality (or otherwise) literature.
On this occasion I decided that I would read the few books that have been sitting on the bookshelf for years and that we have transported accros the sea although I hadn't yet read them.

The first being, "Terminal Man" by Micheal Crichton, Acceptable but so umemorable that I only realised that I had read it before when I was half way through. Certainly wasn't worth reading a second time.

The second being Joseph Wambaugh, "Lines and Shadows". Now, it is quite commen for me to read sentences more than once to attempt to extract some hidden meaning or to digest the ramifications of what I have just read. With this, however, I ended up reading sentences and even paragraphs multiple times just to extract meaning, which when finally grasped seemed disjointed and often meaningless within the context. After 2 Chapters and many headaches I gave up. For me this was simply unreadable, but realising that you can't just take my word for it, I turned to 2 other intelligent creatures for independant opinions. As you can see they only needed to read the first page before deciding that there was better ways to amuse themselves with this book than read it!!!!

The third (and possibly last for a little while as it is difficult to read books whilst riding a bike (alternative to bus)) was "Stalking Horse" by Terence Strong. This came with a single glowing reference from the "Yorkshire Times". It seems that Yorkshire men are indeed to be trusted and this proved to be quite unputdownable. Not the best book that I have ever read, but the short time that the 500 odd pages were consumed (not quite lit. like the last book though!!!) was an indication of the desire to know more and find out what happens in the end.

1 comment:

Nick said...

I believe that 'Terminal Man' was made into a stylish, though somewhat undramatic, film in the early 70s. But I doubt the local video library would have it . . .