Here's a good plan for when you have finished an audiobook and all your other audiobooks are still on hold at the library and you're unlikely to get one for a few more weeks - you go to your Goodreads "to-read" list and you start searching to see what is available.
What is not a good idea, is to go to your library's "available now" section of audiobooks, because then you will wander blithely into picking a mediocre novel by a famous author who once "stunned" the world with a provocative explosively popular novel over a decade ago.
I think I was living in Italy when Dan Brown's The Davinci Code came out and I bought it from my Air Force Base's BX Store (in hardback!) and proceeded to read it in about three days. It was not Brown's first book to feature Harvard professor and symbologist Robert Langdon, but it was certainly his most popular. From it a movie with Tom Hanks was made, and since I love Tom Hanks, I saw that too. But although I went back and read all of Brown's earlier work, I haven't read anything published after The Davinci Code.
So I walked into Inferno knowing that Robert Langdon was back, and this was apparently a fourth Langdon novel (I entirely missed a third that came out some time ago). And well, my impression of Inferno is that I didn't miss much. In this one, Langdon wakes up in a hospital room, having been shot in Florence, Italy and he has retrograde amnesia covering the past 48 hours. Pursued by unknown assassins, he and a young English doctor, Sienna Brooks, must follow the path left by a madman prior to his suicide. The man, a famed geneticist named Bertran Zobrist - significantly obsessed with Dante and an impending global catastrophe represented by overpopulation - has left a video of himself placing a virus in a subterranean lagoon set to deploy in the next 36 hours.
Langdon and Brooks must attempt to locate the virus before it is too late. Of course not all is as it seems, including the virus and Brooks herself.
I get it, by this point, Brown has the formula down that makes him money. Link up some obscure locations and facts, underlay a conspiracy and shadowy groups that operate on the margins, and have Langdon go on a treasure hunt of sorts to find the pieces. Voila, publishing gold. Really at this point Brown likely has so much money, more books are not necessary, but the publishing contracts don't fulfill themselves I suppose.
But this one felt a little more lifeless than the Davinci Code. A little more rote. It was sort of like a chase scene combined with a Rick Steve's guide and somehow had an underwhelming baby. The evil guy was seriously weird and twisted, but actually not that evil. The symbols were detailed and well researched, but for all that I'm not really sure they served a purpose other than leading us on a 400 page scavenger hunt.
Was I entertained? Yes. But since I wasn't on the beach or an airplane, this felt like too little work, for too little reward. I did end up recently watching the movie and several things were changed from the book, including the entire ending. (you can rent the movie here).
3/5 Stars.
Great read! This book took forever to receive from the library and it's more than 20 years old! That's how you know a book has some kind of extra quality that takes it out of the realm of popular and into a more sustainable category when it begins to weave a tale of lasting characters and universal truths.
Berendt said he was not writing a story about Savannah for Savannah, but rather about Savannah for people who had never heard of Savannah before. And he certainly delivered. In the realm of narrative non-fiction, this book is one of the best. Titillating characters, a murder, a trial, a trial, a trial and a trial - this book wraps them all up and manages to make them all relate to one another.
Berendt visits Savannah on a weekend holiday and decides he needs to set up shop there to really get a feel for the city. He's right of course, you can't visit a city and really understand it, you do have to live there. And on the way he introduces us to a cast of characters that couldn't have been made better even if the book were fiction. In fact, the best part is that none of this is fiction.
Jim Williams is a wealthy, and a bit eccentric, antiques dealer who is charged with murder in the shooting death of his young lover. Joe Odom is a charming penniless piano player/lawyer, and The Lady Chablis is a black drag queen with a huge personality. The first half of the book introduces us to these and other minor characters. The rest of the book details mostly the trial, retrial, retrial and retrial of Jim Williams for the death of Danny Hansford.
The book occasionally started to feel a little stale, but these moments were far and few between. I can see why the book has done so well, and left such a lasting mark on Savannah and people's view of Savannah. After reading the book I set out to watch the movie. Aside from Chablis, who was a real treat, the movie felt kind of flat, which was very surprising. (Watch it yourself here).
4/5 Stars.
This is a beautifully written, fascinating, tragic, and simply human look at the end of life. Tragically unfair is the diagnosis of lung cancer handed out to neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi at the age of 36. His exploration of what death and the end of life mean in this short but moving book is so succinctly and honestly written it's breathtaking.
The audio version is narrated by Sunil Malhotra, who has become one of my favorite audiobook narrators (he also narrated the audio version of Cutting for Stone - you can read my review of that book here). Malhotra's voice clearly distills the melody of Kalanithi's words.
I can't imagine getting the same news Kalanithi received at the age of 36 - my current age. On the cusp of finishing his neurosurgery residency and beginning his life's passion as a surgeon/scientist, Kalanithi's promise is cut short and the world is the lesser for his absence. His reflections of being a doctor, and then a patient are so straightforward and true, but in his description it gains an added element of empathy and understanding.
While I mourn that the world lost such a giving soul and brilliant mind, it's consolation (though small) that he left behind this beautiful piece of work that somehow avoids being overly sad and saccharine, and goes right to the heart of matters, without getting needlessly weepy.
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| Paul Kalanithi, M.D. |
Thank goodness for clear-headed Scots, or this book would have been a real mess. Maddie, her husband Ellis, and their friend Hank decide to travel to Drumnadrochit, a small town on the shores of Loch Ness, during the middle of WWII to capture evidence of "The Monster." See, both Hank and Ellis are 4F, unfit for service in the war due to flat footedness and color blindness, respectively. Two otherwise able bodied men about town, Ellis and Hank are increasingly uncomfortable with the judgments they get from others.
This all comes to a head on New Year's Eve, when Ellis, Hank and Maddie get so drunk at a party that they misbehave and Ellis claims his father's spotting of the Loch Ness Monster many years before was a sham. This is apparently a family sore spot, as his father claims to have photographic evidence of his sighting, but later journalists claimed the photos were a hoax. Word about this gets back to Ellis' parents, with whom he and Maddie live, and his father decides to cut Ellis off and kick him and his wife out of the house.
I should mention at this point that Ellis has nowhere to go with his wife because HE'S A HORRIBLE PERSON. Seriously, the guy is THE WORST. It's obvious from very early on in the book. So Hank and Ellis book passage for the three of them across the ocean amid u-boat sinkings and all so Ellis can prove there is a monster and redeem his father and family's honor. The arrive at an Inn and act like completely spoiled brats because during a war there isn't anything better to eat for breakfast than porridge.
There's a bunch of whining on the part of Maddie as she has no idea how she'll survive if Ellis leaves her at the Inn on her own. But eventually, she becomes more likeable by whining less and the two women, Anna and Meg, that work at the Inn befriend her. They teach Maddie how to do her own hair, and basically be a decent human being, all the while HORRIBLE Ellis and slightly less horrible Hank run around completely oblivious.
But you know what's not oblivious, Ellis has a real thing for Hank. And when it turns out that Ellis got to marry Maddie due to the result of a coin toss, it's not all that surprising that the arrangement suited Ellis, who barely shows interest in his wife, and would rather spend time with Hank. No one else seems to say this, but at some point it becomes clear that everyone finally gets it. And at that point, I had a Dixie Chicks moment and knew that "Ellis had to die." I mean, it gets to the point that the only solution is for Ellis to die.
The rest of the story leading up to will he or won't he die is a bit predictable. But the stakes are raised for our Maddie and the owner of the Inn, a war hero named Angus who broods in the background smolderingly.
I think I'd say this book was 3.5 stars, but it gets 4 because Maddie finally became a likeable character about 40% of the way through the book.
4/5 Stars.
