A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

It is nearly one month to the day since I've posted a review. Tomorrow it will be exactly one month. I don't know what happened. I've had a review ready for a while, and I just haven't posted. In the meantime I read another book or two. I've read The Angel Makers by Jessica Gregson. I just finished it a couple days ago. It was very hard to find, and I finally broke down and bought a used copy on amazon. Other than the many typos, it was a good read. But that's not the book I'm reviewing. What Is Mine by Anne Holt is the first in a series. When I started reading it, I swore I read somewhere that it was the first of a trilogy, but upon further investigation after finishing it and reserving its follow up, I found out that it is not a trilogy. In the follow up the two characters are married. What? They weren't even dating yet at the end of What Is Mine ! Anyway. I digress. What Is Mine is from a highly acclaimed Norwegian crime writer-- I b...

Brixton Beach is a hard book to come by. It has very limited availability on Amazon--and only in the used market place. Luckily ILL was able to locate a copy for me to borrow; not so lucky with the other title I was looking for and was forced to break down and buy a used copy of off Amazon. Tearne is a British writer but is Sri Lanka born. The book opens upon a scene of terrifying chaos. Simon, a London doctor is frantically searching for a loved one amid the chaotic aftermath of a bombing on the London tube. The scene is bewildering and heart pounding and vividly drawn. In the next chapter we flash back to Sri Lanka; it is 1973 and Alice is nine. Her mother, Sita, is expecting a new baby. Sita is Singhalese; Stanley, Alice's father, is Tamil. In Sri Lanka the Tamils are a bitterly oppressed group and are seen as less civilized by the Singhalese, who are the ruling ethnic group. There's friction and tension slowly building to a violent conflict of civil war between th...

When the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue, and it wasn't until long afterward that I was able to see that there was a chain of events leading up to it. Some of those events had nothing to do with us, the Morrisons, but were solely the concern of the Pyes, who lived on a farm about a mile away and were our nearest neighbors." from page seven I must confess that it took me longer than it really needed to in order to finish the novel Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. The entire story is building up to the big catastrophe that forever destroys all the hopes and dreams the Morrison clan ever dared to hope and dream for its future. In the eyes of the narrator, it is even worse than the tragedy of the car crash that claimed both parents' lives one evening on the heels of some good news the family has received and celebrated. Now you can see why I dreaded getting to the end of a book that drips in foreboding like nobody's business. What can be a worse tr...

In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect by Ronald Kessler pretty much says it all in its title. One of the things that I liked best about this book was the short chapters. Especially recently I've found that if a book has rather long chapters, it is a big turn off for me. That was what drove me up the wall when I read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway in high school: it's a novella that was basically one long chapter. I hated it, and I hated the story. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was basically three really long chapters. Hated it. And I had to read it twice in college and write a paper on it both times. The first paper, for my introduction to literary criticism class, was about how I got nothing out of it and why I got nothing out of it. To be honest, the story itself is not one that I would choose to read on my own, so that didn't help it at all. But I digress....

District 9 is up against nine other films in the best picture categoy at this Sunday's Oscars. I've seen two or three of the other nominees and have plans to see some of the others when they come out on DVD; there's no telling who will get the Oscar for best picture this year although it seems like the two frontrunners are The Hurt Locker and Avatar . I recently watched District 9 starring Sharlto Copley. For some reason I was under the impression that the protagonist, Wikus van de Merwe, was a soldier who gets caught up in events in the alien ghetto. However, this was a false impression. Twenty years ago an alien ship came to earth; it came to rest over the South African capital of Johannesburg and there it hovered for months with nary a word or movement from it alien passengers. Finally a detail of humans were dispatched to breech the ship to reveal its secrets: mysterious alien technology and extremely malnourished aliens. The aliens were evacuated from the ship ...