Audio Books in my car. Journeys seem to contract amazingly when your mind is occupied by a good book.
* Avoid
** OK if you’ve nothing better to do
*** Worth the effort
**** Excellent
***** A must-read that will stick with you in your head
**** Matthew Reilly - Ice Station. Very much an action story, this describes a series of events around an ice station in Antarctica using brilliantly devised characters and loads of detail. Really enjoyable stuff.
** Daniel Silva - The Messenger. Weaved around the intricate politics and moralities involved in the “war on terror”, this has an authoritative feel to it. The characters aren’t bad, but the book suffers from some over-long dialogue in a few places.
*** Harry Thompson - Penguins Stopped Play. Now here’s a silly story. An English village cricket club with dubious quality trying their luck in spots around the globe? I almost gave up early in the book because it just seemed pointless, but I stuck with it and was extremely glad I did. The sections on British Airways are outstanding, and the ending of the whole book is unforgettable.
**** Jack Higgins - Bad Company. Higgins paints some nice characters and the plot keeps moving well - you feel like you’re watching a movie.
**** Jack Higgins - Edge of Danger. Same characters, top fun
**** Jack Higgins - Dark Justice. And again!
* Colin Forbes - Rhinocerous. I thought this might be like Jack Higgins. I was wrong - it’s rubbish. The big mastermind guy builds a machine to destroy the internet.
**** James Patterson - The 5th Horseman. A smashing tale of police work, courtroom drama (fab!), and true-to-life pain made this one of the most enjoyable audio books I’ve had. The reader on this one was particularly good, really drawing out every ounce of meaning in the words.
** James Patterson - Cross. Grisly murders and a decent plot, but not one of the best books I’ve had.
***** Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveller’s Wife. Recommended by my wife and dad, I was a bit disappointed when I started on this. As I got more into it, though, I found it totally absorbing and well worth a read. I expect to read it again.
**** Lee Child - Echo Burning. Very slow to get going, but compelling and intense in the end. Jack Reacher is a brilliant hero.
**** Lee Child - Without Fail. Again, Jack Reacher is excellent. There’s a real sense of time and space in these books that you just get lost in.
*** Lee Child - Persuader. Just when you thought Jack Reacher is scary, you read a book with him in the first person. Now that is brilliant.
*** Lee Child - One Shot. Clever and subtle, everything seems so obvious in the end. More Jack Reacher.
**** Lee Child - The Enemy. Another first person Jack Reacher tale, this one’s set back in the Army days. Cleverly carries off a real sense of mystery and conspiracy, with a healthy dose of Reacher dryness.
**** Lee Child - Nothing to Lose. Very up to date, post-9/11 story with the ever-present Jack Reacher. This mystery had a few different strands, and is set in the twin towns of Hope and Despair, a fact which is almost enough to warrant 4 stars on its own!
**** Clive Cussler - The Treasure of Khan. There are loads of CC books with Dirk Pitt as the hero, but for me it’s the humour, teamwork, and leadership that make these what they are. A cracking set of characters that lifts a moderate plot to something really strong.
**** Clive Cussler - Sacred Stone. More leadership and teamwork, this story is very rich in quality. Exciting and pacy, there’s a real-world feel to it in the way some of the action is limited by having to work out how and when helicopters will re-fuel, etc.
*** Clive Cussler - Skeleton Coast. Again, brilliant action thriller. One of those few authors I regret leaving the car for! It’s worth mentioning that Jeff Harding’s readings are superb, too.
*** Clive Cussler - Serpent. I like Clive Cussler, but this isn’t his best. I don’t mind his plots being a bit far-fetched, but this one seemed to move along rather awkwardly too.
** Dan Brown - Deception Point. The action keeps going at a great pace, but the characters are a bit shallow and some of the action is just too unbelievable. Worst thing about this book is the way the plot uses some of the exact same ruses as the Da Vinci Code - it’s almost embarrassing.
* Dan Brown - Angels and Demons. I fancied something mindless, and I got it. Once again, Brown uses the same old ruses. If you’ve read the Da Vinci Code or Deception Point, don’t bother with this.
*** Ben Elton - Dead Famous. Appalling language but true to Big Brother, this is one of the best whodunnits you could ever read. A murder in the Big Brother house! All those cameras, but no idea who did it…
* Ben Elton - Past Mortem. More bad language and sex, with grisly muders to boot. I found this one unnecessarily graphic in places, and a little predictable in who the murderer was.
** Terry Pratchett - Wings. I can’t quite make up my mind. Some bits are laugh-out-lound funny but the plot is just a bit too silly. I was glad I read it, but I’m not sure I’d read more in the series (Diggers and Truckers).
** Michael Palin - Pole to Pole. Another slightly disappointing read; Palin’s writing is a bit wooden. The events he describes and the contrasting conditions he saw are amazing.
* Sidney Sheldon - Are you afraid of the dark?. Average pulp, fattened out.
***** Bob Geldof on Africa. A must read. Funny, moving, terrible, encouraging, disheartening, insightful. A must read.
***** Bill Clinton - My Life. A fascinating insight into a towering intellect and what drives someone to run for Presidency. He is as open about his failures as he is his successes; his childhood and early years are full of surprises (not all good); the challenges he faced put any job into perspective. On the Monica Lewinsky situation he says, “I have always loved my wife very much, but not always very well.” His remarks about how Bush won the election over Gore and the partisan tricks that prevented the Florida re-count are astonishingly withering; a piece of history on which more hinged than anyone could have known at the time.
** Sophie Kinsella - Can you Keep a Secret?. A chick-lit. If you’re a man, it’s a scary piece of enlightenment about what goes on inside a woman’s head! As a book, it’s funny in places and boring in others. A literary sit-com.
**** David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas. Now this really is an original piece. Start story 1; interrupt with story 2; interrupt that with story 3; and so on until you turn around and start resolving stories, coming back to story 3, story 2, story 1. There are links between the apparently unrelated stories. Few books require you to hold their entire contents in your head right to the end, but this one does and it’s brilliant.
**** David Mitchell - Black Swan Green. This bloke has a way with words that leaves you dizzy. This is about a boy of 13 and it’s amazingly perceptive.
*** Kathy Reichs - Monday Mourning. I’d been warned that Ms Reichs can be gruesome, but I found the scientific approach took the gratuitous edge off. This was pretty well written except for the glaring error that the heroine made at the end - it was too hard to believe. A nice touch was that it was set in Canada, about which I knew very little.
*** Tami Hoag - Prior Bad Acts. Sometimes somewhat grisly, this is a pretty good American cop book.
*** Walter Moseley - Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Here’s another original book. It’s about Socrates Fortlow, a man who is trying to build a life after 27 years in prison for murdering someone with his own hands. Each chapter explores his understanding of morality and the challenges of living an honest life in terrible times.
***** Alistair Campbell - The Blair Years. It seems that Mr Campbell has a heart as well as a brain! If you had ever wondered what went on within Tony Blair’s inner circle then this is for you. An absolutely compelling read.
*** Andrea Camilleri - The Terracotta Dog. A simple-enough crime novel set in Sicily, with lovely subtle humour throughout. The plot loses strength but the characters are a delight, particularly the main man, Inspector Montelbano.
**** John Burdett - Bangkok Tattoo. A crime novel set in Thailand. This is a very unusual book, where the plot is almost incidental. It’s the city, the culture, and the characters that make this so intriguing. There’s more explicit content than I like, but the author seems to be at pains to stress that that is part of the celebration of life in a Bhuddist mind; indeed, the introduction to “applied Bhuddism” and the Thai view of the “Farang” West are remarkable insight.
** Robert Ludlam - The Altman Code. This was my first Ludlam book, and it’s not bad. I did get the feeling that the underlying plot might have been considered too linear so he padded it out a bit.
