Weekly Reading #11

I started out this week with James Grippando’s book Intent to Kill. Just okay for me. I like him well enough to keep reading and for when I don’t have anything else but I don’t find his characters engaging.

Then I moved onto Douglass Preston’s Kraken Project. I should have stuck with Grippando, who while not exciting didn’t annoy me so much. I normally like Preston when he’s writing with Lincoln Child. And maybe I should be even more impressed with Child after this. First, I found it irritating for Preston to toss of a comment about one of his characters loving The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut at age 10. Not a children’s book, really. Not even a kind of children’s book like you might find from Tolkien. Later, I find out she didn’t do well in school, although she is a genius. No she mostly spent time jacking cars and getting into trouble. Even less likely that she would have run across and loved Vonnegut at such a young age. Give me a back story to that if you want me to believe it. Of course our genius is also beautiful, is a crack shot and is basically a horse whisperer. She does have a gap in her front teeth, so she’s not perfect. Although she’s supposed to be bad with people, she seems to sleep around a lot and it causes a lot of tension at her work, because apparently the men want her back? I don’t know. That was more of a lack of coherance than anything else.

Other people have criticized the book for appearing to be an old one that Preston attempted to update. Lots of terms I haven’t heard in AI for a couple of decades, so I tend to agree with their assesment. Also, there were a lot of glaring errors in the computer technology. And let’s face it, Hal has already been done.

The best book this week was Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s I remember You. A nice ghost story. Suspenseful and creepy without any real blood or gore. The setting couldn’t be better and the suspense is well done. I’ve read her other books and found them to be only okay but this one just hit me right.

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