What are you currently reading?

[ChrisC]

At the moment I have just started The Terror by Dan Simmons. Dan portrays the cold very well in the book, enjoying it so far.

[admin]

Just got back from a trip to New York (Billy Elliot is great, avoid The 39 Steps, Shrek has good acting but mediocre songs.) My trip book was The Judgment of Caesar, one of Steven Saylor's excellent Roman mysteries.

[ChrisC]

Island by Aldous Huxley. Put The Terror by Dan Simmons on hold for a bit for this one.

[admin]

I just finished "Enigma" by Robert Harris. It's a "thriller" about the breaking of the German Enigma code during WWII. I enjoyed it -- but I didn't enjoy it all that much. Scratch Harris from my reading list.

It is a lot easier for an author to loose readers than to gain readers.

I loved Robert Harris's "Pompei", so I bought all the books he wrote before "Pompei". I read two of them, "Fatherland" and "Enigma", and now I think I've got his number -- long, carefully researched novels about more or less powerless characters, with a chase scene near the end. Not good enough. I don't plan to read "Archangel" or "Ghost". I will read his novel "Imperium" because 1) I'm into all things Roman and 2) it got a solid five stars on amazon, alongside Pompei, while the others are four to four and a half.

[slaven41]

On the subject of Enigma, several years ago I read The Code Book by Simon Singh. It's a (non-fiction) history of codes and codebreaking, and it has a couple of chapters on Enigma. I think the author did a good job of describing how Enigma worked, what its weaknesses were (both inherent weaknesses and in how it was used), and how those weaknesses could be exploited. By the time I was done, I really felt like I was ready to crack Enigma. :-)

--Dave

[admin]

The Code Book sounds more interesting than the novel. No matter how good the research -- and Harris' research is very good -- unless the fiction part stands out, I'd rather read non-fiction.