Books

Confessions Of A Demented Housewife is what I call a toilet book: you leave it in the bathroom and pick it up for five or ten minutes at a time. It doesn't require massive amounts of brain power, it's quite funny, but neither is there any compelling reason to read it from cover to cover in one sitting.

In God Is Dead, author Ron Currie imagines a world in which God dies after becoming incarnate as female refugee in Sudan.

It's an interesting premise for the book. Currie starts with God dying in a bleak war zone, then explores the global aftermath as the world comes to terms with the fact that the creator is dead. In a nutshell, society shuts down for a while - mass suicides are the start of it, with the clergy finding their raison d'etre has disappeared.

After a while though, society starts to rebuild, but things aren't quite the same. People still need to believe in something, and so parents start to worship their children, taking time off work to spend more and more time with their offspring. Later on, the rise of ideological cults like the Evolutionary Psychologists and the Postmodern Anthropologists leads to a 'holy war' which tears the population apart. Does the human race have a natural tendency toward divisive ideologies?

Sometimes when you review a book, you really just want to say whether you liked it or not.

But books by Chuck Palahniuk are a rare exception. I've read Fight Club, Invisible Monsters and Survivor. His books are a freefall of ideas that cause you to re-evaluate everything in your life and leave your brain throbing restlessly inside your skull. Reviewers constantly refer to this as 'millennial angst'. What this means is that Palahniuk's prose causes you to look at the world and see all the vapidity and commercialism. Suddenly it seems the most abhorent thing ever, and you just want to jump in a shower and wash it all off.

The last novel of Stephen King’s that I read was The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - the book which preceded Dreamcatcher. I’ve also seen the Dreamcatcher movie but thankfully have no memory of that apparent travesty, so I read the book with virtually a clean slate.

Anyway, useless trivia aside, let me tell you a bit about the plot, and then I’ll fill you in on what I thought of the book.

The Story

In their early adolescence, four boys do a brave thing and stand up for a young handicapped boy who is being bullied by some larger boys. They form a tight friendship with Douglas ‘Duddits’ Cavell and due to this shared bond, they all discover that to some extent they have telepathic or extrasensory powers.

Unable to do anything life-changing with these powers, the four grow up, and loose touch with their childhood friend. The four meet up annually for a hunting trip in the woods. On the last of these trips, the four find themselves in the middle of a military quarantine area just following an actual, honest to goodness alien invasion.

Sad news for any fans of the famous author Michael Crichton - he died yesterday (4th November 2008) after what has been described as a "private battle with cancer". He was 66 years old.

I was a big fan of Crichton's work during the 90's, and read all the Jurassic Park novels, and I actually read his "sexual politics in the workplace" novel Disclosure before I saw the film.

Many of Crichton's novels were given film adaptations, including Congo, Sphere and The Andromeda Strain. However, after Jurassic Park, his biggest achievement must be the long running medical drama, ER, which debuted back in 1994.

An official statement from the author's family reads:

Servant Of The Bones is a novel from Anne Rice written during the mid-nineties. Having written extensively about vampires, mummies and witches, the story introduces another supernatural creature – the Genie.

Azriel is the son of a Jewish merchant in ancient Babylon. Living amid the opulence and splendour of the court there, he starts to see the Babylonian god Marduk. When the members of the court realise this though, they conspire to use Azriel to invoke a centuries-old enchantment – they drug him up and involve him in a ceremony to welcome the conquering Persian, Cyrus (no relation to Billie Ray). When the ceremony is over, Azriel is numb and knows he is dying. However, he is brought to another place where his body is placed in a caldron of boiling gold. As the pain overcomes him, he has an out of body experience and his spirit floats above the cauldron as his body dies and is boiled down to the bones.

It's a question the bereaved have been asking themselves for years - what would you do if you could have one more conversation with a loved one who'd died?

That's what Mitch Albom investigates in For One More Day. The main character, Chick Bennetto, is a down on his luck drunk. He traces his downfall back to his mother's death nine years previously. Following her death, Chick descends into alcoholic dependency and manages to alienate and lose his wife and daughter.

Finally, at the height of his desperation, he decides to return to his hometown and end his life. However, an accident en route to the house severely wounds him, and he staggers to the old family home. However, when he enters the house, his mother is there, seemingly alive and unaware of the fact that she was buried years ago!

Oh Lestat, what have you done now? At the end of The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice's beloved Brat Prince has incurred the wrath of vampires across the globe and somehow managed to awaken the vampire Akasha from a slumber of a few thousand years. And such is her fascination with the fanged Frenchman that she grants herself a quickie divorce from her 6,000 year old husband, Enkil. By bleeding him dry (in a vampiric sense - lawyers would have only slowed things down).

Anyhow, having read quite a number of Anne Rice's vampire chronicles, I'm inclined to say that The Queen Of The Damned is one of the best. For a start, it's not totally devoted to Lestat. We finally get a chance to look around at other vampires and see the colour and variation of their characters.

It's a joy, for instance, to see Marius spurned by the ancient vampire he's protected for a couple of thousand years. To see Marius's assumptions shattered and the utter disdain of Akasha for him. And his resulting bitterness is something you never expect to see from one of the most self-assured immortals in Rice's savage garden.

This was my first reading of a Jeffery Deaver book, so I only went in expecting a series of short stories.

Twisted is a collection of short stories, all with a twist (hence the title). It's a book full of double-crossing, untold intent and intrigue. The cool thing about short stories is that you can pick them up at any time, which makes them ideal bathroom reading.

The protagonists in Deaver's stories are almost always paranoid, believing themselves to be at the centre of elaborate schemes by family, friends or colleagues. The thing is, they're almost always right!

I was sceptical about The Righteous Men from the moment I read the strapline across the top: "The Greatest Challenger To Dan Brown's Crown".

Aw, shite. Not another Da Vinci Code rip-off.