Book

A Tom Clancy book ghost-written by Mark Greaney, Threat Vector is a pretty fun read full of cyber-espionage and eventually, war with China. There are some idiotic plot elements and nauseous Hollywoodisation. But on the whole, it was quite entertaining.

Lee Child's third Jack Reacher book, Tripwire has an interesting plot, but ridiculously scripted. I think that the series would have been a whole lot better if it had been more risqué.

Ridiculous but entertaining which is what I guess the USP is.

Lee Child's second Jack Reacher book, Die Trying has a worse plot than the first albeit with better writing. I bet US soldiers really lap this up.

I'm going to give a "pass" rating to this entire series. It really isn't very good. But I have a few more of these Jack Reacher books and I'm going to go through the lot of 'em, I reckon :)

A very "pulpy" action novel by author, Lee Child, The Killing Floor does not really throw any surprises your way. The hero is a Jack Reacher and is an army man who now wanders aimlessly around the US thereby allowing the author to create an entire series around his persona. The classic masterless Samurai/Ronin cliché :)

Passable read.

Joe Haldeman's Forever War is a classic sci-fi novel and no matter how many times I read it, I tend to come away satisfied.

Highly recommended.

According to Wikipedia, Harris wrote this prequel (of Red Dragon, another prequel) because a movie producer threatened to have it written by somebody else. The drop in quality is palpable. The story is about Hannibal's childhood and coming of age and flits exotically between Lithuania and France with an even more exotic Japanese character thrown in the mix along with a garnishing of Japanese literature and poetry. The resulting soup is very contrived.

While this 1981 prequel to The Silence of the Lambs does feature Hannibal Lecter, he plays more of a cameo and is not a central character. This immediately downgrades the novel into one of those run-of-the-mill serial-killer tales, albeit about ten times more macabre. There are also a couple of largish plot holes that are difficult to digest.

On the whole, a disappointment.

The sequel to Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal is not as tight in terms of plot. But it more than makes up for it in character. I was simply bowled over by Dr. Lecter's character and especially, but the non-standard ending.

I wish I could give this a higher rating. But the plot got a little too unbelievably contrived in certain areas.

While Hopkins and Foster add the je ne sais quoi to the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, that end up making it better than its source, Thomas Harris' book is quite phenomenal. In many ways, watching the movie before reading the book helps visualise things better as Hopkins and Foster leave such an indelible mark on your memory.

This is a must read.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan is the first book in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series for "young adults". Even though I do not fall in the aforementioned demographic, I decided to give it a whirl as I've heard mention of this novel on the Interwebz. Well, after a breezy read, my recommendation is to not bother. While it might make for good reading for young adults, I expect that it will fare pretty poorly in the hands of anybody above the age of say, eighteen.