Interlude: Book Reviews Pt.1

As any traveler undoubtedly knows, travel can consist of a decent amount of dead time. Waiting for and riding on planes, trains and automobiles. A quiet hour when you get back to your hotel at night and you're sick of CNN because that's the only English channel they have. Next to my TaiPod, books were my best friend and since I've read five of them so far, I've decided to do a quick book review.

Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow. As a teenager, one of my all-time favorite books was Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, so I was excited to have a chance to get back into the Ender universe with this well-conceived retelling of the same events from another character's point of view. The main character of this book is Bean, who was a secondary character in the first book. While the book is fairly well-written, it suffers from two major flaws. The first is the fact that Bean begins the story of a 4-year old boy who is simply way too smart for his own good. While Card explains this as a product of Bean's genetic engineering, it's hard to suspend your disbelief that a toddler could exhibit so much intelligence and emotional sophistication. The second flaw is that Bean starts the book as almost a cold-blooded survivor. For a good quarter of the book, we are shown how Bean does anything to survive, with little regard to the people around him other than as pawns in his game. But by the end of the book, Bean exhibits true emotion and altruism. The problem is, Card never really details this character transformation, but it simply just seems to happen in between pages. Grade: B

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. Okay, I know, I am way behind in reading this, but it has been in hardcover forever and I quite simply couldn't fit it into my luggage. I've never really been a fan of thrillers, but with all the talk about this book, I just had to read it. The result? I became an instant Dan Brown fan. Brown has mastered the fine art of the "whodunnit", constantly challenging our notions of who is behind the nefarious actions in the book. Even up until the moment the villain is revealed, it could easily be any of the red herrings. Of course, that's not what has made this book famous. The real secret ingredient is Brown's real-life mastery of cryptography and religious history. Through an ingenious set of puzzles, Brown leads us through a maze of mostly true religious facts. Facts which are so controversial to the Christian faith, I almost got into a fight with a woman about it in Budapest. Grade: A+

More reviews to come later...