Book project 2010: Update #11

Ok folks, here's my fortnightly update of the books I've been reading this year...

Solar by Ian McEwan


After the release of the movie of Atonement last year I sought out several of Ian McEwan’s books to see if there was more too him than that over-blown melodrama suggested. Overall I was pleasantly surprised – he really is a very good writer with a keen eye for human nature. But this one? Bald, fat, short man who thinks he’s gods’ gift to women, cuckolded by his fifth wife? Beardie wierdie types with leather elbow patches on their cardis? Quantum mechanics? Oh dear. I tried but no. Just no.

Blue-eyed Devil by Lisa Kleypas

This is the only book I have seriously considered not putting on the list, in over six months of keeping it. The name alone is an embarrassment! And yet... I really enjoyed this smart, sassy (well, compared to Mills & Boon anyway) romance between the blue-eyed devil Hardy Cates, self-made oil millionaire, and beautiful heiress, out-of-her-depth Haven Travis. So there!

Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James

This book, written ostensibly for the young adult market, has been hailed “the new Harry Potter”, not so much for the subject matter (no wizards here) but for the aggressive bidding war it sparked amongst publishers and the $1 million or so it earned author Rebecca James in advances. Television interviews with James have suggested she’s an affable suburban soccer mom-type, who can hardly believe her good fortune, and that the book is the next breakout read for Gen Y. All of which goes some way to explaining why I wanted to read it; I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Starting Beautiful Malice on the bus to work one morning, I have to admit it grabbed me immediately. By the time I got to work I’d rather 70+ pages and was keen to find out how the story unfolded. Mentioning to a couple of friends in passing that I was reading it I said how much I was enjoying it and hazarded a few guesses at what lay in store for troubled teenage heroine Katherine. And therein lies the problem: it is an engaging psychological thriller but it isn’t difficult to predict the twists and turns ahead. Possibly I’m a more sophisticated reader than the intended audience but young adult is a cross-over genre, as the Harry Potter series amply proved. Possibly I’ve just read too many “addictive psychological thrillers”...

One area where this book excels is the evocation of the toxic friendship at its core. I doubt there’s a woman alive who wouldn’t recognise that relationship to a certain degree. Who’d want to be a teenager again, honestly?

Die for you by Lisa Unger

A fast-paced crime novel set in New York and Prague, with enough murder, corruption, deceit and betrayal to make any interstate flight, well, fly... I enjoyed this novel although I suspect that it’s one of those sorts of books I won’t remember in a month.

The Zookeeper’s war by Steven Conte

I haven’t read far into this book yet (my magazine pile is threatening to topple over if I don’t give it some attention) but so far, so good. The premise is great: An Australian woman and her German zookeeper husband struggle to look after the animals at Berlin zoo as the allied forces pursue an aggressive bombing campaign. Life is unhappy, her Aussie accent is highly suspect and the mounting tension is unescapable. Good stuff.