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I’m reading this book by Dennis Lehane as part of a Goodreads Group Read.

Here are a couple of random sentences, as todays Teaser Tuesday offering:

I sidestepped the bellman by the bar and opened the door myself. If he was amused he didn’t show it. If he was alive, he didn’t show it.

I was disappointed with this book by Philip Roth – it was not what I expected. I was looking forward to an alternative history political thriller, but instead was served with a detailed account of the life of a 1940s Jewish New Jersey family. The book posits the election of Charles Lindbergh, celebrity aviator, isolationist, admirer of Nazi Germany and anti-semite, as US President in 1940. The story is told through the eyes of an eight year old Newark Jewish boy. The life of the boy’s family is described in great, and for me tedious, detail. At times the writer’s voice sounds like an eight year old, which works well such as the boy’s fear and simultaneous fascination of seeing the stump of an amputee’s leg. But most of the time the writer is looking back retrospectively and this makes rather tiring reading. 

There is far too much detail, such as pages of description of wedding guests who play no further role in the book. The pace is very slow and it’s nearly half way through the book when we get to the first dramatic event. This is a family trip to Washington, with unpleasant scenes in a hotel and restaurant. The episode is very well described.  But then the family returns to Newark and for much of the book nothing dramatic happens. The book convincingly describes tensions within the extended family as whether to collaborate, resist or flee.  However these family arguments are just repeated in far too many scenes. 

Towards the end of the book nation-wide riots break out and the boy’s father has to make a dangerous cross country car journey. However the dramatic effect of this is spoiled by being told retrospectively.  The ending, which conveniently lets real history reassert itself at the end of 1942 albeit a year late, was poor and lacked plausibility.

I still haven’t finished, The Plot Against America, so I’ll pick a couple of sentences from a random page of a book I’m about to read.

“It will take us less than five minutes to show even the most dumb-assed regulator that we shorted that stock as part of a pattern of bets to the down side. It was nothing special. It was a coincidence. Get over it.”

The Fear Index by Robert Harris

I’ve just started Giveaways of The Banker on Goodreads and Librarything. The Giveway competitions run until 12th June.  For Goodreads there are 2 printed copies going. For Librarything I’m giving away 10 ebook copies.

For Goodreads go to http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/25617-the-banker

For Librarything go to http://www.librarything.com/work/12341508

This film is a sentimental, feel-good romantic comedy. Two mismatched characters, straight-laced fisheries expert Dr Fred Jones (played by Ewan McGregor ) and glamorous consultant Harriet (played by Emily Blunt) oversea a hair-brained project to introduce salmon fishing in Yemen. Initial professional sparing between the two gradually turns to romance.  Although the film had charm, it was just too weak for me, causing the occasional smile but no laughs. The one exception is the British government spin-doctor (played by Kristin Scott Thomas), a clean version of Malcolm Tucker in the TV series The Thick Of It.  She added a bit of spice and did make me laugh and her performance raised the film from two to three star standard.

The film is based on the book which is more of a political satire, which I think would work better. I haven’t read the book, so I’ll add it to my to-read list.

Teaser Tuesday is a routine that seems to be popular in many writers’ blogs. So I thought I would follow suit. The rules are simple:

Every Tuesday open a random page from a book you are currently reading and share two sentences from that page. Here goes:

“These friends of von Ribbentrop,” he explained to Sandy, “are no friends of ours. Every dirty scheme that Hitler has foisted on Europe, every filthy lie he has told other countries, has come through the mouth of Mr, von Ribbentrop.”

The Plot Against America  by Philip Roth.

The Banker got a 5 star review a couple of days ago from a Goodreads member in Canada.  The reviewer was one of two who received a copy of the book as part of my Goodreads Giveaway back in February. So the Giveaway has really been worthwhile.

See the review on http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/286518382

I saw Jo Nesbo Headhunters last night.

The anti-hero, Roger Brown, is a Norwegian corporate headhunter who moonlights as an art thief to support his high-maintenance trophy wife.  Roger is not a nice man – he is arrogant, greedy and amoral but also insecure.  The first part of the film is a primer on how to carry out an art heist.  Roger headhunts a Dane, Clas Greve. While Roger plans the theft of Clas’s Rubens painting, Clas is sleeping with Roger’s wife. There is a sort of comedy of corporate manners between Roger and Clas as they size each other up. I liked this part of the movie, the tension all the while steadily building up.

Roger’s heist goes badly wrong and he ends up being hunted – literally. We now get a gory chase movie.  Roger manages to survive one bloody attempt on his life only to survive even more gory and implausible actions. However he survives at the price of extreme humiliation. The direction here is rather heavy handed, lacking any subtlety, and is more a dark comedy than a thriller.  Although this didn’t work for me as a thriller, I did find it entertaining.  You come to admire Roger’s rat-like cunning as humiliation upon humiliation is heaped on him.

In the end Roger survives by stealing a dead man’s identity.  For this to work Roger has to cover up a lot of evidence. However there are so many strands of evidence that need to be undone that this part of the movie is too fast to have any sort of tension.

So although I found the movie quiet entertaining I didn’t think it was a very good thriller. I haven’t read the book; maybe it’s more of a thriller rather than the dark comedy that the movie is.

I’ve just finished reading this book by SJ Watson.

The story is about Christine who suffers from such an extreme amnesia that she has no memories of her past every time she wakes up. The terrifying nature of this illness is well described, for example waking up with a stranger in your bed, whom you only later find out is your husband. The tension is increased further when, by means of a daily journal that Christine secretly keeps, she finds she cannot trust her husband. The tension is eased a bit when she finds out there is a reasonable explanation for her husband’s behaviour. But then she discovers something new which again causes her to mistrust her husband again, only to later find another explanation.  Much of the book describes these swings between suspicion and trust.

Although I found out a bit more about Christine’s past life every time she woke up, I did find the middle part of the book a little slow and a bit repetitive as Christine’s feelings on waking up are described. 

Up to about four fifths of the book I would have described it as good but not very good. But in the last fifth of the book events take a different turn and the tension really ratchets up and it gets quite scary. The ending is very good and takes the book from four to five star standard.

I’ve just finished The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith.

This book is nowhere near the standard of his first book, Child 44. To make sense of The Secret Speech you need to read Child 44 first. But doing so will raise your expectations only for them to be dashed later. The first part of The Secret Speech describes well the confusion in the Soviet Union following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. However this part was a bit too slow paced for me.  The book changes gear in the second half and becomes more of an action thriller. However both the plot and characters lacked credibility. In particular two characters weren’t at all convincing. Fraera, a priest’s wife becomes a gang leader and goes to extreme lengths to destroy Leo, the book’s anti-hero. Leo’s adopted 14 year old daughter, Zoya, joins Fraera’s gang and later becomes a freedom fighter in Budapest. The plot was too contrived and lacked credibility. The description of Leo smuggling himself into one of the Kolyma gulags is well written and conveys the horror of both the place and the system that sent people there.  Leo’s escape from the gulag by seizing an aircraft and flying it across the entire Soviet Union and his subsequent adventures in Budapest, were just not believable.