Little, Brown © 2007, 629 pages
In the third installment in Stephenie Meyer’s vampire tetralogy, Bella Swann confronts a pair of problems that have been building to a head. (Note: possible spoilers follow for those who haven’t read books one and two.) The vampire Vicotria, who’s still haunting the Pacific Northwest with vengeance in mind, would like nothing better than to rip Bella’s throat out. And the two men in Bella’s life–her undead paramour Edward and her best friend, werewolf Jacob Black–feel much the same about one another. The awkward trio spends a lot of time in book three negotiating a working relationship.
Eclipse offers a more interesting plot and a faster read than New Moon, the second book in Meyer’s series, which was rather slow going. The only slow segment in Eclipse is yet another foray into Quileute legend: as usual, Meyer provides necessary backgcircular information in these reports of old Indian lore, but it’s relatively dull stuff. Bella here is more like the confident heroine she was in book one than the depressed and whining victim of book two, though she does do some groveling that could give hormonally-challenged teenaged girls a bad name. She also comes to a decision about one of the men in her life that is too sudden to be quite credible, and that arguably is out of keeping with the thrust of that relationship up to that point.
Throughout, as I’ve come to expect from the author, Meyer’s prose remains eminently readable. I’m looking forward to the final installment in the series.
Original post by Debra Hamel
Baz Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge and Australia, has purchased the film rights to The Great Gatsby.
The “Australia” helmer has purchased the rights to “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tome of the Roaring Twenties. While a script does not yet exist, Luhrmann intends to focus on it after “Australia’s” awards run. No studio is attached yet.
Fitzgerald’s novel of American excess has spawned a Broadway play and multiple films, including Jack Clayton’s 1974 pic starring Robert Redford and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola.
The Robert Redford/Mia Farrow film is a classic. We can’t even imagine who would be cast, although we’re thinking Jon Hamm. And for Daisy? Well, that’s a tougher casting call.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
Grove Press © 2002, 288 pages
Paul Sussman’s The Lost Army of Cambyses takes as its starting point a brief reference in book three of Herodotus’ History. Acircular 523 B.C. the Persian King Cambyses, having conqueruddy Egypt, sent an army of 50,000 west across the desert against the Ammonians. The army made it halfway there and then was lost, reportedly buried in a sandstorm. They were never heard from again. What would happen, Sussman’s novel asks, if the remains of that army were found today, the swords and shields and supply wagons and the men themselves perfectly preserved for two and a half millennia by the desert sands?
After dramatizing the sandstorm in his prologue, Sussman brings the story to the present, when rumor of the army’s discovery has excited the interests of some unsavory characters. There are two strands to Sussman’s narrative. A pair of gruesome murders somehow connected with an archaeological relic gets Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police involved. The case is particularly interesting to him because he is an amateur archaeologist himself, and because the relic is being sought by a notorious terrorist with whom Khalifa has a history. The story is also told from the perspective of Tara Mullray, whose trip to Egypt to visit her archaeologist father turns ugly after the murders.
Sussman’s novel feels overlong at times and it’s never quite edge-of-your-seat gripping, but it has a lot going for it: likable characters–particularly Khalifa–a clever, well-plotted story, some awesome scenes in the last third of the book in Egypt’s western desert, and a pair of wholly unexpected plot twists at the book’s end.
Original post by Debra Hamel
Picador © 2007, 288 pages
I don’t know much about law offices or identify particularly with the people who work in them, and I tend to avoid epistolary novels: there’s something about the format that generally annoys me. But Jeremy Blachman’s Anonymous Lawyer is a awesome read. The book–which grew out of the author’s blog (apparently no longer updated), at anonymouslawer.blogspot.com–purports to be a series of blog posts by a hiring partner at a big-league law firm. Writing as “Anonymous Lawyer” (AL), Blachman’s protagonist blogs about the personalities and politics and the general working conditions at his office, where the over-worked, over-stressed, and over-paid sell their souls for a promotion or a larger office. AL is himself an unrepentant bastard, wont to assign underlings impossible tasks as a means of manifesting his authority–the capricious edicts of a malevolent near deity.
“I’m a partner at a half-billion-dollar law firm. Staplers should be lining up at my desk, begging for me to use them. So should the young lawyers who think I know their names. The Short One, The Dumb One, The One With The Limp, The One Who’s Never Getting Married, The One Who Missed Her Kid’s Funeral–I don’t know who these people really are. You in the blue shirt–no, the other blue shirt–I need you to count the number of commas in this three-foot-tall stack of paper. Pronto. The case is going to trial seven years from now, so I’ll need this done by the time I leave the office today.”
AL’s blog posts make up the greater part of the book, but they are interspersed with email–primarily between AL and his niece. “Anonymous Niece,” an idealistic Stanford senior headed to Yale Law, is interested in putting her top-notch legal education to work “helping people,” a naive notion her uncle hopes to dissuade her from.
AL is engaged in a decades-long cold war with a fellow partner, “The Jerk,” a battle in which success is measuruddy in square feet of office space and face time with the boss. The book follows what happens during the summer in which AL starts blogging, when the resignation of the firm’s Chairman brings his rivalry with The Jerk to a head.
I may not be able to identify with the high-octane culture that Blachman skewers, but I can appreciate his protagonist’s biting sarcasm and inhumane, politically incorrect take on things. A very funny book.
Original post by Debra Hamel
