BTT: Playing Editor

This week's BTT question (suggested by John Mutford from The Book Mine Set):

How about a chance to play editor-in-chief? Fill in the blanks:

___ would have been a much better book if ___.

I really can't answer this one. There are many books that I would have liked better if they had been different but I'm absolutely sure about one thing... allowing me to edit the books would most certainly not have made them any better! In fact, I would have spoiled the book completely and fewer people would have liked it. I would rather read a book the way it was written by the author and not worry about how it should have been written.

Books: February 2008

I can't help but feel disappointed that I couldn't read more in the past month. Four books in a month isn't all that bad, but after that magical reading month of January (when I finished 11 books), four looks like a very small number.

The Books

1. Ice Station (Matthew Reilly) [8/10]


2. A Falcon Flies (Wilbur Smith) [9/10]


3. Voyage To the End of the Room (Tibor Fischer) [2/10] (review)


4. Miracle (Danielle Steel) [6/10] (review)

Stats

• books: 4


• authors: 4 (2 new)


• pages: 1743 (436p/book)


• avg rating: 6.5

Liked

1. A Falcon Flies (Wilbur Smith)


2. Ice Station (Matthew Reilly)

Didn't like

1. Voyage To the End of the Room (Tibor Fischer)

Maybe I didn't get too much time to read, but looking at the brighter side, there was only one book that I didn't like in February compared to three in January. :D

Review: Voyage To the End of the Room (Tibor Fischer)

Oceane is a computer graphics designer living comfortably in her London flat. She likes to travel as long as she doesn't have to leave her flat. For this she gets her travel agent to arrange for foreigners to visit her and thus give her the experience of having spent an evening in a foreign country.

Then one day she gets a letter from Walter, her ex-boyfriend who has been dead for ten years. Here the book moves back a few years into Oceane's past when she used to work for a sex club in Barcelona. The letter tells her that Walter knew something about a series of deaths that took place when she worked there. He instructs her to travel to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean to find the truth about the deaths. Reluctant to leave her flat, she hires Audley, a debt collector and sends him to investigate as she watches his progress using hi-tech gadgets and the internet.

The reason I picked up the book was the title. It promised to be a story that took a close look at the protagonist's life and that's what it did for the first few pages. After that it meandered along with flashback after flashback which did nothing to move the plot forward. I was kind of pleased with the book when I started reading it, started getting bored by the time I read the 50th page and was quite irritated when I reached the end of the book.

Although technically this book falls into the first person narrative category, with Oceane being the narrator, large part of the book involves someone narrating his/her story to Oceane or even sometimes narrating a story that someone else narrated to them in the first place. I found this style rather interesting at first but constantly stopping by to listen to people talk about their past really slows down the plot and makes the book boring.

Sure, the book is funny at times, but you need a halfway decent plot for a book to be called good, which this book doesn't have. The ending too was very disappointing. The book just ends, that's it. It's as if Fischer had enough of writing this novel and decided to stop. It's definitely not a book that I would recommend.

My Rating: 2/10

BTT: Hero

You should have seen this one coming... Who is your favorite male lead character? And why? (BTT)

I've been too busy to post here over the last month and I missed (yet again!) last week's question about favourite female lead characters. Good thing too, seeing that I couldn't remember a lot of characters I could have put into that list except for Robyn Ballantyne from Wilbur Smith's book A Falcon Flies which I read recently. These kinds of questions are always difficult because I always end up typing up a quick reply and then remembering more characters after I've published the post. Coming to today's question, there are a few characters I remember right now. Here's the list:

• Andy Dufresne from Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. He's probably the most patient and determined character I've ever seen. How many people would actually spend two decades planning the perfect prison break?



• Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter series. I couldn't resist putting all three on the list! ;-)



• Patrick Lanigan from John Grisham's The Partner. Sure, he may be a crook, but like Dufresne (who was actually innocent) he's one of the most determined and brilliant fictional people I've seen. You just have to read the book to know what I mean.

That's five people on the list already and I still haven't been able to decide who my favourite character is. I'm sure I'll find that I missed someone who would have topped that list once I go through the replies by other bloggers. For now, I'll give that title to Dumbledore. When I started reading the Potter series, this amiable wizard was the first character I liked and has remained my favourite throughout the series. Plus, he's the coolest headmaster I've ever seen!