Summer Reading Project
If you’re read my wife’s blog, you’ll already be familiar with our “Summer Reading Project”. If you’re not, the quick summary is that we can’t buy anymore new books until we’re done reading the ones we already own. As a sidebar, we also want to talk about the books from this project.
I’m going to kick off the discussion with two more traditional “summer” books that I’ve already finished.
I started reading Clive Cussler novels after watching (and really enjoying!) the movie Sahara. Raise the Titanic is one of his earlier novels and even though a little period in both technology and women, the rest of the story really holds up well. The basic gist of the story is that NUMA (and therefor Dirk Pitt) has been hired to find and raise the Titanic in a huge salvage operation. The only problem: The Soviets want to salvage her as well (Cold War anyone?).
As can be expected from this kind of novel, you don’t need to do a lot of thinking. Just read along and try to keep up. I had a hard time putting this book down!
Margaret and I started reading Vince Flynn’s novels after someone left his first one at the airport. We picked it up and got hooked. I like to describe him as Tom Clancy, before he got totally long-winded and more concerned with political machinations than with the people in his novels (some may argue that he was always this way). Unlike Jack Ryan, Mitch Rapp is much more than just an analyst. He is a trained assassin who knows that sometimes you need force to keep the world safe. Even having to skip over the conservative lectures were not able to get me to put this book down.
My only problem with the book is that the conclusion feels like a letdown. All the action up until the very end is extremely engrossing, trying to figure out how Mitch is going to save the world this time. And then how he saves it at the end seems like more of an afterthought. It got worse when I read the epilogue and Vince let me know that the whole reason for writing this book is to give a logical setup to his next book. Vince, don’t spend 500 pages to cover what could have been covered in a handful of pages in your next novel.
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