Fast-Paced – DaneCobain.com

Title: Black Sunday

Author: Thomas Harris

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 320

Rating: 2.75/5

I was expecting good things from this, purely because I’ve read the Hannibal novels and so it had a lot to live up to. In fact, as far as I’m aware, this was the only Thomas Harris novel that I hadn’t read other than his most recent one.

This one was actually published way back in 1975 when Harris was in his thirties, and I have to say that it shows. He attempted to write a sort of fast-paced political thriller, but it doesn’t really work so well when you compare it to some of the newer novels to have hit the market in the last twenty years.

There’s also the fact that this deals with terrorism but was written over a quarter of a century before 9/11. Some of the stuff that he wrote is still relevant, but a lot of it has been superseded by events, and it definitely feels like a product of its time. The writing isn’t particularly good either, and nor is the plotting. In fact, it just comes across as a pretty generic book, something pretty forgettable as far as I’m concerned.

There is a saving grace though, and that’s the complex antagonist with his Vietnam flashbacks and his plot to blow up the Superbowl using an explosive-laden blimp. In fact, I’m kind of surprised that it was so dull considering the subject matter. It could have been awesome. It just wasn’t.

I’m not sure that I’d say that it’s a bad novel either, I just think that it’s very much a product of the time it was written and published in. I think it would have been good enough at the time, but I don’t think there’s much point reading it now. I would have given up if I hadn’t already read Harris’ other stuff.

Learn more about Black Sunday.

Louis de Bernieres – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin | Review

Title: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Author: Louis de Bernieres

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 438

Rating: 3/5

I had high hopes going into this one and I’m sad to say that it left me a little disappointed. de Bernieres’ writing style is excellent and the actual book felt almost poetic because of the way in which it was written. The problem is that it just dragged on and on, and while the characters were realistic and fully fleshed out, I just didn’t relate to them.

In the end, I was left with this feeling that there was all of this interesting stuff happening in the world and instead we were stuck with a slow burner of a romance, which isn’t my thing to begin with. I generally enjoy books that are set during war, and it is true that I liked some of what the author had to say here and the way that the characters related to the sheer hellishness of it all. It’s just that even the bits that I was interested in ended up amounting to little more than a line or two in someone’s letter.

I think part of the problem was that I was expecting something more than I got. It’s a competent enough novel, it was just a little too slow for me, and I do think it would have benefitted from a little extra editing. It’s not exactly supposed to be fast-paced in the first place, and there are some interesting bits of character development. There’s also a lot of talking, too much of it for my liking, and while there are plenty of references to goats throughout, I was expecting it to have some sort of payoff instead of just feeling like a wasted metaphor.

But I’m still glad that I read this, even if I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. I’m just a little mad at it because I ended up in something of a reading slump and only managed to get through the latter half of the book by reading 20 pages at a time before going to bed. I also now have no desire to see the movie, and in fact I’m not even sure how they’d manage to do it considering all of the plot could be squeezed into half an hour or so.

All in all, it was a bit of a disappointment, especially because it came highly recommended. I went out of my way to read it, and that’s definitely not worth doing. If you can pick it up cheap from a used book store, be my guest. Otherwise, just don’t bother.