More books

I've been reading a little bit more lately, so here's a book report, or two and a half.

Inferno by Dan Brown is a Dan Brown book.  That is both blindingly obvious, and probably the most insightful thing I can say.  Dan Brown books are the perfect airplane/airport books.  They're very engaging, so they make the time go quickly.  They have a gazillion chapters (103 chapters in a 400 page book), so there is always a handy stopping point. (Though about 90 of the chapters end with a phrase like "until he opened the door and saw who had just arrived." or "when he saw that they were too late.")  In this book, there is an evil badman who is going to ruin the world, and our only hope is follow clues left in art symbols to track down the diabolical device that he's hidden in the historic building.  So, yeah, it's just like all the other Dan Brown books.  This one uses Dante's inferno and associated artwork, and branches out from the Vatican to take us to entirely different places, like Florence and Venice.  I will say that the ending of this one took me by surprise.  Despite the little jabs I take at the book, it was just what I wanted it to be: entertaining.

If you're looking for something not entertaining, I can point you to Winston Churchill's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples".  Shannon first got me an abridged copy from the library, but I figured that if you're going to do something, you ought to do it right, so I sent the book back and got the unabridged one that is eight or nine hundred pages long.  I have since asked Shannon to go back and get the abridged one from the library.  I made it up to the Magna Carta or so before I started skimming.  I'm still stuck in the 1300s.  For some reason, I had assumed that Churchill would be a more entertaining writer.  (You know, "I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."?)  Apparently he did his writing sober.  Anyway, I may or may not finish this.  I plan to fast forward a few hundred years and see how it's going.

Because it was sitting around the house, I picked up "Michael Vey: the Prisoner of Cell 25" by Richard Paul Evans.  It's a YA superhero book, basically.  The writing is ok, but not great.  Michael Vey has some electrical super-powers, and there is a super evil, completely amoral, conscienceless, badman who wants to catch him and get him to do Bad Things.  The villain is kinda over the top, just so we can all be clear that he's completely, 100% bad.  So of course Michael, and friends he picks up along the way, have to get involved in saving the world.  I picked this up as a change of pace from Churchill rambling about King Edward the somethingth and his taxation fights with the church, so it has successfully entertained me.  I finished the first book and am about half way through the 2nd.  They are about 300 pages a piece, and I think there's only 3 of them, so I plan to read through them all.  Not good enough to really recommend to someone else, in my opinion, but now that I've started, I guess I need to see how it turns out . . .