13. Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain

A&E recently aired a made for TV remake of the Andromeda Strain that was broadcast over two nights.  My wife, who is not a fan of science fiction, really enjoyed the first night of the series - she missed the second night - which is why I decided to pick up this book.  I got an old 1969 edition of the book in pretty good condition along with tear out advertising in the middle, anyone want a 20 week subscription to Time magazine for $2.67?

This is a mass market science fiction story with a happy ending.  A secret experimental satellite lands in a small town in Arizona and when the town doctor opens up the casing all but two of the town's residents die.  The overseers of the program send their team in to find the satellite and the team is also instantaneously killed when they open their van's doors in the town's main street.  The leader of the program decides to activate Wildfire, a secret government contingency plan designed to try to deal with extraterrestrial bacteria that are brought back to earth.

The Wildfire team assembles in a secret underground lab and tries to first identify and then cure the bacteria that killed the residents of Piedmont.  They go through the usual steps to do this and then they discover that the bacteria first mutates into something that destroys plastic and then mutates into something entirely benign.  There are some obvious tense moments in the Wildfire lab with potential breaches of seals letting the disease out through the lab and things like that.

The book has an awesome premise, it is amazingly well researched and Crichton's prose is fluid and easy to follow but it is a mass market story and it epitomizes why I tend to stay away from authors like Crichton:  they take an idea that has so much potential and then they dumb it down to the point that it is entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying.

Padding My Stats

Every night around 8 I sit down with my young daughter and read her a story.  Sometimes I read a few pages from the book that I am reading and other times I read stories about Grufallos, naughty mice or some other appropriate theme.  I want to know if I can count these books as part of my reading for 2008 because with these books I would be reading fifty books per month!

12. Georges Simenon, Tropic Moon

This is another one of Georges Simenon's roman durs.  It is the story of a young Frenchman, Timar, from La Rochelle who uses his politically well placed uncle's connections to get a job at a French company's colonial outpost in Gabon.  When he gets there to report for duty he finds that the only launch that can take him to his post in the interior is broken and, even if it worked, the guy who is currently in the post refuses to leave and has threatened to shoot anyone who tries to come and replace him.  With that plan on the shelf for now he checks into a local ex-pat hotel run by the beautiful Adele and her husband.  One morning Adele comes to him in his room and starts a tormented love affair that eventually drives him insane.

After their first morning together Adele withholds her tenderness which makes him increasingly wanting and insecure.  He wears his emotions on his sleeve and becomes the butt of the jokes of the more rugged ex-pat loggers who live in the hotel.  One night Adele's husband succumbs to an indigenous virus and dies the next day.  On the same day the police chief calls Timar in to question him about the shooting of a native which has caused a lot of tension among the native population.  Shortly after Adele's husband's death, the two recommence their love affair in a more bona fide manner and Adele, manipulative temptress that she is, convinces him to buy a logging concession in the interior.  After getting themselves organized the two of them set off for the interior.

Things go poorly from the start.  They first stop at a small native village and Adele mysteriously heads into one of the huts and comes out fifteen minutes later but refuses to say what she was doing in there.  This begins to drive Timar crazy which, compounded with the infection that he has picked up, makes him attack the boat's captain as they are pulling into their concession's dock.  Timar spends the next few days with a high fever, hearing things and behaving erratically towards Adele.  In these three days he figures out that Adele was the person who killed the native man in the city and that she hid the murder weapon in the hut that she went into on their way up here.  Before he is fully recovered, Adele is called back to the city to appear as a witness in the framed person's trial.  On hearing this, Timar canoes back to the city partially because he cannot bear to be without her and partially because he wants to tell the truth.

He shows up at the trial and after hours of testimony he screams that Adele is the real culprit and not the poor black man who's on trial.  Adele ends up in jail, though it's not entirely clear as the book leaves a lot to the reader's imagination at this point, and he ends up on a steamer back to France having gone insane and muttering "it isn't real," over and over again as he walks up and down the ship.

This is a murder story that is tightly tied up with a tortured love story.  It is excellent.

11. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

This book is so much better than the movie!  Where the movie is a superficial, pleasant, happy ending show this is a dark, angry, sad ending book.  The book is set after the end of a war, maybe a nuclear war though the author never says so.  The chemical weapons used in the war have released some kind of germ which turns people into vampires.  Because of the nuclear winter-like dust storms the germs are quickly transported throughout the world and they turn almost everyone into vampires except Robert Neville.

After his wife and daughter turn into vampires, Neville turns into a hermit drunk spending most days drinking from the morning till the night until he starts doing research on the germ which becomes an all consuming project for him.  He is joyous one day when he finds a dog that hasn't turned into a vampire already but he crashes a few nights later when the dog returns as a vampire.  At the same time as he is trying to find a cure for the vampire germ the vampires themselves are evolving and the story hits its climax over a physical and emotional battle between Neville and the advanced vampires.

This is nicely told but short story.

10. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

To my surprise I never read this rite of passage book when all my friends were reading it in high school.  What a great and sad story.  I am sure that my paltry audience of three or four has read this book so I won't bother summarizing the story for you.  The ending didn't come as a surprise, you knew that the bitch nurse was going to lobotomize him from about halfway through the book, but it still left me saddened that the tortured good guy lost his life.

We all have a lot of unread books on our shelves but this strikes me as one of those books that is worth re-reading.

9. Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad

Pulling out the big guns for the ninth book of the year!  I don't remember where I heard about this book, it could have been a book review somewhere, it caught my eye because it is the story of a tough Chechen fighter's interaction with his Russian adversaries.

Hadji Murad is the tough fighter and his former superior, Shamil, feeling threatened by Murad's courage and success has taken Murad's family hostage and has sent Murad into exile.  Murad turns to the Russians and gives himself up with the promise to fight on their behalf as long as the Russians give him his personal Cossack guard.  The Russians agree and Murad returns to Chechnya to fight Shamil.

This passage from the book could apply today just as well as it did 100 years ago:

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians.  The feeling experience by all Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate.  It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them - like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves - was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.