Four "promising" books to avoid at all cost

Every now and then I hit a bad stretch in terms of the choice of books to read. I read a lot, and it's inevitable to bump into a bad book every now and then, but in February and early March I plucked four consecutive duds!

It started with "The Age of Miracles" by Karen Thompson Walker, of which I wrote earlier in this blog. A promising premise in that one! I can't help but feel cheated when the story took a wrong turn and became rumblings of a teenager who just happened to live in interesting times, when the Earth's rotation slows rapidly and affects the life on the planet. You can read my full rant here.

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Next, I listened to the audiobook "The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story" by Robert and Dayna Baer. A real life love story of a CIA couple - what a gem to read for a journalist, I thought. Better yet, a part of it happens in Croatia and Bosnia, where I spent a few years of my photo-journalistic career. And that's where the problem lays. Well, first I had to try and get over the horrible reading of the book. The authors have done it themselves, and I was excited with the prospect of hearing the real CIA lingo, but there was none of it - they read like semi-literate high school students, without emotion, in flat tone. They also butchered every local term and name they mentioned. After a while I listened with permanent goosebumps, as if they were dragging fingernails across the blackboard the whole time.

The premise of the book is - two CIA operatives describe their spying jobs, making it sound more mundane than any regular office job, in places that would sound exotic if anyone else was telling the story - Kazakhstan, Middle East, Latin America, and, finally, the Balkans. It's a collection of loosely connected anecdotes, which didn't say much about the life and work of CIA operatives, except that they were utterly clueless about the real life in places they operated at. They travel with pre-assumed American attitude and that never changes. They see local life only through the lens of their occupation and their country's interests. After getting over being irked with their naivety, I actually felt sorry for them. The book was also supposed to be about them falling in love and screwing up their respective previous marriages, so they can start a new one. Except, there was no romance - there was only a long car ride from Croatia to the south of France when Dana sort of figured out that she likes Bob, but if you wanted more juice, you were out of luck. They either weren't romantic, or don't know how to write it in the book.

Lastly, mind-jarring for me was a blatant inaccuracy that could (and should) have been caught by any writer with an IQ higher than rainworm's: there is a scene when another couple is sent to relieve Dana and her CIA partner in Sarajevo. Dana says there was nothing to eat in the apartment, so the replacements went to grab a pizza in the town of Mostar, which, she said, was half an hour drive away. Well, even a casual search on Google maps will show you how inaccurate that is - Mostar is, according to Google, 129 kms away from Sarajevo, which is 2 hrs drive. With the checkpoints, I would guess at least double that time - I've done the drive a few times myself at about the same time, and it always took the whole day. On the way back from Mostar, allegedly, the woman was shot in the stomach. It's the event that ejects Dana and Bob from Bosnia for good, so it's important. Yet, she didn't get the places, the distances and the circumstances right. If she lied about that, what else they lied about in the book? Yes, it leaves the sour taste.

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After those two rotten apples, I dove into Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" with great expectations. He won Booker prize for it, after all, it's bound to be good!

I read his "The Enchantress Of Florence" previously and loved it. But, when the "Children" started, it felt deja vu. It felt the same as the Enchantress. Same jokes, same light tone, same mixing of fantasy and history. Except in the Children, Rushdie kept telling through his narrator what he's going to write next. I hate when the book is hinting what will happen in the next chapter. I was put off with the tone, style and the corruption in India for about a hundred pages, then I simply gave up. There are just so many jokes about the big nose (of the main character) and lame "comical" situations I can digest in one book. When reality started mixing with fantasy too much, when what was supposed to be funny became forced and dull, it was a sign to put it down.

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The last in this rotten quartet was "The Midwife of Venice" by Roberta Rich. The story develops simultaneously in Venice and Malta in 1573. Historical fiction is my favorite, as long as it's plausible. Well, the Midwife was hard to swallow. Here's why:

Hannah and her husband Isaac were Jews from the Ghetto in Venice. She was extremely skilled midwife, but without a child of her own. He was a merchant enslaved on Malta, pending ransom. As the book opened, Hannah went to deliver a Venetian nobleman's baby in exchange for a handsome sum so she can ransom Isaac. The thing is - it was illegal for a Jew to tend to a christian, punishable by death not only hers, but the whole of the ghetto too. Yet she did it for the love of her husband. So far, so good. The descriptions of the midwifing were too expansive and too detailed, but all in all it was suspenseful and entertaining.

Then the problem started - with the plausibility. The nobleman whose boy she delivered had two brothers whose inheritance would go to the infant, so they naturally wanted the baby dead. Yet, the parents decided to go on a trip and leave the baby behind in their palace at mercy of the brothers. They traveled to Ferrara, the trip that the author informed us, takes 3-4 days. The same evening one brother tried to kill the baby, but Hannah followed him and saved the boy by stabbing and killing the bad guy. The NEXT DAY she took the baby back to the palace - the parents should have been somewhere half the way to Ferrara by then - yet the servant opened the door, told Hannah they got a word from Ferrara that boys parents have died from the plague which scourges Venice at the time, and shooed Hannah away. Now - how is it possible that not only they reached Ferrara so quick, but they also managed to die from the plague - all over one night!

As the story went on, it got more and more unbelievable - characters appearing always at the nick of time with the only possible solution Hannah needed to solve problems the plot presented her with. The ending was happy, entirely unsurprising and uninspired.

The story had so much going for it, it was almost more difficult to screw it up, than to end it properly. Yet, the author managed to ruin the promising tale.

Book: The Age of Miracles

A Novel by Karen Thompson Walker

The premise of the story was promising - a dystopian look at what would happen if the Earth inexplicably started slowing down its rotation. The problem was the narrator - 11-year-old Julia. Instead of high drama of looming catastrophe with all the possibilities of horrific personal stories that could have been told, we get the doubts and insecurities of a near-teenager coming of age in unusual circumstances - a casual setting of the 'slowing' as a background. At first it seems a nice way to tell the story of a dying planet through the eyes of a child. Soon though, it becomes clear that Julia (and the author through her) are more focused on exploring the girl's romantic interests and the threat of her own family falling apart, rather than getting into the effect a global tragedy can have on all of them and humanity in general. It also seems as if the plot itself gradually slows down with the earth's rotation and there are some seriously slow patches you'll have to pull through. I would have given it 2/5, were it not for the ending. Without giving anything away, I can only admit that it was sad, but well done. Finally the author's mastery of words, which came across only in sparse hints through the rest of the book, bloomed in full beauty in the last few paragraphs of the novel. And for that it deserves another notch: 3/5

Book: The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

Finally a post-apocalyptic novel without monsters - no vampires, zombies or other men-eaters, except men themselves. Who really needs fictitious demons when humans are more than capable of monstrosities beyond imagination?

The whole story happens on the road, in the world burned to ashes, where a man and a boy travel scavenging the deserted houses for food and looking for "good guys". They avoid hordes of cannibals, looters and thieves. All along, the man is coughing, the ashes taking his breath little by little, until the end.

Very dark story, extremely detailed in surviving ingenuity and unfortunately very possible. It leaves no hope at the end, except the hope in survival itself. There's no promised land or miraculous healing. It also leaves no illusions about people - all of them are monsters, with a very few exceptions. Prosaic and deeply disturbing.

Book: A Dance With Dragons

Going through this one was quite a slog. Martin wrote about the last two books: "The last one was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard." It really felt that way reading through it. When an author doesn't enjoy writing a book, how could we enjoy reading it? I wish I found those two sentences in the foreword, not the afterword, maybe it would save me from wasting time.

GRR Martin, it seems, is too busy with the production of HBO's TV series based on the first three books, which were fabulous. Or, he simply lost the flare for action, and is given to politics. Maybe he simply let too much time pass since the first books, and can't re-create the atmosphere he had there. Whatever the reason, this one was a bitch, slow and expansive, with (too many) new characters entering the story, while the old characters are trapped in place and the author can't think of a creative way to get them going again. Imagine a (very simple) video game in which your character is driven to the wall, and it keeps walking in place and pushing without going anywhere - that's how it felt with many of the old heroes we followed from previous books - Daenerys, Jon Snow, Arya, Tyrion, Jamie...no one is going anywhere, or doing anything of interest and essence, yet the book grew to 1,200 pages.

One thing I have to give Martin credit for - with his writing, raw and gritty, he keeps the promise of suspense going through the book, so you keep reading expecting something to happen. When nothing does, you feel betrayed.

When the next book comes out, I think I'll wait to see how readers like it, before deciding whether to read it or not.

Troubles with 'The Tiger's Wife'

I just finished the book "The Tiger's Wife" by Tea Obreht. Don't ask me if I liked it, because - I am not sure. The reason I am writing this post is to try and clarify to myself my own feelings about the book.

First thing first - the story: it's set in an unnamed country, which can't be anything else than now-defunct Yugoslavia. It's told by a young doctor Natalia, who is telling the story of her beloved grandfather, who passed away, and whose life was deeply influenced by two myths - the one about the Tiger's wife and the other about the deathless man.

The book plays on the superstition of the people who live there, portraying the whole area as backward and undeveloped. Admittedly, parts of the old country were just that uncivilized, but the place in whole was much more modern than what you'd feel from the book. The storytelling is smooth and masterful, for someone so young. The story not so much.

My problems start with technicalities - I listened to the audiobook, and the readers managed to mangle all the local names and expressions to the point that it got extremely annoying. I had to take a few days break on several occasions, before I could go on.

The fact that the author changed/made up the names of towns made it even worse. Why making up a name for something that's so obviously recognizable? Like 'Sarabor' for example, which in the book has combined attributes of Sarajevo and Mostar (both Bosnia-Hercegovinian towns were the scenes of monstrous atrocities during the war).

Another thing - having been through that war myself, the unapologetic stand of Ms Obreht irks me to the point of madness. Obreht portrays war she obviously never experienced as a conflict of equally guilty sides. Description of suffering in the war-torn "City," which can only be Belgrade, seems exaggerated. The mythical elements, which carry the main weight of the story, are anticlimactic, too long and too slow. It had a promise of a story a grandma would tell on a wintery night with a cup of warm milk. Instead, it turned into a dragging witch-tale.

And so, here is my problem: the story, and the area is too close to real to be able to take it as fiction or fantasy. And its twisted reality played on my senses of right and wrong. The characters are likable, especially the grandfather, but the surreal elements of deathless man and other superstitions, and the backdrop of the war made it impossible for me to like the book. Maybe, if I never lived there, I would like it. Maybe, if Tea Obreht lived there, she'd write a different story.

I thought I was depressed; turns out I'm only introverted

The Quiet Power of Introverts

This is going to be personal, to a point. But, bear with me, it will make sense at the end.

Have you ever come across someone shamelessly boasting about his talents and experience? Some people are so good at it, they climb the ladder based on nothing else but self-promotion. All you need to do is have boundless self-confidence and enough yapping talent to convince the others around you, especially those higher up the food chain, that you are what you say you are. 

I was brought up in a society and environment where the saying goes "self-promotion is worthless" (loosely translated), meaning one is supposed to show his true worth with his work, not his words. True to the old wisdom, I found my niche and built my reputation without having to advertise it. But then I moved to Canada. With about 15 years experience as photojournalist, I thought it'd be easy to find work. Yet, on my first job in Calgary, an editor told me that I should be more assertive, that I'm too quiet. And I tried. I competed with lesser photographers, who were more verbal. While I could outdo them with work, they've always outdone me in the newsroom. They moved up, I stayed put. Imagine the hit my self-confidence took!

For a long while I thought I was discriminated against as an immigrant. I thought the Canadian-born were getting the chance, while I, a foreigner, will always stay on the sidelines. Typical immigrant's story, right? I thought so too, until a few weeks ago, when I started reading a book that turned this whole perception upside down. It's called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" by Susan Cain. 

Did you know that one third of the global population are introverts? That is not a derogative - it's a personality trade. They (we!) are people highly sensitive to the outside stimuli and overstimulation; the ones who prefer peace and quiet over loud and busy; the ones who'd rather have a serious conversation with one person, than entertain a crowd with small talk and trivial jokes. There are whole civilizations based on preferences toward introverts or extroverts. Asian society, at least until recent wave of westernization, valued quiet thoughtful types, who were considered wise and studious. Western Europe and North America are the kingdoms of extroverts - the outspoken, the loud, the good presenters, the self-promoters. They are the risk takers, the leaders, and sometimes the troublemakers. The introverts in the West are the thinkers, the creators. Some famous introverts are Steve Wozniak, who started the whole personal computer revolution from the quiet of his solitary home workroom, Eleanor Roosevelt, a U.S. humanitarian and diplomat who had to fight her shyness to do her work, Albert Einstein who preferred his formulas to his peers.

The book is full of scientific and scholarly studies explaining why is it so that I hate confrontations of any kind, that I'm so distracted by the din of the open office space, its constant buzz and rings of telephones, to the point that it cuts my productivity by half. It also explains how some of my colleagues blabbered their way to promotions and why it worked in the environment which values extroverts and considers quiet types backward, less intelligent and slow. 

So, if you find it difficult to talk loud at a party, to hold empty conversations, and prefer to be on your own reading a book, or with one good friend talking about the essence of life - don't worry, you're not depressed, neither are you dumb or weird. Welcome to my third of the world's best - the creative, the inventors, the artists, the thinkers! Without us, conversation would be a shouting contest, with the loudest ideas prevailing. Without us, our extroverted friends would be deprived of the sound advice; the books would be fewer, the innovation slower; the world would be more chaotic. We are the quiet power behind the noise.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, a novel

by David Mitchell

Oh, it's been a while since I last visited my own blog. I'm positively rusty. Still there are a few things I want to put on the record. All in its time, though, and every thought in its own blog post. For this one, just a few musings on the book I just finished reading. "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet" by David Mitchell reminds me of the Clavell's "Shogun", the book I devoured as a youngster. De Zoet took me to the port of Nagasaki at the turn of the 18th century. It's a fascinating story about love, history, politics and the clash of cultures. It's written in a fashion I find extremely annoying: the author often interjects a quick visuals from the surrounding right into a conversation or a train of thought of a character, which makes a reader constantly re-reading previous lines to be able to follow two strings of narrative going at the same time. In almost 500 pages long book it quickly becomes a tiring way to tell the story. Which is too bad, because the story is really captivating, and deeply sad.

Well, after closing the last page I'm equally saddened with the story and relieved that I don't have to put up with the annoying style of storytelling any more. A strange mixed feeling, maybe not of love and hate, but certainly of melancholy and happiness.

Throwing words in the wind

I’m listening to a pretty interesting audiobook on my runs. It’s “The Man From Beijing” by Henning Mankell. Only about a third into the story, but it’s quite gripping already. Mankell is another fascinating Swedish writer -- after the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson, I wonder what is it with Sweden to produce such good mystery writers. Maybe it’s the long winter with not much to do that gets the imagination going?

In the book one of the characters, a Chinese man, writes a book of his life. He’s going through a rough period in life -- in fact, his whole life is rough and full of misfortunes -- and, when he starts writing, everyone in his family is dead. He wonders who is he writing the memoir for. Then he realizes that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he writes it, then, if no one else wants to listen, he’ll tell his story to the wind. He will find the way to make the wind listen and carry his words.

I wonder if that is the winning formula, the right attitude to write? Without caring if anyone will ever read it. Just throw the words into the whirl of pixels, the digital version of the wind, to carry them far and wide. Maybe, one day, someone will find them and care enough to read. Maybe not. But the satisfaction of pouring one’s life into words will live with the author.

Is this what I’m doing here, on the pages of this blog?

No more books

I don’t mean I’ll stop reading, nor will I slow down. I’m not even going to stop reviewing the books I’ve read. The thing is, I realize that almost a third of the blog posts in the past year were about the books. So, I decided to outsource my reviews to Goodreads.

I still may, from time to time, offer my unsolicited opinion about a book that impressed me in some way, but if you are curious what I’m reading, or find my reviews irresistible (OK, just joking), please check up my reviews on Goodreads. You can always travel there from the Goodreads widget at the right column of this blog.

The Shadow of the Wind

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read the author's other book, "The Angel's Game," before I read "The Shadow Of The Wind," and I'm glad I did, because, although "The Angel's Game" was published seven years later, it covers the events that chronologically happen before "The Shadow Of The Wind." So, when the story opens with a boy Daniel and his father mourning the death of their mother and wife, the character who was never more than a memory in the book, I felt like I knew her, having read the other book in which she features prominently. Reading out of order was a fortunate mistake, because it reacquainted me to Barcelona I left in "The Angel's Game" and some characters I was already familiar with.

Zafon masterfully waves his spider net of intrigue, mystery, and old secrets which are being dug out, one detail at a time, by Daniel, the bookseller's son. There's love, passion and crime, but although there are hints to supernatural, everything was at the end clearly explained. The narrative is engaging from the first sentence and the characters come alive. I felt like I knew them personally.

One thing that makes me like this book less than it's sequel-prequel is the detailed histories of certain buildings where the plot was unfolding. Although it was interesting to read how a certain villa came about, it slowed the plot somewhat, and I found myself wishing the author would hurry back to the present time and continue with the several threads of the story he dangled before my nose like a carrot.

Overall, a wonderful bittersweet story that makes you wish to read it all over again the moment you turn the last page.

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The Bells

by Richard Harvell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love the books which transport me through time. With “The Bells” I travelled through 18th century from Swiss Alps to St. Gall, then Vienna, then Venice, in the romantic period when beautiful music could make people stop what they are doing and bring tears to their eyes. Along the way I learned about love, passion, pain and injustice. But, more than anything, I learned about the sound.

The book made me become aware of the sounds that surround me, of so many different shades of “noise” we live in. It made me long to hear all the wonderful sounds the author is describing with such emotions throughout the book. It almost seems as if the sound is another character in this tale of a few wonderfully imperfect characters.

There’s one thing that made me withhold the fifth star - I felt that Amalia, the love of Moses’ life and the main female character, wasn’t brought close enough. She featured as an object of Moses’ passion and adoration, but as a reader I didn’t get to know her nearly as much as I wished.

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Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures: Stories

by Vincent Lam

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Well, what a mess. There must have been a storyline somewhere in this book, but it got lost in the jumble of medical terms and half-baked verbal polaroids of failed attempts at CPR.

What did I take from this book? That there are way more failures than successes in emergency rooms. That doctors take deaths as a marginally important daily occurrence, and that they regard having to perform CPR as a time consuming nuisance. All the doctor-characters in the book are interconnected, but they never develop into real persons. Except the brief romance at the beginning between Ming and Fitzgerald, they don't interact with each other, and their eventual connection is only stated in doctor-like brief statements through the book. The author uses their relationships only as props for much overdone ER scenes. The result is a shallow story with too much unnecessary medical jargon, which fails either to develop into a real story, or to glorify the medical practice, presuming either of those was the author's intention. The book reads with as much appeal as the Human Anatomy Atlas.

It's beyond my comprehension how was it awarded the Giller Prize. Must have been slim pickings for the Gillers that year! Doctor Vincent Lam shouldn't leave his day job for writing.

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Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

by Wells Tower

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a collection of well written short stories. The problem is - I'm not a fan of short stories. It doesn't help that, more often than I'm willing to tolerate, the stories are left without conclusion. For a reader who likes well written prose, there's plenty to like in this collection of dysfunctional American family-drama snippets, but I'm glad I'm done with it, so I can move to a complete novel.

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my favorite book of the trilogy. I already confessed The Millennium series is my guilty pleasure and I thoroughly enjoyed this last book. It took off where The Girl Who Played With Fire left off, and built the story from there. There was a slow part just before the ending crescendo, but all in all the intrigue, the ruthless spy game made-in-Sweden (don't expect James Bond, this IS Sweden after all), and the trial of Lisbeth Salander were all gripping and suspenseful. It won't win any literary awards, but it will be remembered as entertaining and well thought crime and spy intrigue.

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The Lotus Eaters

by Tatjana Soli

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As a former war photographer myself, I was amazed when, reading The Lotus Eaters, I read some of my own thoughts, fears and doubts attributed to the main character, Helen. Although my war happened long after Vietnam, the way the author described situation and mental built of war photographers hasn’t changed. War shooters, then and now, are children who live high on adrenaline and in their own utopia, believing that the truth exposed in war photographs can make the difference, that people will learn from a tragedy they reveal not to repeat the same horrific mistake. But, people never learn.

As it was the case with Helen, once a photographer had some modicum of success with a certain photograph, the pull to out-do his own picture becomes a drive that pushes him (or her) farther, into riskier and wilder situations. At the same time, something tears in the social fabric of his soul, and he (or she) becomes incapable of returning to “normal” life. And, although seemingly Helen always had a choice to return to the U.S., I completely understand her failure to blend in when she came back, and her eagerness to return to Vietnam at the first opportunity. Once you learn that the only thing that matters in life is the life itself, you can’t sympathize with trivial complaints about job, baby-sitter, traffic and weather. Everything that institutes life for “normal” people becomes trivial. Consequently, it’s impossible to fit into society which only pays attention to “trivial” things. If there was a sequel to this story, I’m certain Helen would be in another war, doing what feels natural – taking pictures of another tragedy.

It is a well-written love story, believable as it is tragic. Tatjana Soli takes the reader through the jungles of Vietnam and the chaos of Saigon, into the depths of her characters’ hearts. It is a wonderful trip and I enjoyed every word of it.
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Angelology

by Danielle Trussoni

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Right, let’s blame the fallen angels and their children – the nephilim – for all human evil: greed, corruption, wars and everything in between. I am a huge fan of fiction, and I love different and sometimes fantastic ideas, but angels? And humans fighting angels? C’mon!

There was some good work in character development, some elements of searching for clues, but for me it was all destroyed with utterly incomprehensible idea of angels among us. Sorry for my incredulity – I’m simply unable to believe.

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Dog Boy

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Don’t expect the Disneyfied version of the urban “Jungle Book.” This is a shocking and horrifyingly believable story of an abandoned boy, rescued from the Russian winter and brought up by a pack of feral dogs. He survives with his new “family” through the many challenges imposed on them by the weather, society, gangs of homeless, rival packs of dogs, and authorities – police and medical crews. There are a few positive characters sympathetic to the dog boy, but mostly there are dangers, which he survives and takes in stride, with a dog-like resilience.

Also, heed my advice—don’t let your guard down. Every time I relaxed carried by the story, something terrible happened, something at the same time inconceivable and frighteningly logical from the perspective of pure survival. I can’t remember if ever a novel shook me to the core so many times during the course of the story, until the very end. Fortunately, there is a hint of hope throughout, and all is not doom and gloom. A fascinating story!

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The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm afraid this was my guilty pleasure. I don't usually read crime novels, and maybe I'm easily satisfied, but judging by how many people like Stieg Larsson's novels, I'm in a good and numerous company.

The story starts slowly and almost the whole first half of the book is lost on retelling bits from the first book, and Salander furnishing her new apartment, for which we are given a detailed list of IKEA furniture items, together with the unpronounceable names of the articles and price. It made me wonder if the author had a stake in IKEA, or just couldn't get over his student-days infatuation with cheap and non-durable furniture.

However, once people finally get killed, the story picks up. Like an old steam-engine locomotive, it starts to roll snail-like slow at first, but faster with every turned page. Of course, since there's the third book, it took away a lot of suspense over the main character getting killed. Still, although I knew she'll live to kick the hornets nest, I found Salander's solitary search for justice and vengeance holding my attention until the very last page.

If you manage to survive the numbingly slow first half, you may find yourself thoroughly enjoying the climax of a much better second half.

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Born To Run

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(I’m not going to describe the content, this is only what I took from the book)

What can I say – for a serious runner like myself (if “serious” means running six days a week), this book is a fantastic motivator. The cast of characters is colorful and the best part is – they’re real (although it’s sometimes hard to believe, but they are all Googlable). McDougall takes us through his search for the Mexico’s Tarahumara’s secret of long and healthy long-distance running. Even his detours into the invention of the first Nike running shoe (which he all but blames for the subsequent running-related injuries), barefoot running and his theories of human evolution into a running man, are entertaining to read.

I can’t say I agree with everything presented in the book, but I did squirm with unease while reading about the grueling endurance races. It was very difficult to pick exactly who to cheer for from many likable characters who, at the end, had to race against each other.

There are many moments in the book that’ll make you wanting to lace up the running shoes and give it a try. The author takes us skillfully on a search through the most inhospitable parts of Mexico’s Sierra Madre for a tribe of the Indian runners who, through the centuries, could thank their survival to the fact that they can outrun any pursuer, and their villages are almost impossible to find. Add to that the rugged canyons they live in, and Mexico’s drug cartels keeping the unwanted visitors away, and there’s the material for a real thriller. Yet, this is a book about running, and discovering the true technique and joy of running. The only thriller exist during the several amazing races described in details.

To sum it up – if you’re not into running, you’ll like Born To Run as a sports book. However, if you are a runner, you’ll treasure it like a running bible.

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Waiting for Columbus

Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I feel cheated by this novel. The question is—does the wonderfully touchy and tragic ending justify the long toil the story took us through, to reach the end? I was, actually, so very close never to reach it, because the first 350 pages made me so agitated, I wanted to leave the book unfinished on a few occasions. Even now, when I turned the last page, I’m still not sure if it was worth it.

At first I liked the idea of a mental patient who thinks he's Christopher Columbus, and tells the stories, mixing history and present time, to his nurse. However, as the book progresses, it doesn't go anywhere, the plot stalls, and Columbus' stories drag on, without sense. There are way too many of those confused story-episodes, unsorted and out of chronological, or any other logical order. On top of it, the nurse develops emotional attachment to Columbus, but that was explained in a very superficial and unbelievable way. There was no courting, or subtle changing of feelings from the care for a patient into something deeper. No, one day the good nurse realized that she’s in love. Snap. Just like that. For a reader who likes his books well done, this one was absolutely rare.

It also seems that all the female characters in the book get naked at some point, mostly without any particular reason other than, perhaps, to spice up a terribly bland story. There’s lust and sex. There’s author’s documented intention to describe a great romantic with absolute adoration of his women’s body, and, yes, the soul, too. Which begs the question whether the author ever experienced the kind of romance he was trying to attribute to this ‘Columbus,’ because if he did, he isn’t capable to translate it in writing. Rather, the romantic escapades in the book are half-baked, clumsy and neither detailed enough to be taken seriously, nor funny enough to be taken as comedy.

Two stars, only because of the ending.

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