The Swarm: A Novel By Frank Schatzing

This, like many articles has been sitting as a draft for many months. I never really though that it was finished but, In preparation for the big switch to Blogger v2, I'm publishing it now anyway.

Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic, eyeless crabs poison Long Island's water supply. The North Sea shelf collapses, killing thousands in Europe. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the effects of the ocean's revenge as the seas and their inhabi-tants begin a violent revolution against mankind.

I read this book a few months ago and have been trying to think about how best to describe it. I think I can sum it up best as a thoroughly modern thriller. It takes inspiration from about a thousand other books and tries to combine science with horror. It is reasonbly effective as a novel, and despite the fact that it may have lost something in translation into English, it was still a bit of a page turner.

Now this is far from the best book I have ever read and it relies a little too heavily on long forays into science fact which eventually wears you down and makes some parts of the book quite heavy going. Towards the end of the novel you really have to force yourself not to skim over the umpteenth extensive explanation of an obscure science fact.

I think that the editor should have put his foot down long before the final 896 page draft as there is a good story in this book trying to get out. If the book had been compressed into about 600 to 700 pages with a lot of the science and more importantly the pseudo-science stripped out it would have been a much more engaging read.

All in all I can't really recommend this book to anyone who isn't a die hard science fiction fan.

Cigar Cool

I received Cigar Cool by Jonathan Futrell & Lisa Linder as a gift this Christmas. It is a book about cigars and cigar smoking. Not a comprehensive tome by any means, this book is more along the lines of an extended glossy magazine article.

The presentation is very well done, very trendy. There are lots of good photographs and some interesting layouts as well.

The typeface used throughout is exclusively courier and it would seem as that the authors have a general dislike of uppercase characters or the shift key was broken, but apart from that the book is a pleasant read.

Cigar Cool

Presentation: 14/20
Layout: 15/20
Content: 38/60

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Total: 65/100

The introduction is very self agrandising and should perhaps have been edited out alltogether, but if you make your way past that following chapters takes you on a short journey through the history of smoking from Columbus' discovery of the habit in 1492 through to today. After that there is some interesting information of tobacco and cigar production. This is probably the most interesting part of the book and it covers the history of cigar production along with the methods used to produce cigars from the planting of the seeds to the ligting of the cigar.

Overall it is a pleasant light read for tobacco enthusiasts.