Judging Books By... Well, Their Covers

As tedious as it can be to see publishers pump out stab after stab at replicating the latest bestseller, it can be equally fun to watch them try to be 'subtle.' Check out these covers, and tell me the similarity is mere coincidence. Yeah, uh-huh. Ironically, Publishers Weekly hated the original...

A Good Character

The FRL has a small but growing collection of CD audio books, so I am a bit limited in what I can throw on during my commute. These items, however, HAVE reacquainted me with a writer I previously gave up on. Daniel Silva wrote a great debut spy thriller about a decade ago called The Unlikely Spy -- a crusty but crafty old British academic, the Enigma machine, Natzi's... a good ride. His next book, though, didn't last three chapters in my stack.

And yet, I listened to his newest, The Secret Servant, and enjoyed it enough to backtrack and begin to trail the franchise character, Gabriel Allon through Silva's fiction. Allon, an Israeli spy trained as a world-class art restorer, has a history that goes back to the hunt for the members of Black September. Having recently watched Spielberg's haunting Munich, I felt like I was jumping right back in with the story.

In the words of Pvt. Hudson, 'We're all gonna die, man!'

My dad sent this link out recently, and it is about as depressing as you can get. Certainly there appears to be a bit of a pessimism involved, but the fact that these are the words of a guy whose predictions have been largely correct, despite being branded as a bit of a loon, is more than a little frightening (especially for those of us with kids...)



On that happy note, I think I'm going to read Kunstler's new novel, World Made By Hand, because even his predictions about the end of oil and the environment as we know it suddenly seem optimistic!