Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (2.5 stars)

Bella may be the most annoying heroine I have ever encountered. The first few hundred pages are her obsessing about whether Edward will be in the cafeteria, will he look at her, will he smile at her? When it isn't about Edward we're hearing about how uncoordinated Bella is, Gym is completely beyond her, and normal activities like walking and getting out of the car require intense concentration, often resulting in falls and scrapes.

Granted, I'm not an adolescent girl (ie. the target audience), who can probably empathise strongly with the "gorgeous guy in school doesn't notice me" situation, but being inside Bella's boring, insipid head is tedious.

So what does Edward see in her? Bella herself wonders this on many occasions. Would a 100+ year-old vampire with a fairly ridiculous array of superpowers really be interested in a whiny, uncoordinated 17 year-old? Sure, maybe her blood smells good, but a few minutes of talking to her should have cured him of any attraction (conveniently he can't read her thoughts, or he would have been turned off instantly).

The characters quickly declare their undying love, so the story can move on, and things actually get interesting 300+ pages in when other vampires arrive on the scene. Edward's control of his vampire urges seems to be a thinly veiled metaphor for a very conservative Christian 'no sex before marriage' vibe running through the book.

One final thing I found funny, at one point Bella uses cold medicine to drug herself to sleep. Meyer was obviously worried about giving teenagers this idea so she qualified it as below, but I think she could have left it out and avoided this weird 'say no to drugs' passage:

...so I did something I'd never done before. I deliberately took unnecessary cold medicine - the kind that knocked me out for a good eight hours. I normally wouldn't condone that kind of behavior in myself, but...

Maybe the next books in the series are better?

2.5 stars

Update: Saw the movie, and thought it was better than the book, which pretty much never happens. Slightly clumsy cameo for Stephenie Meyer was funny.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (3.5 stars)

I'm not even sure where I heard about this book, but I had it on request at the library and it was something fun I knocked over in a couple of days. It followed in a vein somewhat familiar, see if you can pick it:

• Boy discovers he has 'powers'.
  
• He travels to a school where he meets others like him and begins indoctrination into a secret society and learns how to make use of his powers.
  
• He faces great dangers, and fights battles with loyal friends against against an ancient evil that is growing in strength.
  
• etc...
  

Basically take Harry Potter and replace wizards with greek gods and their demigod offspring. Despite the fairly obvious formula-stealing (published in 2005, well after HP kicked off) the book is entertaining and a fun read. It is probably aimed at slightly younger kids, the story moves quicker and is shorter overall. Left wide open for a long series of books - there are five so far. At least kids learn a bit about Greek mythology along the way!

3.5 stars.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (4.5 stars)

This seems to be my year for reading epic novels. I have to admit that the 933 small-font pages of Shantaram were fairly intimidating, and I was reluctant to begin reading. The feeling dissolved almost immediately when I picked it up, this book is amazing.

Roberts has led a phenomenal life: heroin addict, escaped convict and Australia's most wanted man, mumbai (bombay) slum doctor, mumbai mafia 'goonda' counterfeiter/smuggler/dealer, and Mujahideen fighter in Afganistan.

I don't think I will look at any slum anywhere in the world in quite the same way after reading this novel. Roberts' slum is an amazing community where everyone works together, taking turns at the dirty cleaning jobs, and pulling together to fight fire, cholera, and the monsoon rains. All slums might not be as loving and carefully cared for as the community presented by Roberts, but it is a very different perspective to the horror with which most Westerners view slums.

I loved the description of the Indian head wiggle, and how Roberts gained instant smiles when he adopted it on the train to Prabaker's village. In conversation the side-to-side wiggle means 'yes' or 'I agree with you' or 'yes, I would like that', but it can also be used as a greeting to show you are friendly.

Roberts is a deeply philosophical man, and much of the book is devoted to philosophical discussions he has. I found some of these passages a bit boring, like the one on the nature of suffering:

...is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered...

I also got a bit sick of the fawning descriptions of pretty much every woman he was ever friends with - I get it, your friends are good looking:

Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. it was the green that trees are, in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be, if the sea were perfect.

A final thing I will never forget is the descriptions of the Colaba lockup where Lin (Roberts) spends three weeks and the infamous Arthur Road prison where he spends four months. In Colaba there were three overcrowded rooms and a corridor - Lin ends up breaking a man's nose and bites a chunk out of his attacker's cheek just to secure a place to stand:

...even at the foul end of the corridor, where shit and piss flowed onto the floor in a repulsive, reeking sludge, men fought each other for an inch of space that was slightly shallower in the muck.

In Arthur road Lin weathers systematic brutal beatings, starvation, and the constant attack of thousands of body lice.

Amazing book. The movie is supposedly coming out in 2011, although it has been delayed a number of times already. Looking forward to it.

4.5 stars.

Dear Editor...The collected letters of Oscar Brittle by Glenn Fowler, Christoper Smyth, and Gareth Malone (2.5 stars)

Three guys invent the character of Oscar Brittle, a prolific letter writer. This is his collection of letters to the editor, many of which were published. One of my favourites was a letter published in The Canberra Times describing a drive in Canberra at sunset:

I was unprepared. The crimson sunset, the azure mountains and the verdant green hills combined, forming a rich tapestry of colour that was, quite simply, overwhelming. I wept. I wept like I used to in the '80s. Thank you.

Awesome. It's quite interesting which letters get published, and what words the editors cut out. Some of the responses to his letters are great too. In one letter Oscar makes the bold claim:

I believe that I have eaten more types of animal than anybody else on the planet.

and proceeds to list them all including gnu, elephant, mole, iguana etc. A Sydney Morning Herald reader replies with 'I too have had a Chiko roll, but not for some time'.

2.5 stars.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (3.5 stars)

I came pretty close to giving up on this book. It starts well, with Blomkvist's trial and conviction for libel, and introduction to Salander. I quickly became bored once Blomkvist started his investigation into Harriet due to the huge number of pages devoted to boring narrative history of a seemingly endless parade of Vanger family members:

In 1926, when he was nineteen, he was going out with a woman called Margareta, the daughter of a teacher in Falun. The met in some political context and had a relationship which resulted in a son, Gottfried, who was born in 1927. The couple married when the boy was born. During the first half of the 30s...

If this information is really important (it isn't), then why not do it in the first person as a series of flashbacks? I also found it quite disconcerting to have this mind numbing verbal family tree cut with the brutal violence of Salander's experience with Bjurman. The violence with Bjurman was extremely graphic, and seemed to be the typical setup for harsh vigilante justice - think Batman's parent's murder.

After this point the story gets much better, Blomkvist makes progress in the investigation, and Salander joins Blomkvist (albeit in a fairly contrived way). I read the second half of the novel in one sitting and thought it was great.

It was interesting to read a 'very Swedish' novel with great placenames I don't know how to type on this keyboard. I did feel the unwelcome presence of product placement - many references to 'iBook', 'Ikea', and others I can't remember. I also usually cringe at any descriptions of 'hacking' in the media, but those in this book were at least better than average.

3.5 stars.

Update: Just saw the movie, it is brilliant. I was really dreading the rape scene, and I thought they took the violence too far in the movie, it is really, really uncomfortable to watch (and should probably be R). However, the rest of the movie is great: it is entirely in Swedish, Salander is perfectly characterised, it isn't a commercial for Sweden (although there is plenty of Apple product placement), and the 'hacking' is believable, which is more than I can say for most movies. As an aside - Salander's screen shows '/var/lib/dpkg' directory listings, which indicate a linux system (probably Debian) - on a Mac 'fink' is based on dpkg but shows up in '/sw/var/lib/dpkg'. Lookie ma, I'm hacking:

$ find /var/lib/dpkg
/var/lib/dpkg
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/xinput-zh_SG
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/tclsh
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/wx2.5.pth
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/cpp
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/vi
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/xinput-zh_HK
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/libgksu-gconf-defaults
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/odt2txt
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/kdesu
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/rcp
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/postmaster.1.gz
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/locate
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/wish

The Host by Stephenie Meyer (4.5 stars)

This book is brilliant. Sort of a soft sci-fi, with the focus on what it is to be human. It reminded me a lot of the Tomorrow when the war began series, with a secret community hiding out from a hostile society. The writing style was simple and easy to read, similar to the Harry Potter series, and I imagine it probably would come under the same sort of literary criticism :)

The premise is great - a super-intelligent race of parasitic beings colonizing planets through secret implantation of their hosts. The 'souls' want to experience life as their host, not take over or massively change the planet, something their human hosts don't realise or appreciate.

This book was Amazon best of the month for May 2008. It is going to make an awesome movie one day.

4.5 stars.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (5 stars)

Loved this book. It is an epic (858 dense-font pages), but worth every minute I spent reading it. Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer for fiction, and has inspired a ridiculous number of movies and miniseries. My favourite part of the book is when Gus gets ambushed by 12 indians on his quest to rescue Lorie. He immediately knifes his horse to use its body as cover on the open plain, and singlehandedly kills six indian warriors. Gus is a hardass, he breaks a bartender's nose because he isn't quick enough about serving him.

The characters in the book are brilliant, and by the end of the book I felt like I had known them for many years. Because of the books length there is quite of cast of characters you get to know who die before the end of the book. I really liked Janey, who could keep up with a trotting horse and throw deadly rocks like a ninja, and Po Campo who was the American version of the bush tucker man. The journey from the Texas-Mexico border to Montana is full of adventure, and death lurks everywhere.

5 stars!