Page-turners

Reading is good. It is state altering. I don't even like the book I am reading that much and I still love it. I woke up at 3:30 this morning, read for 45 minutes with two glasses of wine, and went back to sleep. The simple process of disengaging yourself from your own day-to-day immediacy and identifying with something fictional (or as I would have said 15 years ago, an Other... schmuck) is refreshing.

The current book, which is the first book I have read past page 15 in over a year, is Prisoner of Birth by Jeffery Archer. As Archer was recently in prison himself, I thought it might be more interesting than the typical spy novel (although I have never read any of his other books, of which there seem to be a ton). And it's a page-turner alright. But it reminds me a bit of the last page-turner I read, which I threw into an Italian swimming pool just over halfway through. And that was written by a classmate, none other than Dan the man Brown. The D.C. started at a rapt pace, and by about page 50 you knew the movie was coming. But at the same time, you were counting up all the loose strings that would have to be tied for the plot to really work. And the more rapt it got, the more you began to doubt the story. It all finally fell apart under its own weight, in my opinion, in the scene in the English lord's country house, where stealth was replaced by slapstick as the albino and the hero chased the grail around the living room floor. Splash!

Archer nearly got the dunk as well when the illiterate East-ender switched identities with the Lord from Edinburgh and no one noticed. He also relies too much on forced dialog to push the story along. In other words, now and then a character will say something that sounds both stiff and unlikely, but it adds a necessary piece to the plot. Rule #1, "Show, don't tell". But none of that stopped me from happily being in Mayfair last night, first at the Dorchester, then at Brown's Hotel, then on the train up to Edinburgh, then a quick stealth trip to Geneva and back to Heathrow, where I was unceremoniously arrested on the tarmac. Hmm, tune in tomorrow.