HANNIBAL RISING (Thomas Harris) - January 27/07

Though the latter half of the novel is actually pretty good - what with the whole Man on Fire except with Hannibal Lecter thing - Hannibal Rising is a slow-paced, convoluted, and overwritten piece of work that doesn't offer much insight into Lecter's mindset. Harris spends an inordinate amount of time focused on the various Nazis that ate Lecter's sister, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to follow everything that happens. Stripped of about 200 pages, the book probably would have been pretty good. The movie will undoubtedly be much better. ** out of ****

TERRORIST (John Updike) - January 19/07

Though it really picks up with the last 50 pages, Terrorist is - by and large - an incredibly dull book revolving around potential terrorist Ahmad and his aging teacher Mr. Levy. Updike's decision to emphasize needless descriptions sucks all the tension out of the novel, and there's just no getting around the pretentious vibe. There's a reason it took me several months to read this (I had returned it and everything). ** out of ****

KING DORK (Frank Portman) - January 13/07

This is the sort of book that would have been so much better as a short story. Portman's tendency to ramble on and on and on is virtually impossible to ignore; the book is consequently rife with scenes that either feel superfluous or overlong by several pages. The inclusion of a seriously tedious mystery doesn't help, nor does the fact that the main character thinks he's super-cool and a crazy outsider, but he's really not (aside from jocks, he's about as mainstream as they come). There's some good stuff here, but it's ultimately too hard to overlook the crazy overlength. ** out of ****

THE CHILDREN OF MEN (P.D. James) - January 4/07

Sporadically interesting but mostly tedious, The Children of Men often feels like a 20-page short unnaturally stretched out to 300 pages. James is the sort of writer who presumably thinks he's good, but actually sucks. Too much description and too little action. It took me well over a month to get through it, which is a shame - given that the premise would appear to be a can't miss sort of proposition. ** out of ****

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child) - January 3/07

Aside from the fact that this is part of a series that I've never read, The Book of the Dead is an entertaining and occasionally thrilling adventure story. The book is at its best when it sticks to all the museum stuff - the Tomb of Senef, etc - but then, as I'm not terribly familiar with a lot of these characters, everything else might've worked better had I read the preceding novels. The end goes on longer than it has any right to (the museum stuff is wrapped up and there's still 50 pages to go!), although the fight atop a volcano was pretty good. *** out of ****