Thanks to the lovely young woman who pulled up to the bus stop, exited her car, which she left running, flicked away a cigarette, and said: "I need something to read." She chose hardcovers by Nora Roberts, Nelson DeMille and Daniel Silva. Speaking of Silva, I just finished The Messenger (2006), a thriller about an Israeli agent on the trail of terrorists. It moves into second place on the list of those I've sampled, behind Tami Hoag's A Thin Dark Line. What I liked most about it is that it makes no bones about the war on terror - it's real, deadly and must be won. And the writing, to borrow a phrase from Linda Richman, the Coffee Talk character on Saturday Night Live: "It's like butter," more polished than anyone else in the genre except Joy Fielding. It takes the hero around the world and moves swiftly in short sections, as do so many novels of this type. Silva's background is in journalism. He abandoned it when he found immediate success in the literary field. All his novels have been New York Times best sellers. Ten of them focus on the same protagonist. This does not sit well with a lively little old lady, who has the energy of a teenager and who frequently stops by the floating bookshop on her daily trek to the library. "You've read one, you've read them all," she says. Still, fans continue to snap them up. Silva's work has been translated into 30 languages. I can attest only to the quality of the book in question: on a scale of five, I rate The Messenger three-and-a-half. My only quibbles are its length (480 pages) and a few instances where the dialogue does not ring true, but those are brief and hardly detract from the overall quality.
Inception just arrived, courtesy of Netflix. I haven't been this eager to see a film in a long time. I hope I haven't set myself up for a let down.
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