#18: The Passage, Justin Cronin

After The Passage was unofficially anointed as THE book of the summer, I gave it to my dad for Father's Day. I was incredibly excited to read it when I got home from Europe, especially as I had been struggling through Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which I never ended up finishing. And then I spent the next four weeks trying to pass through The Passage - why was everyone so crazy about this book? I don't get it; neither does my father. And yeah, I will do a little spoiling.

The Passage reminded me quite a bit of I Am Legend (a movie that, incidentally, when PMS hits right, makes me cry like a baby). The U.S. military attempts to convert convicts into super-fighting machines but all goes awry and the superhumans escape the lab facility and turn the population into vampire-like creatures. The doorstop-sized tome then jumps about 100 years into the future, to one ragtag community that has managed to insulate itself from the monsters with bright spotlights. After a young girl appears in their midst, a group of people - who have never known the world as it was - inadvertently sets out on a journey that will save everyone.

It sounds interesting enough, but I just couldn't get through it. It was well-written (except for the fact that my particular copy had some printing issues, so the last sentence on one page didn't lead to the correct sentence on the next) but it took me forever to read. And then, I found the ending to be pretty disappointing - after 766 pages full of nitty-gritty details, you have to assume the ending. The characters are on their way to eradicating the vampires when The Passage just ends. You know they eventually will from some future documents that pepper the book, but it's like, I have to guess how they got from here to there? After 766 pages? When the whole book is essentially about saving the world?

#17: Pompeii, Robert Harris

Although I had other books stashed in my luggage, I ended up trading Good in Bed for Pompeii at some hostel since I spent most of my time in Europe/Asia tripping around ancient ruins. Even though Pompeii is set in Italy (hence the title) and I was not, it seemed to fit the mood - though I spent the entire book wondering if I had read it before.

It turns out that I had - clearly it was not memorable enough to be remembered in its entireity (though I am absolutely certain that I read it while I was in Athens in 2004) but was still enjoyable the second time around. Pompeii is the story of aquarius Marcus Attilus, who has been sent to the town of Misenum, in southern Italy, after the former aquarius disappears. When he gets there, the mighty Aqua Augusta starts mysteriously dropping in volume. Attilus sets out to fix the aquaduct before southern Italy goes dry, but little does he know that the oncoming eruption of Mt. Vesuvius is to blame.

It's a quick read and good for nipping into here and there on a trip like mine. It also made me realize that I still need to haul my ass to Pompeii - enough so that I almost considered trying to squeeze it into my itinerary. But since that never happened, I'll have to hit it up another time - probably forgetting, once again, that I read this book so it can have yet another go-around.

#16: Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner

Before heading off to Europe this summer, I visited Half-Price Books to pick up some beach reads (ha, not that I spent much time on the beach). I had long heard about Good in Bed - mostly that it represented the best of chick-lit - and thought it might provide some easy entertainment as I made my way through half-lit hostels. Ugh - how wrong I was. I hated this book; in fact, I think it represents all that is wrong with the genre, a genre which I now pledge to stop reading (really, I promise).

Ostensibly, Good in Bed is about the protagonist's body issues. Cannie is a 28-year-old newspaper reporter who essentially loses her shit when her newly ex-boyfriend writes a magazine column about her entitled "Loving a Larger Woman." Even though Bruce is kind of a loser/creep, she decides that she wants him back and spends the next hundred pages obsessing. But then, on page 164, a surprise arrives and then the rest of the book veers off into something else (which I won't spoil)...and to somewhere else, an imaginary place called Never Never Land where screenplays magically get sold in an afternoon. I know chick lit generally contains fantastical elements but Good in Bed really went overboard - and it was eye-rolling because the characters were one-dimensional and Cannie barely agonized over/worked for any of her big decisions or accomplishments. The moral of the story seemed to be *whine a lot, get a lot* and it really pissed me off.

Before I let this one go, though, I do have to point out an error that really cracked me up. On page 26, Weiner writes, in Cannie's voice, "I felt scalded by shame, like I was wearing a giant crimson C..." But following the reference to The Scarlet Letter, Cannie wouldn't wear a C, because the letter isn't meant to represent her first name. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic - which I was forced to read twice in high school - the letter is an A, to represent the sin of adultery, not adultress Hester Prynne's first name. Clearly I really was meant to be an English teacher.