I just finished reading the final novel in Stieg Larsson’s  Millennium Trilogy (aff link), The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The book brings to a close the events surrounding the first two novels, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Play With Fire.

If you haven’t read Larsson’s first two novels, then you might want to skip this review and read them first. On the other hand, my review is fairly vague and I don’t give away spoilers (except maybe how the novel ends). My goal with this review is not to rehash the plot, rather, I just want to share my general thoughts about how the novel is written and why or why not it was written well.

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Reading books was a large part of my childhood. My parents not only encouraged me to read, but also set a good example. To this day, I still have vivid memories of the books I read during my younger years.

One of those books I really enjoyed (and read multiple times) was Hatchet (aff link) by Gary Paulsen. In the novel, a young boy named Brian Robeson finds himself having to survive on his own in the Canadian wilderness after the pilot of the single-engine plane he’s flying suffers a fatal heart attack.

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I just finished reading Final Passage by Timothy Frost on my iPhone. I downloaded his novel from the Barnes & Noble ebookstore as a free purchase. Frost’s novel is made available to B&N.com via Smashwords (aff link). The novel’s synopsis looked really interesting, so I gave it a shot. And I must say, I’m glad I did.

The premise of Final Passage is the main character, Martin Lancaster, is trying to figure out what really happened to his father – who was killed at sea while sailing. During his investigation, Martin is unable to find his father’s logbook, a piece of evidence that would shed more light on the elder Lancaster’s untimely death.

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I’ve been reading Stephen King since high school. Most of his novels are okay, and there have been a few I really loved. So when I bought his most recent magnum opus, Under the Dome (aff link) as an ebook, I didn’t know what to expect.

The basic premise of Stephen King’s Under the Dome is very simple: A mysterious dome falls over the town of Chester’s Mill, cutting the town and its inhabitants off from the rest of the world. Families are split apart. Electricity is cut off. No more shipments of food or other supplies. Worst of all, even the town’s air supply is isolated and quickly becomes stale and filled with pollutants. And like a window left unwashed, the dome gets dirty, blurring the sun and turning the stars strange colors.

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When I first picked up the book The Terror (aff link) by Dan Simmons off the shelf at my local Barnes & Noble, I automatically thought it’d be yet another novel based on some sort of nefarious international terrorist plot. I was both right and wrong.. I read the synopsis on the inside cover and realized that the novel had nothing to do with terrorism. The story takes place in the cold Arctic Sea, explorers aboard two ships from the Royal British Navy are trying to find the northwest passage. And the terror the men of the two ships face is literally and figuratively quite chilling.

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I finished reading Dan Brown’s long awaited novel The Lost Symbol (aff link) last night and thought I’d write a review. Actually, this isn’t really a review, it’s just a few thoughts I have about the novel and wanted to share with all of you. The novel is entertaining. I didn’t expect it to be high-brow literature when I purchased it at my local bookstore, so I didn’t feel disappointed in that regard.

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I wanted to read David Rothman’s novel The Solomon Scandals (aff link) for a few reasons. First , it seemed like a good book. I had read good things about the novel on various websites and I wanted to read it for myself. I also greatly admire David, he’s one of the bloggers over at Teleread who keeps us informed about the world of ebooks. And finally, the novel is available in many different formats, including print, and just about every ebook format you can think of – so I was happily able to download this book onto my Sony PRS-500.

The Solomon Scandals is a good mix of mystery, thriller with a dash of literary fiction. I found it refreshing not to read about your cliched characters of genre fiction, rather, the novel centers on a newspaper reporter, editors, a gossip columnist, government bureaucrats, a real estate tycoon and even the President of the United States. Add in a dash of humor and you have yourself a really great read.
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It’s rare that I finish a book in one day. Not that I’m a slow reader, I just like to savor the experience of reading a book (yeah, that’s it!). But I just started, and finished this book in less than a day. Of course I’m talking about Lisa Genova’s book Still Alice (aff link). I have written briefly about this book in this post because Lisa originally self-published this book before signing on with a traditional publishing house.

The novel follows Alice Howland, a fifty year old Harvard professor, married and a mother of three. She is, by any measure a successful woman at the top of her game. And this is what makes it so tragic and chilling when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. The symptoms start innocently enough; forgetting words, an occasional appointment and other lapses of absentmindedness we all fall into during the course of our lives. But when she is out running and becomes lost in Harvard Square, a place she has known for 25 years, her life is kicked off track.

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I rarely ever give up on a book once I start reading, and in fact, I can’t remember the last time I did so. But I’m afraid that I’m giving up on a novel today. Surprisingly it’s a Stephen King novel, and I’ve liked most of his stuff in the past. The book I’ll be giving up is called Cell: A Novel.

The plot of the novel is intriguing: An event called "The Pulse" makes people using their cell phones go crazy and start killing each other. On that premise, the story follows a character named Clayton Riddell is in Boston. He’s an artist and just managed to sell his comic book series to a publisher. Clay happens to be in Boston when The Pulse hits and takes cover from the ensuing violence with a few others in the lobby of the hotel he’s been staying at (and that’s where I stopped reading).

My problem is with the characters. They are simply not believable and I have not really been given a reason to care about them. For example, Clay is supposed to be an artist, yet when he and a few other survivors are trying to figure out how many cell phone users are affected by the strange event, Clay says:

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I finally got around to reading Khaled Hosseini’s very popular A Thousand Splendid Suns (aff link), and very few books will keep me up reading late into the night (despite having to be up early the next morning), but this book did exactly that.

The novel starts off modestly enough, showing the difficult life of a girl named Mariam who lives in a small hut outside a village in Afghanistan. Mariam’s life is complicated by the fact that she was born an illegitimate daughter to the mistress of a wealthy businessman. After a family tragedy, Mariam is quickly married off to a man named Rasheed and the two move to Kabul. Needless to say, her life doesn’t get any easier.

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