gone tomorrow - lee child
Gone Tomorrow was the very first book I read entirely in its Kindle incarnation, on my iPod touch. An odd experience - reading the book is actually quite pleasant, good letters, good contrast, easy to get back to where you finished reading the last time. But flipping the pages is harder on my hands than flipping real pages, and you have to do it much more often than in real books, since the screen is actually quite small.
But the most annoying thing is that you have no immediate feedback on how far along in the book you are. There's a circuitous route in which you can see in which "location" you are (there are no page numbers, since the Kindle app allows you to scale the type size, and locations are adjusted accordingly), but that is nowhere near the sensation you get when reading a book cover to cover and feeling the stack of pages under your right thumb diminishing towards the end. And I missed that, it certainly adds to the tension of Reacher books when you feel only ten or twenty pages remaining, and there is still so much left to clear up and fix. Now the ending sort of snuck up on me. Which wasn't as good.
So, the book! It was brilliant! I love most of the Reachers, though he did jump the shark a bit with Nothing to Lose and it's slightly-too-grand finale. But Gone Tomorrow is Reacher in fine, witty, dry form again, sometimes violent and even rather gruesome, but superb tension and a great book to disappear into.
I still do not believe in Lee Child as the author, though - how can a Brit write such a totally American novel? And they haven't been getting more American, as far as I can see, right from the start he made Reacher such a quintessentially US-ian guy.
I have a silly suspicion that the actual author is Stephen King, though that's not very probable, since I think King would not be able to keep up this all-staccato-all-the-time thing of Reacher's diction and story, I think he would be tempted to put in more colourful characters and great weird expressions. And there aren't that many of them in these books. But when I see characters discussing a not very attractive woman as "[she] fell out of an ugly tree and hit every branch"... That's a King expression if ever I read one.
So if there is a "Lee Child is an actor" camp, I am in it.
27-01-2010
