Darice de Cuba

Regarded as “the” summer read and highly anticipated, The Passage by Justin Cronin is yet another vampire story. But don’t confuse it with our hero vampire Edward Cullen.

Set in the not so distance future of 2014 we follow an U.S. Army secret test with a virus, death row inmates and a six year old girl. Soon we are taken 93 years later in a post apocalyptic world where the remaining humans live day by day while fighting of the ‘virals’.

The Passage is the first of what will be a trilogy, 700 something pages long I have to say this book felt like my personal Mount Everest.

When a book is much hyped like this one I expect it to read fast, taking me at least a week at most. A good example is the Millennium Trilogy which I read in a week and a half. Justin Cronin really takes his time to develop characters, detailing environments, relationships and so on. It’s not just a thriller and horror story, but a it has a palpable emotional storyline embedded between all of it. If you like authors like Stephen King and can handle a trilogy the size of Lord of the Rings you might like this book.

I struggled with the first 300 to 400 pages which where mostly settings of plot-lines and characters. After The Road and The Book of Eli the whole deserted towns and cities, everyone long dead gets kinda routine. It’s only after I finally got in the mind set of the characters who know almost nothing about the beginning of it all that I got pulled in the story, rooting for them trying to save humanity.

The book gets a 3 out of 5 stars from me. I admit this is not really my kind of fare but I managed to read it till the end and I would like to read the next book. But I don’t feel like the book lived up to all the hype it got.

If you read the book there will be a part about The Gulf of Mexico which will be so ironic you won’t even laugh.

Our Tragic Universe is Scarlett Thomas newest book. Revolving around Meg, a commercial fiction writer living in Dartmouth in Devon with her boyfriend. The mood settings resembles her previous book “The End of Mr. Y” a lot, only that one plays in a city and the other in a far less urban environment.

Since discovering Scarlett Thomas I have realy come to love her books, while they are fiction you learn a thing or two about physics and homeopathy. Not two things you’ll come across easily together in one book.

In Our Tragic Universe Meg contemplates her unfinished novel, going back and forth over in which format she should write it. As a matter of fact Our Tragic Universe reads like a story-less story which is the format Meg is constantly mulling over. But this doesn’t mean the book is boring, the story is partly driven by a book Meg mysteriously gets about how we are all immortal.

I new by this piece on the back flap of the book that I was going to like it:

Meg is lost in a labyrinth of her own devising. But could there be an important connection between a wild beast living on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time, a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe and the Cottingley Fairies? Or is her life just one long chain of coincidences?

Just like her previous book it’s a good read that leaves you wanting for more. This is the second time I finished one of her books and wanted something similar to read but I have yet to come across a book that will match her books.