Atlantis - David Gibbins

22 March 2012
Book 5 of 50

Picked up this book by David Gibbins on a lark. Atlantis has always a held my fancy. In fact anything to do with ancient civilizations and I'm a sucker. I picked up the book as the burb looked interesting.

The plot was really good, but the problem was it got lost in too many technical details. Yes the writer comes from and archeaological background and it shows. A lot of page time is spent on academic and archealogical detail. I have no problems with details but they tend to be too long-winded and often made me lose the plot. I had to go back a few pages and figure out what exactly was happening w.r.t the characters before the technical explaination

IMO this was unnecessary and took focus away from the story structure. Most of the details that Gibbins spent pages on seemed more like a filler in the story to increase the page count that actually counting for anything in the story.

What also got my goat was that Atlantis has been lost for so many centuries and suddenly they find 1 clue and viola within a couple of days they have found the island, the people and have deciphered exactly what went wrong that caused the civilization to disappear. It sounded a bit far fetched to me. Also there are a lot holes w.r.t to the characters. Nothing is mentioned about Jack Howard and Costas friendship except that they were in Intelligence together. Also Howard doesn't really show any qualities that should inspire others.

Mid-way through the story we have a villian coming in with delusions of grandeur. Howard is able to take out the entire group of villians by himself while being shot and bleeding from his wounds makes him look like a Rambo. The book started off as a treasure hunt and from there migrated into the realms of thriller and action/adventure; ultimately doing justice to neither.
So I would rate it 2.5/5 in general. I'm gonna read the next book in the hopes that the author improves his writing style once he's has some experience.

Empire of Gold - Andy McDermott

21 March 2012
Book 4 of 50

Nina Wilde & Eddie Chase are back again in Book#7 by Andy McDermott. This time it is Venezuela & Peru which is their in their cross sites. The mysterious statues introduced in The Cult Of Osiris and The Sacred Vault is brought to the fore again.

There is a 3rd statue and a mysterious organization called Group wants them all. But they need Nina Wilde's help to put together all the statues. Wilde and Chase are put on it's trail by Ankit Jindal the interpol head of cultural investigations who's working on the side for the Group. In their quest for the City of Gold - El Dorado, the come across the Incan site  deep in Venezuelan forest which is being looted by a General in Venezuelan Army looking to depose the current regime; while collaborating with drug dealers and a mercenary psycho ex-SAS officer Stikes from Chase's past.

The path from leads from Venezuela to Peruvian mountains, where the group finds the legendary city of Gold and the final bit of the statue only for Stikes to snatch it from them. Eddie's friend Mac gets murdered by Ankit while trying to protect the statues from being blown (that Mac was targetting Stikes was just a moot point according to Ankit).

The book ends with Eddie being accused of Ankit's murder and being chased by the law enforcement authorities the world over and Nina being in two minds as to weather Eddie is guilty or not. Eddie's ex-wife Sophie Blackwood comes back from the dead and the Group forms an alliance with Stikes to get to the end objective which is a mystery continued in the next book.

What irks me while reading is the constant bickering between Eddie and Nina. While it is a part of their relationship, the problem is there is no counter balance to it and the fights between the pair come across quite often as scripted or staged.

On to The Temple of Gods tor resolve the mystery then!!!

Currently Reading

Currently I'm reading 3 books from 3 different authors at the same time. Talk about variety and spice...

1. On my mobile device I'm reading Atlantis - Book 1 of the Jack Howard Series by David Gibbins.
2. On my comp I'm reading The Empire of Gold - Book 7 of the Nina Wilde & Eddie Chase series by Andy McDermott
3. In hardback I'm reading The Stonehenge Legacy by Sam Christer borrowed from my local library.

I'm hoping to finish these 3 books this week and make a dent in a couple more over the weekend to bringing my reading up to speed.

Update!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have been out of touch with my reading for the past month or so. Too many things to do and not much time in the day to do them all and my time reading ended up being the sacrifice to manage the other tasks on my plate; but no more.

This week I'm planning on reading at least a couple of books and I am glad to say that I have made a start with "Atlantis" - David Gibbins. The plot premise looks interesting enough, lets see how the book pans out. Also on my hit list for this week is Andy McDermott's latest books Temple of Gods and the Empire of Gold. Both featuring his characters Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase. Thats my quota of books to read in a week. Lets hope that I am able to make good progress on them.

By the way while trawling the web looking for good sites that host epubs, I came across this very interesting site called epubbud.com. The site provides the epubs compatible with iphone/Kindle/Nook for most of the popular authors. If anybody wants to download some good books, this the place to surf and search for it.

Another website which scores high on providing the complete bibliography, burbs and information about the authors is fantasticfiction.co.uk. You will find the details of almost all the authors here along with all the books that they have released so far. The only thing that irritates about this site is the background & color schema, it acts as an irritant on the eye.

Micro - Micheal Crichton

Book 3 of 2012

I thought the story was too much along the lines of the movie "Honey I shrunk the kids" granted the terminology is rather new mapping towards the latest trends in microbiology and nanotechnology, but the plot had too many biological factors for me to deal with.
It got so bad that I could not even work on completing the book. Maybe I'll go back to it after a couple of months and finish it...