The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I actually listened to the audiobook of The Ocean at the End of the Lane read by the author, Neil Gaiman. I had read the blurb on the back cover but was still not expecting the story that I actually got.  I’m also still unsure as to how I feel about the book or if I even liked it. The story unfolds with the narrator looking back on a childhood adventure as an adult. In this adventure, he and his neighbor down the lane, Lettie Hempstock, try to send a spirit back who is stirring up trouble, especially for the narrator. This spirit is in the form of Ursula Monkton, the new family babysitter. I can identify with a child’s dislike of a babysitter and seeing her as a sort of monster, so that bit of fantasy definitely appealed to me. I enjoyed the scenes with the Hempstock family as I particularly liked Lettie’s mother and grandmother as characters. The end was quite sad, but it was an ending that suited the story well. Gaiman’s books and fantasies are always so different, but yet very imaginative. This is definitely a story that no one else has written.

On a side note, this book was in the adult fiction section but I would consider it more of a YA book minus the dodgy sexual encounter between Ursula Monkton and the narrator’s father. I think that is part of the reason why I liked it more than American Gods. I just tend to like Gaiman’s younger narrators better.

To hell with literature - read Inferno!

Seek and find...

Symbologist Robert Langdon is back in Dan Brown’s newest thriller. Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital with no memory of the past few days, including what the heck he’s doing away from Boston. He doesn’t have time to ponder his predicament however, as he’s attacked by a spiky-haired assassin and barely escapes with his life with the help of a beautiful young doctor with an IQ of 208 who also happens to know martial arts. Unrealistic – yes. Fun – definitely. While hiding out at pretty doctor (Sienna)’s apartment, Robert finds something sewn into the back of his precious Harris Tweed jacket. Turns out, it’s a laser pointer carved out of bone and that projects an image of Botticelli’s Map of Hell with a few distinct and suspicious changes. Soon, Robert and Sienna find themselves racing against time to stop the plot of an evil geneticist who worshiped Dante and thinks that the Black Plague was the greatest thing to ever happen to civilization. Following clues that take them from Florence to Venice and on to Istanbul, Robert and Sienna try to piece together macabre clues adapted from Dante’s Inferno. 

You don’t read a Dan Brown book looking for great writing. You read it to go on an adventure, a fantastically nerdy adventure where you get a bit of a humanities lecture about every museum and every piece of artwork mentioned in the book. Add that to the fact that Inferno was my favorite of the required reads in my high school AP English class and there shouldn’t have been any doubt that I would read this book. In fact, I’m surprised it took me this long to get around to it. All in all, Inferno made for an entertaining mind-break.