47. 1st to Die - James Patterson

Horrible, predictable, annoying. Suffice it to say, I won't be reading any more Pattersons in the future.

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar

Book #48 - 2013

It is like High School Physics revisited with all the cool stuff that was missing in those textbooks. Manjit Kumar has done a great job tackling this otherwise overwhelming topic. It sure was the recounting of the golden era of physics with such stalwarts, some of them, less recognised, just in contrast with the Einsteins, Bohrs, Heisenbergs and Schrodingers of the world. I personally didn't even know of the existence of Pauli, whom the author has equated with Einstein in sheer intellect. The personal chemistry between those scientists, animated through the correspondences between them, the gradual timeline with non-gradual developments in physics were all very well manifested. The book weakened in the last few chapters, probably because of the complexity of the phenomenon the author was tackling with. The author, perhaps, would have been better off, if he had given a conceptual summary of the developments in the last 25 years, rather than doing such an unsatisfactory job of forcing a closure. There was nothing I gained from the author's explanation of the future efforts made on the leggett inequality or the inequality itself, other than the name itself. The book lost some of its hold on me in the aforementioned last few chapters, but the overall experience was fantastic.

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin

Book #46 - 2013

This book happens to be my first book written with a Swedish background and indeed my first encounter with a Swedish author. A thriller based based in Oland, Sweden where a small child goes missing from an island, without a trace. Does that ring a bell?With a similar background, and with a not so distinct plot, it is easy to see from where the author gets his inspiration, and I just wish publishers will stop posting Steig Larsson's name on all thrillers, be it by Scandinavian authors or by Japanese.  But well, the story, the narration, the outcome, the quality of writing, all differ from the Steig Larsson masterpiece. Not a bad read, but nothing too commendable about the book either.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

Book #45 - 2013

Wow! A superb thriller with a minimal of characters (and really weird ones at that!) and hardly the semblance of a plot. And yet, the story progresses, like a ticking time bomb, till everything comes to culmination. An interesting read, despite the lack of character development, Hitchcockish in a way (the movies), with the final twist being accidental, a point where it deviates from the creations of the brilliant filmmaker.

The Tower of Silence by Gyan Prakash

Book #44 - 2013

Summary from Harper Collins website:

"A long-lost Sexton Blake mystery, 1920s detective fiction at its best

Historian Gyan Prakash of Princeton University stumbled upon part of the unpublished manuscript of Tower of Silence by Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier (or Chaiwala, as he called himself) in the British Library. After scouring several Mumbai libraries, he found the missing pages.

It is a thrilling tale that begins on a blistering April afternoon in Poona with the click of a camera shutter. An aerial photograph is taken from a small aircraft flying directly over the Tower of Silence. The Zorastrian community is thrown into turmoil and horrified grief at this heinous act.

Beram, a suave wealthy man who drives around in a Rolls Royce but is a devout Parsi, decides to exact revenge. Thus begins a sensational cat-and-mouse game between Beram and Sexton Blake, England’s most famous detective."

The biggest "mystery" in connection with this book, was the original author "Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier Chaiwala" himself. The book itself, was quite amateurish, with some supernatural phenomenon and detective tricks which were quite a bore, in search of a better word, a search I am not willing to conduct for the purpose of writing this review. The book was very racist, but the racism was so obvious and oversold, that it was more amusing than annoying. A forgettable read.