I realated a little too well with this book, since when I started my online journal in 1999, quite a few bits were big fat lies. I’d make up friends and lovers. I had no idea that what I wrote would actually touch people. Like Anna, I sort of got a large dose of reality when I found myself falling for someone I met through my journal, riddled with guilt that he’d never forgive me for all the lies I told. Luckily, when I told him the truth, Mark forgave me completely. Shortly thereafter I took down my archives and started over again with the truth.

This is one of the few books I’ve read where I think the movie was actually better than the book. Even then, I don’t think it’s so much that the movie was BETTER, but the book just works better as a movie. It plays out nicer. The book stayed right on par with the movie and only a few tiny events were changed.

If you don’t know the premise, fight club is about a guy who shall forever remain nameless. He can’t sleep at night, so he goes to support groups for diseases and problems he doesn’t have. He meets a woman named Marla Singer and they form a hate-hate relationship. Then the guy meets a man named Tyler and his entire life changes. He goes from a condo filled with IKEA furniture to a crack-house reject of a house.

He forms a club called Fight Club with Tyler. Men beat each other up and feel great about it afterwards. Woo.

It was a quick read and a poor book. I’d absolutely recommend renting the movie over wasting your time reading the book.

Christopher Snow lives in the sleepy little town of Moonlight Bay. He has a rare disease called XP which prevents him from getting any sunlight or being in bright light at all. His body doesn’t repair ultra-violet damage the way most bodies do. Therefore Christopher is resigned to live his life by the night and he knows just about every inch of Moonlight Bay.

His girlfriend Sasha and his boyhood friend Bobby are his closest companions and they both love him dearly and would do anything for him.

He lives with his dog, Orson, who almost seems to be able to understand what you’re saying and respond.

On this night, Christopher Snow’s father, who is afflicted with cancer, dies. Chris makes a rare venture out into the world of light to go to the hospital to see his father one last time before he dies. After he’s gone and the body is taken to be cremated, Chris remembers his father wants to be cremated with a picture of Chris’s mother who died two years ago in a car accident. He rushes down to the basement to catch up with the men who took the body, but instead he finds an odd scene. A man in a van brought another body of a dead hitchhiker to be swapped out with Chris’s dad. Apparently someone wants to do more tests on Chris’s father.

This is the beginning of a strange night full of events for Chris Snow which leads him to discover a frightening military experiment has been going on in Moonlight Bay for years. It’s the end of the world as we know it and it’s too late to stop what’s already happened.

What’s worse, Chris’s mother was involved in the whole thing and as it turns out, she may have been murdered or killed herself.

Chris tries to find the truth in amid all the lies and secrets. He risks his life and his friends’ lives in this pursuit.

The ‘frightening experiment’ involves gene splicing which will allow superior intelligence. It has been tested on a variety of animals and in the first batch, although they exhibited superior intelligence, they also exhibited massive violence and hatred.

This book reminded me too much of Watchers and it even refers to The Francis Project that was behind all the happenings in Watchers. The difference is that this book didn’t have any of the heart that Watchers had. It was well written and suspenseful, but in the end, I didn’t really care about any of the characters. Orson didn’t win me over as much as Einstein. And the violent creatures resulting in the experiment didn’t have the heart that The Outsider was known to have.

Overall, this was a big let down. There’s another book with the same characters, but they didn’t win me over enough to want to read more about them.

I figured I would give chick-lit another try, but it seems like the plain truth is that I just don’t like it. All the books are the same and have absolutely no substance to them at all.

Angela DiFranco is 31 and dying to get married. Her coworker, Michelle believes that men are like a jar of pickles. Someone has to come along first and loosen the lid before you can get in there and pop it open. Michelle devises a number of different ways to make Angie’s boyfriend Kirk pop wide open. Of course he does, but he doesn’t love her as much as he should.

This book was boring and predictable.

I’m so finished with chick-lit this time. I mean it.

This was an absolutely fabulous and unique book that I completely enjoyed.

Sam and Ruth live with Ruth’s mother and their 16 year old daughter. Their world is turned upside down when Sam loses his job and Ruth’s father is in an accident and needs to move in to be looked after by the family. Ruth’s parents don’t care much for one another and fight constantly.

Ruth tries to keep everything together, but when Sam decides he’d rather look at buying and selling boats as a trade rather than the job he’s been doing for the past 20 years, the whole family decides it might be time for Ruth to get a job herself.

Ruth loves to bake cakes, so what better idea than to go into a cake baking business. The whole family gets involved in supporting Ruth’s new career move.

The book is well written and charming. I absolutely loved it. To top it all off, at the back of the book there are cake recipies for all the cakes mentioned in the book. What a unique idea!

Great book.

Hands down, this is one of the best books I’ve read this summer (if not ever). It’s a heartfelt tale of a man who’s lost his wife and wants answers from the only witness to her death, their dog.

This book isn’t really for the tride and true dog lovers due to some of the graphic scenes depicted. It had me squirming at some points, but it doesn’t really take away from how remarkable the book was. I was left breathless a few times. Books never do that to me. This one is a keeper.

I highly recommend it.

This book was so amazingly bland that I can’t accurately describe my feelings for it. Through the entire book I found myself hoping to finish it so that I could put it aside and start another, more interesting book. I have never in my life disliked a main character as much as I disliked Carrie Bell.

She was selfish, pure and simple. When her best friend and fiance broke his neck in a diving accident, she ran off to New York and began making something of her life. She began following her dreams and exploring her emotions. In New York, unlike her hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, she was known to care about people every now and then. Be happy every now and then. In Madison, she cared about no one, least of all herself. She abandoned her friends and her fiance.

I have absolutely no idea how she could feel so numb towards someone who was not only her lover, but her friend. The whole book amazed me. There were no surpises. No plot twists. No caring for the character. I was more interested in the tale of her friends than her own tale. It’s like watching an interesting movie through a very bland character’s eyes.

The third book on my new reading plan and I hated it. I can only hope few books like this follow. I will never again trust the New York Times Bestseller list.

The National Security Agency has been working for years on a method to intercept and crack any code or encrypted message sent via E-Mail across the globe. They finally developed a machine so powerful that it can decode even the toughest messages in just a matter of minutes. The machine is dubbed TRANSLTR.

The existence of TRANSLTR is threatened when a bitter, crippled Japanese programmer threatens to release an encryption method that TRANSLTR can’t crack: Digital Fortress. Digital Fortress is placed up on the web, encrypted in itself so that only those with the passcode can unlock it. The NSA learns the programmer is working with a partner as a safety measure. If he should die, the partner will publish the passcode within 24 hours.

The programmer is found dead in Spain and the NSA must race the clock to obtain both passcodes before it is too late.

The whole idea that keeping Digital Fortress out of the hands of the public was a life or death situation seemed a little too weighty for me. I believe the basic idea of Digital Fortress is that the encryption was constantly revolving, making it impossible for a computer to guess when the correct passcode had been entered. Anyone in the computer world knows that everything has a workaround. It may be that Digital Fortress would make TRANSLTR extinct, but necessity is the mother of invention and people would eventually figure out how to break into a file encrypted by Digital Fortress.

Therefore, the book seemed a little bloody to me. People were taking the issue WAY too seriously.

If you put the absurdity of the subject matter aside, I still enjoyed the book. I’m really starting to like Dan Brown’s work. I’ve also read the Da Vinci Code and both books are filled with information you may not have previously known (such as where the term “sincerely” really comes from). They were also both written in real-time. I absolutely love books written in real-time. No skipping ahead three months and losing a portion of the person’s life. No thought or detail left unattended.

It was a good, dark read that I really enjoyed. I can’t wait to delve into some of Dan Brown’s other works.

As with all of Dan Brown’s books, I really enjoyed this one. It is my least favorite of his works so far because the action doesn’t really kick in until you’re about halfway or so through the book. Aside from Rachel and Michael, absolutely none of the characters are likeable. It’s difficult to read a book when you hate all of its characters.

I like fluff books.

But this one was just taken too far. There is no real plot. Rebecca Bloomwood is a self absorbed weak excuse for a woman. She can’t think of ANYTHING except shopping. Honest to goodness, she can’t go more than 10 minutes without thinking of herself. As a result, she doesn’t have any friends (unless you can count her flatmate Suzy – someone she couldn’t care less about) not that she cares – friends would distract her from shopping.

The novel didn’t even reach a turning point until around page 220, which is more than two-thirds of the way through the book. The previous pages were merely spent going on and on about how much Rebecca loved shopping.

Dear Lord – there are people who actually like THIS fluff? At least fluffy romance novels have ROMANCE in them and GOOD THINGS happening in them. For this novel, we have to spend its entirety feeling horrible for poor Becky Bloomwood, save for the last 50 pages where things just FALL IN HER LAP.

This novel disgusted me. I’m going to have to choose deeper fluff from now on if I want to give my mind something fun to read.