Book Seven

Stephenie Meyer
THE HOST
Little Brown & Company (2008)

"The soul shone in the brilliant lights of the operating room, brighter than the reflective silver instrument in his hand. Like a living ribbon, she twisted and rippled, stretching, happy to be free of the cryotank. Her thin, feathery attachments, nearly a thousand of them, billowed softly like pale silver hair."

Crying when reading a book is a sure sign that the author had the power to bring characters to life, to weave a story that so grabbed me that I was invested in the outcome ... and boy, did I cry!

Definitely not my usual genre of writing ... she's kind of a cross between Isaac Asimov and Stephen King. The story is sci-fi/fantasy ... but within a chapter or two, I was right there with the last rebel cell of humans on a planet Earth taken over by "the hosts".

It's a magnificent love story ... between host and human ... love everlasting between human and human in the face of death ... and a story that transcends into a definition of sorts of the most unconditional aspects of the broader sense of the word "love" ...

An absolute must read!

Book Six

Patricia Cornwell
BOOK OF THE DEAD
Penguin Books - 2007

Kay Scarpetta is another one of those characters who lives and breathes through the author's writing ... and though the storyline is important ... what is happening in the lives of the central characters - Kay, Marino, Benton and Lucy - is just as important. Cornwell always delivers what she promises - human interest, gore and madness, shivers, magical technology through Lucy's gadgets and gizmos ...

" One of those details we may never know," Benton says. "People don't tell the truth. After a while, they don't even know it."