Wilson's Weblog

Lee and Andrew Child, 2020, Random House, LLC 

This might be the worst Jack Reacher book I have read so far. The Sentinel is apparently a system designed to thwart attempts to subvert the election system in the U.S. Reacher gets involved in the plot when he is strolling through a small town in Tennessee and encounters an attempt to kidnap an individual on the street in broad daylight. Reacher decides to help and the plot begins to unfold.

There are several things I didn’t like about the book. First is that Reacher doesn’t seem to connect to any of the victims on a personal basis. In some of the previous novels, he definitely has some sort of personal connection, either with the place or some of the other characters. In this one, there is none.

There is also very little information about this system, the Sentinel. It is mentioned only in a few pages, and we never find out anything about it (how it works, how it is deployed, how it was developed, etc.). One would think that, if it’s so important to protect, we would at least know a bit about it.

Then, there is the plot. It involves corrupt police, the FBI, Nazis, Russians, and several additional non-important characters. It’s convoluted and difficult to know where it’s going at any time. And sometimes it’s not very interesting.

Finally, the writing. The Childs apparently think that short phrases (non-sentences) coming at the reader in rapid succession somehow add to the excitement and suspense. This may be true to some degree, but also degrades the quality of the writing. Coupled with the detailed descriptions of Reacher’s every move when he is fighting his opponents (which becomes very tiresome), the book loses a lot of its potential appeal for me.

If you want to kill some time, you can get through the book. If you want to read a good book, however, there are a lot of other alternatives out there.

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, original publication 1951, Back Bay Books Paperback edition 2010, Little Brown and Company, New York

This book, for some reason, was chosen by our men’s book club. It was interesting to go back and read it as I wasn’t sure that I had read it so long ago. I’m also reading a biography of J.D. Salinger so I have a little knowledge of him and how the book came to be written. That extra knowledge gave me an appreciation of his life and some inkling of where he was coming from when he wrote the book.

One thing I learned was how the book was received when it was first published back in 1951. It was immediately praised as a masterpiece and came to be considered one of the really great books of the twentieth century. Reading it today, I can see some of the qualities of the book, but I can’t quite get my head around its being all that great. It now seems somehow dated but I think it’s probably still relevant given the mental struggles that the youth of today are experiencing. Holden Caulfield suffered from a total lack of direction in his life which may be inflicting many of our young individuals today, although Holden didn’t seem to be contemplating suicide as seems to be the trend today. It would be interesting to hear how a young person would react to reading it today.

Holden, even though he seems to be totally lost, has some redeeming qualities. I was amazed when he held to his principles when he disputed the charge for the prostitute that was sent to his room. The easy way out would have been to just hand over the extra five dollars (which he ended up losing anyway. Instead, he chose to have himself severely beaten just because he determined that he was right and the other people were wrong. I suspect that most individuals would take the easy way out to avoid being hurt. He also showed a great deal of empathy for some others and felt sorry for them, even after excoriating them for being phonies.

It was frustrating to read because I kept wanting Holden to wake up and change his ways while, at the same time, knowing that he wasn’t going to. I’m glad I read it, but I’m not able to rate it as one of my all-time favorite books.

by Matt Haig, 2020, Kindle Version, Viking

This was an interesting book for me. It’s about a young woman whose life is a mess, so she attempts to end it by taking some pills. She didn’t, however, take enough and ended up in a state somewhere between life and death and she arrives in a library full of books. The librarian is a woman who was the librarian of her school library when she was a kid.

The books in the library are books that provide her with lives that she could have lived had she made other choices. There is also a book of regrets which is rather large because she basically regrets all the choices she made in her life.

She then experiences other lives, but they don’t seem to work out very well and she is returned to the library when she discovers that the alternate choice isn’t providing the happiness she thought it would.

The books is well written but bogs down a bit when it describes a large number of lives. Most individuals make a very few life-changing choices and I think it would have been better to explore a few of these lives in greater depth than flit between a larger number. At one point, the author said she had experienced thousands of alternative lives.

It did cause me to go back and think about the choices I had made in my life. Just about all of those choices turned out well for me so I don’t have much to regret in that vein. I do have other regrets, however, that I wish I could have a second change, but there’s no guarantee that I would do any better the second time around so it’s better for me to focus on the present and future.