media consumption

Hour Game & State of Fear

Hour Game, by David Baldacci
State of Fear, by Michael Crichton

Summer's rolled around, and I've started (verrry slowly) to catch up on some reading of books that were given to me for Cristmas. I doubt that I would have picked up either of these books on my own, but the great thing about getting books as gifts is that you get to read something that you might not have otherwise.

Baldacci's Hour Game is a more straightforward murder-mystery, while Crichton's State of Fear is of the murder-that-exposes-larger-conspiracy subgenre, of which the Da Vinci Code is probably the most obvious recent example.

Because Baldacci keeps things relatively simple, the book was perhaps more fun and rewarding. My enjoyment was probably helped along by the fact that the action centered on a smallish Virginia town south of Charlottesville (I spent a couple of years in C'ville attending the University of Virginia). There were plenty of twists and diversions to keep the story interesting and the chapters written from the serial killer's point of view helped sustain the suspense of the story. My only complaint is that the hero characters seemed kind of 2-dimensional. Since I haven't read Baldacci's Split Second (to which Hour Game is a kind of sequel), I didn't feel that I had enough back-story to relate very well to the protagonists. Still this was an enjoyable read overall.

While Michael Crichton certainly knows how to tell a story, State of Fear mostly just made me grumpy. Throughout the book, Crichton bludgeons the reader with his skepticism of global warming. He goes so far as to provide footnoted references for the clever things some of his characters say to refute one or another aspect of the global warming theory. Not that I have any problem with footnotes in fiction, but nowhere in the book does Crichton support any of the pro-global warming arguments. Based on this novel, it would appear that global warming has no basis in science whatsoever, when in fact, global warming is widely accepted as theory.

The story? Yeah it was interesting enough as a thriller/mystery, I guess, but just a bit outrageous for me.

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