Dan Brown

Dan Brown Novels

Sarah has been reading Dan Brown for a couple of years now and she finally managed to get me hooked. I have so far read Angels & Demons and I am half way through The Da Vinci Code. So far I have no idea who did it! One of the confusing things I have found is in what order do they go? So hear is the list in order publication;

Angels & Demons
Publication Date: 2001

The Da Vinci Code
Publication Date: 2003

Deception Point
Publication Date: 2004

Digital fortress
Publication Date: 2004

Chasm City – Alastair Reynold

Editorial Reviews – From Publishers Weekly

In this worthy follow-up to his well-received first novel, Revelation Space (2001), an especially intelligent far-future foray, British author Reynolds transmutes space opera into a noirish, baroque, picaresque mystery tale. Honor requires that Tanner Mirabel, a weapons specialist/bodyguard, track down and destroy the man who killed his boss. Tanner’s pursuit takes him to the planet Yellowstone, where a nano-plague has mutated the glittering human cultural showcase of Chasm City into something bizarre, dark and extremely dangerous. He’s aided or threatened or both, at different times by a host of human and not-quite-human characters. Relying on his own combat skills and hard-boiled attitude, Tanner keeps seeking revenge even though he begins to wonder why he’s doing it, especially after intrusions of other people’s memories lead him to suspect he’s not who he thinks he is. Inventiveness and tone are Reynolds’s strong points. Presented in a sustained burst of weirdness, the novel’s details are consistently startling but convincing in context, and the loose ends eventually tie neatly together. The narrator’s tough-guy stance works too, both as an expression of Tanner’s personality and as a defensive reaction to the setting’s intimidating strangeness. Think of a combination of the movie Blade Runner and one of Jack Vance’s ironic SF adventure novels. If the ending feels a bit flat, that’s probably inevitable after the exuberant display of wonders earlier. (Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.)

Paul’s Review

So far an excellant continuation of the plot. the story blends well with his previous book. Not as confusing as the first, he sticks to one timeline which gets you more gripped by the whole situation.

Revelation Space – Alastair Reynold

Editorial Reviews – Amazon.com’s Best of 2001

Alastair Reynolds’s first novel is “hard” SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old–when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.

Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: “a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy.” Now an intuition he doesn’t understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.

Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity’s tiny crew have hidden agendas–Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity–and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.

The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity’s planet-wrecking superweapons.

At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate–most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. (David Langford, Amazon.co.uk)

Pauls Review

This is the 1st book I have ever read by this author… and i have to say that I did enjoy it. The book starts well but does get confusing when it shifts time lines, the confusion quickly goes and you appreciate both why and then how he achieves this. It gets quite hard going half-way through but picks up again to provide and excellant ending.

A Short History Of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

Editorial Reviews – Amazon.com

From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as “The Size of the Earth” and “Life Itself.” Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it’s when Bryson dives into some of science’s best and most embarrassing fights–Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould–that he finds literary gold. –Therese Littleton–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Pauls Review

A brillant book, full of information that you didn’t know that you needed to survive. His use of descriptive text backuped with the stories and often text and interviews with the orginal people involved with key moments in our history makes this one of the best books I have ever read.