Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson


Christine loses most of her memory every night when she goes to sleep. Sometimes she wakes thinking she’s in her twenties, sometimes even younger. She doesn't know where she is, or what has happened to her in the past several of decades. With the help of a psychologist and her journal, she begins to reconstruct her life and discovers just how vulnerable she really is.
Serious, strange amnesia in fiction is almost always a little too convenient. It's one of those things that happens all the time in books and almost never in real life (like the revelation that your father is not really your father). I picked up this suspense novel because of the compelling cover, but thought - boring, another amnesia story. Then I started reading and I could not put it down. It is definitely one of  my recent top recommendations for beach/vacation reading.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson


Sometimes when I say that a book is movie-ready it’s not entirely a compliment, but this book is so action-packed, so creative, so visual and imaginative, so on-the-edge-of-my-seat-the-whole-time, that I’m calling it movie-ready and that means it’s great. It’s a summer blockbuster in a book (and it will be a summer blockbuster in a movie summer of 2013). I've already picked out who I think should play the various characters in this large and varied cast.
A quick description might make it seem like a rehash of The Terminator stories, but this is a robot uprising of a different sort. Yes, artificial intelligence has taken over and is at war with human beings, but that’s where the similarities end. Wilson studied robotics, so there is a very creepy reality to the way they work and move and how people interact with them. I highly recommend this for any vacation you have coming up – even if it’s just in your backyard or on your couch.