Personal - By Lee Child

There are potboilers. And then there are potboilers. Personal is a potboiler.

Lee Child's leading alpha male (minus the toxicity) Jack Reacher has always been a source of intense, vicarious adventure. Stories starring Reacher are by habit, captivating from the first paragraph, down to the last page. There is rarely anything cerebral about him or his settings, but that is the allure of a Jack Reacher story. If you are a serious reader, this is your detox.

Personal starts with a suspicious summons of our man. He ends up in pursuit of a suspected deadly, unfailing sniper, who might just tip the world balance in favour of the worst. He has for company and assistance a smart, young Casey Nice (a very Bond Girl-ish surname, which is, more or less, a giveaway). The two sift through clues and dodgy elements to a fitting, action-packed climax.

Jack Reacher benefits from being a recurring character, which means, he comes with the baggage of an unapologetic aura. It is understood, that he will do amazing things and be cool, generally, which he does with panache in Personal. The thing I like best about his character is his taciturnity, because his mental workings are enough narration. So the thing to look out for in his stories is his companions or the people he ends up saving. In this case, I really liked Casey Nice. Thankfully, there doesn't seem to exist any dregs of feminity weighing down her character development. Whatever ambiguity may remain, can be adequately explained by her lack of experience (and its over-compensation by Reacher). She is a match for Reacher, only younger.

The story is set mostly in Europe, and there are pleasant descriptions of the continent, in stark comparison to the spartan atmosphere of the US, where Reacher is first found. There is also a minor, also recurring flashback into his past, which only makes me more curious about him as a person.

Personal is a wonderful weekend read or something to return to after a patchy day. It is best not read during bedtimes though, as it is quite the page-turner.

Comments

Side Reads - A Book of English Essays - Edited by W.E. Williams

Remember our school days? Remember those dreary passages we had to read and read again - between the lines and over and under them? Remember wondering how could the study of language be so dry? Well, it turns out, what we were served was high in protein, but pretty much devoid of spice and juice. Let me set the record straight. Essays are fun. Read A Book of English Essays to see if I'm right. As the name says, it is a collection of small essays on a multitude of topics by the who's-who of English literature - Francis Bacon, Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, A.A. Milne, R.L. Stevenson - honestly the list is quite scary. But once you pull your head out of the table of contents, it's a treasure mine. Most essays are short, possibly the length of a newspaper article (which is how they must have been originally published I think). What is interesting though, is the topics they are on. So there are absolutely gorgeous ones like 'Getting Up on Cold Morni...

How are rugs and books related

As a child, I was pretty indifferent to rugs or carpets. Back at home, they always existed. They were scrubbed and vacuumed and dirtied and dribbled upon and I didn't quite imagine life without it. Till I moved out. Basic amenities do not cover rugs, far less, carpets. The first few days I didn't mind, basking in my new-fangled independence, traipsing over bare floors with un-socked feet. Eventually though, the irremovable stains on the bathroom floors made it clear that, in the absence of carpetting, a near-permanent use of slippers is a must. Then came the winters. It brought the chill from all possible directions, including and especially, the floor. The soles of my feet must have been frostbitten on a regular basis and I yearned for the luxury of a nice woolly carpet to sink my feet in. As a conscientious student out making her life (not very successfully), I chose to brave the chilblains (they were not, really). It wasn't until I was married that ...

The Long and Short of It

Call it stuffy, but there'a a charm about long-winded sentences. People my age - and by that I mean the early-to-mid thirties - have had a disgusting time with school texts, which were expressly chosen for their remarkable abstruseness. Most of us were put off with the language, given the endless probing into seemingly harmless pieces of text and losing marks to our seemingly erroneous interpretations (at this age, I am told that I am never wrong, I can decipher things the way I want; evidently an adult's imagination holds more value than a teenager's). Abstruse works were seldom long-winded, but vice-versa always held true, and does so - to some extent - even now. Excerpts from classics (I remember Shakespeare's pieces - abridged, they said but that didn't make a spot of difference at that age) lacked any modern adherence to placements and abounded in queer, archaic phrases jumbled in a sentence spanning three lines; we were taught conjunctions like '...

The Pile of Books

Search This Blog