I read The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum. It's the book on which the movie is based and is, of course, about a guy who can't remember who he is and is then, justifiably I believe, pissed that everybody seems to want to kill him. Luckily for this guy, he's got certain useful instincts that keep him from being killed. It's been a long time since I saw the movie, and I don't remember it very well, but I had the impression that the book was more interesting. It was your general action thriller, so it kept my attention quite well as I was reading it and then faded almost completely from my memory after I was finished.
The same thing happened with The Other by Thomas Tryon. This one veers more towards horror and the story... had potential. It could have been really really creepy but, for some reason, it wasn't. Not for me anyway. (It's about a pair of twin boys and one of them seems kind of evil.)
Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams is the memoir of her mother's cancer. She contrasts her mother's lingering death with the flooding of the Great Salt Lake, which simultaneously drowns her favorite bird sanctuary. It was beautifully written and only tainted by the fact that I'm not a bird-watcher and found it difficult to empathize with her losses where the birds were concerned or her joys upon seeing strange birds. Still, it's lovely and if you're looking for a memoir about dealing with loss, this is an awfully good one.
I'd picked up Patton: Ordeal and Triumph by Ladislas Farago because the boyfriend LOVES Patton and one of those things happened that sometimes happen in relationships, where you've listened to your significant other wax eloquent about how great _________ is for so long that you start to think you think it's great too. It turned out, about halfway through the book, that I'm really NOT interested in World War II from a tactical standpoint and I really don't give a damn about Patton. In fact, I ended up a bit confused about what the big deal was. I mean, the gentleman writing the book asserts an awful lot that, had Eisenhower followed Patton's plans, the war would have been over a lot more quickly, but he DIDN'T. Patton seems to have been systematically ignored and shunted aside all through WWII, so why (even though it seems likely to me that he was, in fact, a brilliant strategist) is he the one we hear about? Why is he the one who got all of the glory when he was the one who wasn't allowed to do anything? It's odd to me. Mostly I got bogged down in the tactical discussions of the book. My brain doesn't bend that way, so it made less sense to me than the discussions of Patton's reactions to things. If you DO like tactics, you'd probably be fascinated by this book but, me, I wandered off to read a book about psychological disorders and was much happier. (But I DID finish the book about Patton, so it counts!)
63/105
