Theme Thursdays -- I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman

Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one Thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:

• A theme will be posted each week (on Thursdays)
• Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading
• Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post
• It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word).
  

This week's theme is:  building:  

Cover of I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel

Security at the Greenville facility was even stricter than at Sussex, with checkpoint after checkpoint, search after search.  That was to be expected, Eliza supposed, when someone was visiting a place known as the Death House.

But the building itself was a stark contrast to the grimly named facility, a small jailhouse, with a deputy at a desk and just one cell.

p.341, I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman

Just finished this one up.  So-so -- definitely airport fiction.  And not topics for the faint-of-heart.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

Moonlight Mile is what I call airport fiction -- the kind of book you can buy in paperback at the airport gift shop and buzz through on your three hour flight and the kind of book that always makes me want to assure people that I do often read books of more substance. 

That said, I was not sorry I read Moonlight Mile. After I started reading, I realized that several of the characters have been present in one or more of Lehane's previous novels.  I wondered whether I should put it down and start with an earlier book -- I don't like picking up a series in the middle.  But Lehane says it can stand on its own and I agree with that assessment. 

I won't say much more about it here, but I will say that, while in some ways a semi-typical detective-y, airport fiction-y kind of story, Mile also delivers a fair bit of substance -- and a presentation of life that is gritty but hopeful, dark but possessing a fair number of people you can love and trust.  I'm down with that. 

I'll leave you with a short quote that probably won't strike others the way it did me, but that I'm still thinking about:

I just notice people sometimes mistake their life choices for their moral ones.
~p.133, Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

Ancestor by Scott Sigler

Hm.  Ancestor by Scott Sigler definitely falls into the airport fiction category for me.  That is what I call anything that I could see sitting in the front at an airport bookstore -- high action & suspense, simple, page-turning fluff.  Which is fine with me -- though I have a friend or two who might disagree, I think everyone needs the occasional fluff.  If there was one aspect of the book that might slightly rescue it from the airport fiction genre, it would be the theme of science gone wrong/where should scientists draw the line with their research and experiments.

So my basic first reaction to Ancestor was, as I told my husband, "It's like Jurassic Park with way more human to human violence and some pretty misogynistic attitudes and abhorrent behaviors towards women".  Though I haven't actually read Jurassic Park, only seen the movie, so I'm not sure how accurate that comparison is.

My more positive thoughts?  Sigler did a great job of creating a diverse set of characters -- each character was unique and it was easy to remember who was who -- not always the case with a page-turning thriller full of many characters.  I also enjoyed the running commentary from one of the older characters about all the famous people he knew "back in the day" (ie, "Charlie" Heston, Jack Kerouac, and Marilyn Monroe) and the portrayals of Michiganders in general.

I will also admit to being amused by the same character's response after being asked the whereabouts of another person on the island, ""Did you look up your asshole?  Oh wait, your head is already there, so you'd have seen her by now."

The book opens with Paul Fischer, a colonel in the Army working with infectious disease.  I expected him to reappear at the end and he never did -- which felt like a loose end left untied.

So in general, it was an interesting airport fiction storyline that I enjoyed in some ways, but the numerous men with hideous attitudes toward women was a pretty big distraction that, for me, took away from my enjoyment of the story.