More of wot I have read…

Mayan Prophecy by Steve Alten

I was given this book for my holiday away and although I don’t think I have ever given up on a book, this one came close. It was full of action and drama but there was something about the characters and the plot that was all too two dimensional and it was hard to engage with the book. Not one I would recommend.

‘For thirty-two years, archaeologist Julius Gabriel investigated the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old enigma that predicts the Apocalypse. His research led him to believe that ancient constructions like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, and Chichen Itza, were all built as part of a primeval fail-safe system, that might save humanity from total annihilation. But now Julius is dead, and his theories have perished with him, discredited and ridiculed.

With the help of Dominique, a part-Mayan psychiatric intern, Julius' son, Michael, breaks out of an insane asylum in Miami, where he has been illegally imprisoned. Together they flee to the Yucatan Peninsula, where Michael believes he can find the evidence he needs to prove his father's theory, and to convince the world of the fast-approaching global catastrophe.

In Mexico, at the autumn equinox, a serpent's shadow appears over the northern face of the Temple of Kukulcan, as it has done for a thousand years. But this time is different - it is the beginning of the end...’


The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

After reading this and Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell is my current favourite author. It was an engaging story with believable characters in a highly detailed and mysterious world. This was a superbly crafted piece of work that satisfied the reader on so many levels.

‘The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.


But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”’