The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

★★★

"Being a victim is more palatable than having to recognize the intrinsic contradictions of one's own governing philosophy."

My thriller book for LIS 642 - Reading Interests of Adutls

The Hunt for Red October is a military Technothriller dealing with tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It is the first of thirteen novels centering around the main character of Jack Ryan.  The novel opens with Marko Ramius, a submarine commander in the Soviet Navy.  Ramius has had enough of Soviet politics and plans to defect to the United States with his officers aboard the Red October, a nuclear Russian submarine.  Meanwhile, Jack Ryan, a analyst for the CIA, travels to Virginia to deliver classified photographs of the submarine.  After receiving information from various other ships, Ryan quickly figures out Ramius’s plan and he finds himself caught up in an International chase to keep the Red October from the Soviet fleet.  After convincing the military of the situation, he boards the submarine with a British officer named Owen Williams.  Ramius fakes a malfunction of the submarine’s reactor in order to allow the crew to be rescued by the United States Navy.  He and his officers remain behind while a different submarine is blown up to make it look like the Red October was destroyed.  Many of the Soviets are convinced of this, but Igor Loginov, a cook and spy on the Red October is aware of Ramius’s plan and tries to blow up the ship.  Ryan ends up having to kill Loginov to stop him after Ramius and Williams are severely wounded.  Just when the danger is believed to be over, Captain Viktor Tupolev, a former student of Ramius, recognizes the he Red October and discovers that it was not the submarine that they thought to have been destroyed.  Tupolev’s submarine is eventually destroyed and the Red October arrives safely in Virginia.  Ramius and his crew are taken by the CIA to begin their new lives in American and Ryan flies back to his home in London.

Not being very familiar with the Thriller genre, it took me awhile to select a book.  I wanted to read something that I normally wouldn’t have picked up on my own and Tom Clancy has always been an author that I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t read myself.  Before his death in 2013, I remember his books always being on the top of the bestseller lists.  I chose to read The Hunt for Red October not only because it was the first of Clancy’s books written about Jack Ryan, but also for it’s reputation for it’s accuracy of military submarines and warfare.  

This book was hard for me to get through.  I tend to read books that have a lot of background information and character development and The Hunt for Red October was mostly based on action, as most Thrillers are.  It also included a lot of details that I wasn’t really interested in about submarines and the United States and Soviet military history.  The author frequently went back and forth between different characters and ships during much of the novel.  This did a great job of keeping the action going, but it left me having trouble keeping all of the plot lines and characters straight.  I’m a very visual learner so I kept having to take notes and draw diagrams to make sure I knew what was happening.  The book was very descriptive of military warfare and seemed to be very well-researched.  Even though I didn’t really enjoy reading it, I appreciated the novel for these aspects and would recommend the book to someone who likes reading thrillers or is interested in military history.

Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind (audio)

★★★ 1/2
"People are stupid.  They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true."

This is one of those books that I've been meaning to read for years and years and haven't managed to get around to it until now.  I felt like it was a very "typical" epic-fantasy novel: lots of action, ok writing, and very predictable.  The story was interesting and I enjoyed learning about the world that the author created, but everything else was pretty much average.  I was glad I listening to it as an audio book - all 33 hours of it.  Would I read the rest of the series if I was stuck somewhere for a week with no other books to read? - definitely.  Will I realistically finish the series? - probably not...there's a lot of them.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel (audio)

★★★ 1/2

"If you stumble about believability, what are you living for?  Love is hard to believe, ask any lover.  Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist.  God is hard to believe, ask any believer.  What is your problem with hard to believe?"

Pi Patel is a young boy from India who is the son of zookeepers.  When him and his family and their animals travels to North America, their ships sinks.  Pi is the only human survivor - along with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a tiger named Richard Parker.  Within a few days, the tiger devours the other animals and he is left on a lifeboat with Pi.  They survive 227 days in the Pacific Ocean before finding land.  

When they reach Mexico, Richard Parker runs off to the jungle.  Pi is questioned by Japanese authorities about what happened to the ship and how he survived.  Pi tells his story - but it is deemed "unbelievable" and they ask for a story without animals. Pi tells another story, similar to his original, but instead of animals be used people - his mother, a sailor, and a cook.  Readers are left at the end of the novel wondering which story is true.

This was a very interesting novel.  I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I read it - and it was different from the type of books I normally read and a little hard to get through.  Overall, I enjoyed Pi's story and it's unique ending.  I assumed the entire novel would be about Pi and Richard Parker's survival on the lifeboat, but the author gave a lot more detail about Pi and his family's life before the journey.  There was a lot of interesting writing about the zoo and behavior of animal in captivity. Pi was also very involved in religion.  As a young boy, he practiced Christianity, Islam, and Hindu - all at the same time.  He claimed that he loved God and wanted to be a part of each religions.  This worked out well, until the leaders of each of the three religions and his parents found out and told him that he must choice only one.  I was really interested in this debate.  I am Christian, but have always enjoyed learning about other religions.  As I was learning about these many years ago, I always thought it would be kinda neat if people could practice whatever aspect of different religions they felt was right for them.  Religion is also a very unique concept and I found it intriguing that different groups of people believe so strongly in their different religions - and most believe that theirs and only theirs with the "right" religion.  Pi went against this commonality and wanted to practice all of the common religions around him.  As a boy, he did not think there was anything strange or different about this - until he was questioned by "older and wiser" adults.