Sarah's Library

25/2 - Started reading this (the first time around) while away on the yearly family skiing holiday a couple of years ago.  I read about 200 pages before I got home and then got distracted when I arrived home and hadn't picked it up until 3 days ago, at the beginning of this years skiing trip.  I didn't stop reading it because I wasn't enjoying it, other books simply got in the way once I got off the plane.  I don't remember most of the plot, so it seems pretty much new to me, I don't feel like I'm wasting my time re-reading what I read the first time around (the page I stopped on is still folded down, so I know where I was up to).  I really like stories where the characters are figuring out a puzzle and searching for treasure, so that's a plus for the book, but I don't like the way the chapters end - they seem chopped off prematurely, kind of like watching a movie and suddenly the power goes out and you don't get to see the conclusion.  The period of time between a number of chapters seems excessively long, some days in most cases, and then instead of reading about what happened in the intervening hours and days, you are told through exposition-like writing, which I don't find particularly interesting.  Obviously exposition is an important tool to give readers background of events that happened prior to the opening of the book, but putting it at the beginning of numerous chapters is a bit much, especially as the scenes that have been turned into exposition seem to me to be pretty important scenes to the plot of the book.  To be continued...

2/3 - I'm enjoying the story all over again, but I wish Gibbins wasn't so intelligent so that he could dumb down some of the technospeak - I keep getting lost in the details and explanations of what they're using this piece of fantastic technology for and what that thingamajig does.  Some of it's so technical and over my head I can feel my eyes glazing over and then I nod off in the chair mid sentence.  I mentioned in the previous paragraph that Gibbins seemed to be skipping interesting, if not important, scenes by giving the reader a teaser of what was going to happen and then cutting us off and leaving it to the imagination or telling, instead of showing, us what had happened the day/hour/whatever before.  It seems to me that he skipped those parts in order to have enough room in the book to fit in all this technobabble, which isn't nearly as interesting to anyone who doesn't have archeological, deep sea diving or Russian weaponry knowledge.  The best part of the book so far was when Jack and Costas were in their submersibles discovering Atlantis, leading up to the discovery of the Russian submarine.  I love the feeling I got from that passage, of finding treasure and working out a puzzle - kind of like a cross between Indiana Jones and The Da Vinci Code.  To be continued...

6/3 - This was a great treasure-hunting story, it's just a shame Gibbins' intelligence had to be shoved in our face on every page.  I felt stupid during a lot of the story as he reference things and events that I needed to wikipedia, if I'd highlighted every word that I needed to look up the whole book would have been fluorescent yellow.  I'm still looking forward to the next book in the series, I just hope Gibbins or his editor can rein in the intelligence bragging, it would make the book more accessible to more readers.