12 & 13

Another of the reasons I love the Miss Read books so much is that I can identify with the main character, Miss Read. She's a spinster school teacher who is a little bit frumpy, a little bit untidy and a whole lot of fiesty. Me if the world had turned out differently. And she loves that she's a spinster! Rejects all attempts to marry her off, and revels in her solitude. If only I'd read these 15 years ago! (I kid, I kid...)

Obviously I loved Miss Read's Tyler's Row.

I wish I could say the same for Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. People have been recommending this book to me for ages and it's been on my radar at least that long. When I finally broke down and read The DaVinci Code, I quite enjoyed it.

It didn't help that the first few chapters of Digital Fortress were so excruciatingly painful. People who can't write romance shouldn't try. And if it's not necessary (it really wasn't), leave it out! Then there was the glaring spelling error straight off the bat. And I don't like being patronized. The story's key characters are cryptographers. How come I figured out one of the biggest clues the first time I looked at it, and it took the whole book for the scientists to figure it out? And then the kill code? The thing the characters were laboring through the whole book to find? I saw the clue and knew the answer. The cryptographers took another six or so chapters to figure it out. Totally shot the author/characters credibility for me.

*sigh*

Maybe this whole spy/thriller genre is just getting too predictable.