Alpine Climbing

Each trip I managed to end up getting forced, blackmailed or otherwise tricked into reading something truely terrible. Usually its a panic buy before a long flight or the only English language book in an otherwise empy alpine hut. Previous winners of this prestigious title have included such notables as Dean Kootz, John Grisham and Ayn Rand.

For this trip we have a clear winner in Robert Ludlum´s ¨The Bourne Ultimatum¨.

If on the next page all the principle characters were brutally murdered and the rest of the book were blank, would you care?

If the answer to this question is ¨Not really¨then you have a problem. In the case of ¨The Ultimatum¨ I was pretty much wishing this would happen by about page two hundred, knowing full well that over four hundred and fifty more pages of contrived plot and mediocre writing lay ahead.

The film, if it is any good, will be a testament to the art of screen writing. We can but hope that all it shares with the film is the name of the main character.

Books which I really enjoyed from this trip include; Ian McEwan´s ¨Amsterdam¨ and William Boyd´s ¨Restless¨. I´ve also read ¨Climbers¨by M. John Harrison, which I can´t say I´d recommend.