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Showing posts from May 16, 2010
Book report: Pompeii, by Robert Harris I'm apparently a big fan of Robert Harris. I've read every novel he's published so far. One interesting thing about him is that he writes in several different genres, which you don't see a lot. Usually, a person is just a mystery writer or just a romance writer, and they don't stray outside their area. But Harris has written books in all these areas: * What-if history: Fatherland (what if World War II ended in an armistice and Nazi Germany continued to the 1960s); Archangel (what if Stalin had an heir) * Historical: Enigma (cracking the German secret code in WWII), Imperium (Cicero, the famous Roman orator) * Modern political thriller: Ghost (ghostwriter for fictional Tony Blair discovers his secret) Maybe the common denominator is politics, but I doubt I would have read so many books about politics. This novel puts us back in Rome. In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum i