State of fear

This is a 2004 novel by Michael Crichton.

Compared to his past novels, I actually found it quite hard to get myself into the story. It begin with a series of scenes from different locations and it's get really confusing because readers will not know what's the story about until they finally pieced together at the end. From Paris to The depths of the jungle in Malaysia and then to London and Japan, each scenes seemed unconnected from each other. It's only when the story reached it's middle portion, that readers will have some idea what was going on.

State of Fear is techno-thriller about Eco-terrorist. An environmental organisation is trying to garner more funds to support its clause and had gone to extreme ends to as collaborating with an terrorist group to manipulate the climate and cause "natural" disasters so as to make it look like the world is in serious dire states and need quick remedies soon.

A young lawyer and the rich patron for the organisation are the heroes in this novel and with a pair of FBI agents, they tried to halt their efforts. There are two major parts of the story where I considered more exciting than the rest. The part where they went to Antarctica to investigate and nearly got killed and the last portion where they head over to the Solomon islands in a stand-off with the terrorists and the natives.

This novel is rather unusual from the rest of his novel where in which the entire novel is peppered with citations from real papers and journals in the field of climate science. It had been given it's fair share of criticism from this scientists over the misleading information and the misuse of their information.Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had actually scolded him for views that "muddy the issues around sound science"

Overall I think this novel is quite average and thought-provoking in some sense

The curious incident of the dog in the night time

The curious incident of the dog in the night time is a strange title for a book. For one thing, the title seem a bit too long and the incident was not the main focus of the story. Rather it's a starting point for the book where events of the story are born out of this incident.

The book took the perspective of an autistic fifteen years old, Christopher. Christopher's world is very logical and things like love and human interaction had little meanings to him. He lived on patterns and rules he made himself, not caring about the world as he went on achieving his goal to score an A in the A'levels Mathematics.

Christopher's curiosity took him to found out that his neighbour's dog had died. What happen afterward began a trail to uncover the truth about the death of the dog. Yet, interestingly, he uncovered more about his family instead.

Throughout the book, Christopher shared with us his thoughts and thinking. The author, Mark Haddon seem to understand the minds of the autistic. While many people cannot comprehend the strange actions of those who are autistic, he is able to tell us how their thinking was mapped out in their minds.

It's a moving book and the story unfold in a nice way that makes readers unwilling to put the book away once they started reading it.