Note.61 The five people you meet in heaven - Mitch Albom

Note.60 Villain - Shuichi Yoshida

Note.59 Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

Note.58 The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino

Note.57 Salvation of a Saint - Keigo Higashino

Note.56 Last to Die - Tess Gerritsen

.. But really, who wans the Internet when the real treasures are right here - the collected wisdom of centuries, under one roof ..

Note.55 A Murder is Announced - Agatha Christie

.. People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something... many an invalid who has suffered far worse and been cut off from life much more than Charlotte Blacklock-and they've managed to lead happy contented lives. It's what in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy ...

Note.54 The Murder At the Vicarage - Agatha Christie

Note.53 Crooked House - Agatha Christie

Agatha used to say that :"Writing Crooked House was pure pleasure and I feel justified in my belief that it is one of my best". That really excited me to read it by all means and it turns out really really .. I can not put the book down till the end. The strange story of Aristide Leonide's death and his whole "strange" family members and "strange, different and ruthless" characters of the members really lured the readers. The answer is even so intelligent and awesome and really pathetic. This time, there are no Miss Maple, no Poirot but it's so beautifully solved and told. The characters of human in life are performed again for us to think about the human's nature. No one likes each other even coming from the same family, the same blood. The thought, the motive is not always the same and the crime never waits for age to come.

And finally the readers can understand why the author loved and satisfied with this book so much. Really really share with her "I saved it up for years, thinking about it, working it out, saying to myself:"One day, when I've plenty of time, and want to really enjoy myself-I'll begin it!" I should say that of one's output, five books are work to one that is real pleasure. Crooked House was pure pleasure. I often wonder whether people who read a book can know if it has been hard work or a pleasure to write?" ... Yes I totally believe that it's really a hard work and pleasure one. I love "Crooked House".

Note.52 World Without End - Ken Follett

Note.51 The Bone Garden - Tess Gerritsen

Note.50 Gravity - Tess Gerritsen

Note.49 Bloodstream - Tess Gerritsen

Note.48 Harvest - Tess Gerritsen

Note.47 Life Support - Tess Gerritsen

Note.46 Girl Missing - Tess Gerritsen

Note.45 Vanish - Tess Gerritsen

Note.45 Body Double - Tess Gerritsen

Note.44 The Apprentice - Tess Gerritsen

Note.43 The Surgeon - Tess Gerritsen

Note.42 The Mephisto Club - Tess Gerritsen

Note.41 The Sinner - Tess Gerritsen

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Note.40 Saving Fish from Drowning - Amy Tan

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Note.39 The Daughter of Siena - Marina Fiorato

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Note.38 The Botticelli Secret - Marina Fiorato

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Note.37 The Body in the Library - Agatha Christie

When I was young, I love Agatha Christie's books at the first book - "The Ten Little Negroes". From a big fan of Conan Doyle's, I found her a totally new and really excited new land to explore. The readers will never be able to find out the murderer in Conan's because he/she will just be retold and explained afterwards by Sherlock Homes. In Agatha's books all the characters and their secrets, relationships are gradually discovered and must be carefully noticed to find out. It made the readers be able to join and play the role of the puzzle resolver too. So I think it's more interested and cooler and really intelligent. Each author will have her or his own "hero". If Conan has only Sherlock Homes, Agatha has even two famous detectives taking turns in her books, one is Hercule Poirot and the other is the old - Miss Marple. Besides are the amateurs with exception skills. And the answers are always surprised and interesting.

"The Body in the Library" may be the 1st book of her I read after so many years not reading her. To tell the truth, I don't like this book. I found a little dissapointed. The book for me is rather confused and messed up. The plot was done intelligently but by the two murderers not persuaded me much by their characters as well as their "intelligence". It's somehow not natural. But who know? Maybe that's Agatha's point of view.

Note.36 The Innocent - Taylor Stevens

In this second book, Taylor continues Munroe's adventures with the new task from her best friend - Logan. This time her urgent mission is to find out Logan's lost daughter taken by a religious society in Argentina. This task also opens and tells readers more about new and old relationships as well as each character's secret life - Logan, Bradford, Gideon ... Taylor leads us to the religious cult with its dirty and disgusted faces - boy, girl sexual abuses. Munroe has to enter this world to rescue Logan's daughter as soon as possible because the organisation hid and moved around so fast to cover their traces. Her story is more and more like an action movie ever. Also told about religious cult but I prefer Tess's way. For me this 2nd one is less interesting than the 1st one. I know Vanessa's adventures will be continued in her 3rd book. Let's wait and see.

Note.35 Five Patients - Michael Crichton

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Note.34 The Terminal Man - Michael Crichton

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Note.33 The Andromeda Strain - Michael Crichton

".. Physics was the first of natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.
 It was not until the late 1940's that this situation changed. The postwar period ushered in a new era of biologic research, spurred by the discovery of antibiotics. Suddenly there was both enthusiasm and money for biology, and a torrent of discoveries poured forth: tranquilizers, steroid hormones, immunochemistry, the genetic code. By 1953 the first kidney was transplanted and by 1958 the first birth-control pills were tested. It was not long before biology was the fastest-growing field in all science; it was doubling its knowledge every ten years. Farsighted researchers talked seriously of changing genes, controlling evolution, regulating  the mind-ideas that had been wild speculation ten years before.
 And yet there had never been a biologic crisis. The Andromeda Strain provided the first.
 According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable. Whether the additional factor is political, economic, or scientific hardly matters: the death of a national hero, the instability of prices, or a technological discovery can all set events in motion. In this sense, Gladstone was right: all crises are the same.

... the first contact with extraterrestrial life will be determinded by the known probabilities of speciation. It is an undeniable fact that complex organisms flourish in abundance. There are millions of species of bacteria, and thousands of species of insects. There are only a few species of primates, and only four of great apes. There is but one species of man.
 With this frequency of specication goes a corresponding frequency in numbers. Simple creatures are much more common than complex organisms. There are three billion men on the earth, and that seems a great many until we consider that ten or even one hundred times that number of bacteria can be contained within a large flask.
 All available evidence on the origin of life points to an evolutionary progression from simple to complex life forms. This is true on earth. It is probably true throughout the universe .. the first human interation with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 percent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.

... In the deepest, blackest regions of the oceans, where oxygentation was poor, and where light never reached, life forms were known to exist in abundance. Why not also in the far reaches of the atmosphere? True, oxygen was scarce. True, food hardly existed. But if creatures could live miles beneath the surface, why could they not also live five miles above it? ... and if there were organisms out there, and if they had departed from the baking crust of the earth long before the first men appeared, then they would be foreign to man. No immunity, no adaptation, no antibodies would have been developed. They would be primitive aliens to modern man, in the same way that the shark, a primitive fish unchanged for a hundred million years, was alien and dangerous to modern man, invading the oceans for the first time .
The third source of contamination, the third of the vectors, was at the same time the most likely and the most troublesome. This was contemporary earth organisms, taken into space by inadequately sterilized spacecraft. Once in space, the organisms would be exposed to harsh radiation, weightlessness, and other environmental forces that might exert a mutagenic effect, altering the organisms. So that when they came down, they would be different.
 Take up a harmless bacteria-such as the organism that causes pimples, or sorethroats-and bring it back in a new form, virulent and unexpected. It might do anything. It might show a preference for the aqueous humor of the inner eye, and invade the eyeball. It might multiply on the small currents of electricity afforded by the human brain itself, drive men mad...

 .. Most people, when they thought of bacteria, thought of diseases. Yet the fact was that only 3 percent of bacteria produced human disease; the rest were either harmless or beneficial. In the human gut, for instance, there were a variety of bacteria that were helpful to the digestive process. Man needed them, and replied upon them.
 In fact, man lived in a sea of bacteria. They were everywhere-on his skin, in his ears and mouth, down his lungs, in his stomach. Everything he owned, anything he touched, every breath he breathed, was drenched in bacteria. Bacteria were ubiquitous. Most of the time you weren't aware of it.
 And there was a reason. Both man and bacteria had gottern used to each other, had developed a kind of mutual immunity. Each adapted to the other.
  And this, in turn, for a very good reason. It was a principle of biology that evolution was directed toward increased reproductive potential. A man easily killed by bacteria was poorly adapted; he didn't live long enough to reproduce.
  A bacteria that killed its host was also poorly adapted. Because any parasite that kills its host is a failure. It must die when the host dies. The successful parasites were those that could live off the host without killing him.
  And the most successful hosts were those that could tolerate the parasite, or even turn it to advantage, to make it work for the host.

 .. the best adapted bacteria are the ones that cause minor diseases, or none at all..
 .. there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of enzymes, each existing solely to aid a single chemical reactions. Without enzymes, there could be no chemical reactions. Without chemical reactions, there could be no life. Or could there? It was a long-standing problem.
.. How do you study a form of life totally unlike any you know? How would you even know it was alive? This was not an academic matter. Biology, as George Wald had said, was a unique science because it could not define its subject matter. Nobody had a definition for life. Nobody knew what it was, really. The old definitions-an organism that showed ingestion, excretion, metabolism, reproduction, and so on-were worthless. One could always find exceptions.
.. The group had finally concluded that energy conversion was the hallmark of life. All living organisms in some way took in energy-as food, or sunlight-and converted it to another form of energy, and put it to use. (Viruses were the exception to this rule, but the group was prepared to define viruses as nonliving).
.. Finally, they came to the granite. It is living, breathing, walking, and talking. Only we cannot see it, because it is happening too slowly. Rock has a lifespan of three billion years. We have a lifespan of 60 or 70 years. We cannot see what is happening to this rock for the same reason that we cannot make out the tune on a record being played at the rate of one revolution every century. And the rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark ..

.. No one ever thought to consider whether the human brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, making fantastic demands on the human body in terms of nourishment and blood, was not analogous. Perhaps the human brain had become a kind of dinosaur for man and perhaps, in the end, would prove his downfall.
 Already, the brain consumed one quarter of the body's blood supply. A fourth of all blood pumped from the heart went to the brain, an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more-perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them.
 Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other..."

Note.32 The Informationist - Taylor Stevens

For me till now it is really hard to find appropriate as well as precise word to translate the title to Vietnamese (not to confuse with the role of newspaper reporter) "kẻ săn tin". Classified as one of best thriller from the thriller authors, I immediately searched and borrowed it from the Central Library.

The book tells about adventures of Vanessa "Michael" Munroe in one of her tasks to find a lost girl from an America millionaire family travelling to Africa. Vanessa is regarded as an expert in dealing in information for corporates, head of states, private clients and anyone else who can pay for her unique brand of expertise. Vanessa will soon reminds readers of Lisbeth Salander but really really differently. Vanessa is not a 24/24 pc-guru, it's just the means nuturing and sharpening her skills. She is a wild, courage, smart, tough and hurtful one. The finding route to Africa is also the home-returning way of Vanessa that she wants to forget and runaway from it and aslo the past story or childhood of Vanessa and tell us what she is made from and of. The route helps her to find herself, hurt her and release her if possible. Adventures, love, hadred, racing, killing .. keep on twisting intelligently together with the Africa world so wildly and vividly. The readers will keep on opening mouth to follow Vanessa's feelings, steps and adventures. The story is really interesting and good source for an interesting movie if the film-makers concern.

If the readers get familiar with thriller novels, they can easily figure out where the story goes. Even then, the attraction of the story is still undeniable. I can not put it down till the last page. The end of the book seems to promise series of next adventures of Vanessa.

Taylor Stevens is known as spending considerable part of her life journeying the globe so it's no surprising that her rich experience and information about African countries and their cities. This is the first book I read so dedicated to Africa to cities of Cameroon such as Yaounde, Douala .. to islands with specific coordinates of Equatorial Guinea. The chaos of these countries as well as rotten government are mentioned in her book, especially Equatorial Guinea is really a bad taste to Taylor. I hope it's true and people there won't find to be insulted when reading the book.

Although this is Taylor's first book, it turns out to be so successful and best-seller and was highly commented from the best-seller thriller authors such as Tess Gerritsen and Michael Palmer ... to be the best thriller book of the year and standing in top list always then. Taylor Stevens from now on will aslo be one of the thrilling authors I am waiting for her books. Goodluck, Taylor!

Note.31 Before I Go to Sleep - S.J.Watson

"There are two of me, now, in the same body; one is a forty-seven-year old woman, calm, polite, aware of what kind of behavior is appropriate and what is not, and the other is in her twenties, and screaming. I cannot decide which is me ... .. I know I'll go to sleep tonight, and then tomorrow I will wake up and not know anything again, and the next day, and the day after that, forever. I can't imagine it. I can't face it. It's not life, it's just an existence. jumping from one moment to the next with no idea of the past, and no plan for the future. It's how I imagine animals must be. The worst thing is that I don't even know what I don't know. There might be lots of things, waiting to hurt me. Things I haven't even dreamed about yet .. "

Note.30 The Last Surgeon - Michael Palmer

This is the first book of Michael Palmer I read. Frankly speaking, at first it successfully drew my attention. The opening and near the end is really good but the middle really really tired the readers with the medical initials and specialised words. Tess Gerritsen also writes about medicals but reader, me included will easily understand and absord easily and naturally. "The last surgeon" is a good story to tell, a "face-off" story. I'm just sorry that the middle parts bored and tired me. Hope not to get that in his next books I will try someday. :P 

Note.29 Ice Cold - Tess Gerritsen

Note.28 The Silent Girl - Tess Gerritsen

Note.27 The Keepsake - Tess Gerritsen

Note.26 The Man From St.Petersburg - Ken Follett

Note.25 Triple - Ken Follett

Note.24 Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett

Note.23 The Key To Rebecca - Ken Follett

Note.22 The Fifth Woman - Henning Mankell

Death always arrives at the wrong time. Something is left undone.

Note.21 The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett

Note.20 The man from Beijing quoted - Henning Mankell

Truth never hurries


There's always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, is one way or another.

The day we stop searching for the truth, which is never objective but under the best circumstances built on facts, is the day on which our system justice collapses completely.

In the world of fiction that is not only a possibility but the basic prerequisite. But even in a novel the most important details ought to be correctly presented whether they refer to the presence of birds in present-day Beijing or whether or not a judge has a sofa provided by the National Judiciary Administration in his or her office.

Note.19 When the snow fell - Henning Mankell

Thoughts and dreams came from the same place. From somewhere inside yourself, from an underground cave system deep down in your head. Thinking was harder than dreaming. You would have to make an effort in order to think. Dreaming was the opposite. You couldn't do it if you made an effort.

Feelings were like doors. Sorrow had its own room, so did disappointment, and happiness. Life was like a long corridor. Every door you walked past concealed something you could choose to accept. Or reject. If you knocked on the door and went in. Always assuming you were allowed in. But doors you hoped would remain closed could also open unexpectedly.

New year wishes

Each time new year coming, people like to give wishes to each other. The New year comes but the wishes are always the same. The elders always know which wishes for each case. The kids also gradually learnt by heart all the wishes about long life, healthy and prosperity and tried to compete to get more red "lixi". I don't blame them just the more getting the wishes the more vacant, emptiness and a little bored feelings increased. I kept on wondering how people can get healthier, happier and more prosperious if they keep on being safety and staying in the same place, doing the same thing, meeting the same people. The thing people needed each every new year is the braveness the courage and daring big enough to try to experiment the new one, the one people always want to do in their whole life and at least give it a try, meet the new ones and be ready to give up the old ones, the bored ones taking and eating them days after days. Each new experiment is really the one will etch in life making life more remarkable not the tasteless safety days. Each new year coming, new experiment coming, New eagerness coming.

Messages in the bottle

Recalling childhood time I used to wish picking up a bottle with messages when strolling at the seaside. The curiosity plus imagination about some remote lands, strange people excited me each time going to the sea finding the bottles with messages. Till now I have never picked any bottle. Instead I wrote my messages, my thoughts and put in my bottle here - my blog and threw into the vast sea of web information. And like the bottles with messages in real life, the thrown one could not and should not be taken back. So am I. Some even erase theirs and took back their messages just because the "pickers-readers" protested or pissed it. I won't never do that. It can unplease people sometimes but it is mine and it's life with variety of thoughts, ideas, viewpoints so just please respect that. My messages never intend to please anyone's taste (sorry). It is just a sharing thought of the one having endless eager in reading, in experimenting new things, exploring new places and Now .. Who will pick up my bottle? Welcome.

Note.18 Italian Shoes' Quoted - Henning Mankell

When the shoe fits, you don't think about the foot.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where the opposite is obviously impossible, and deep truths, which are characterised by their opposite also being a deep truth.

Love is a gentle hand which slowly pushes fate to one side.

Life is not about cut prices. Life is basically about something more important. I don't know what exactly but, nevertheless, one must believe that it is important, and that the hidden meaning is something more substantial than discount coupons and scratch cards.

We' re always being made promises. You make them yourself and you listen to others giving theirs. Politicians are always going on about providing a better quality of life for people as they get older, and a health service in which nobody ever gets bedsores. Banks promise you high interest rates, some food promises to make you lose weight if you eat it, and body creams guarantee old age with fewer wrinkles. Life is quite simply a matter of cruising along in your own little boat through a constantly changing but never-ending stream of promises. And how many do we remember? We forget the ones we would like to remember, and we remember the ones we'd prefer to forget. Broken promises are like shadows dancing around in the twilight. The older I become, the more clearly I see them.

Life was like your shoes. You couldn't simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.

Of course I'm going to die. We all reach a point where we no longer have the strength to deny what's going to happen. Death is the only constant companion a human being can have in this life. Even a lunatic usually knows when it's time to go.

I've felt cold all my life. I've gone looking for warmth in deserts and tropical countries. But all the time I've had a little icicle hanging inside me. People always have baggage. For some it's sorrow, for others it's worry. For me, it's always been an icicle.

There are always humiliating moments in the life of every woman. What most of us find worst is what happened when we were very young.

Truth is often stranger than fiction.

There are remarkable people living everywhere, but nobody notices them because they're old. We live in an age when old people are supposed to be as transparent as a sheet of glass. It's best if we don't even notice that they exist. You are becoming more and more transparent as well.

It's just as easy to lose your way inside yourself as it is to get lost in the woods or in a city.

Good shoes help a person to forget about his feet. Nobody travels through life on a table or on a sheet of paper. Feet and the ground are linked together.

To make a difference that's so small it's not even noticeable. But it's a difference, for all that.

There's no such thing as normal people. That's a twisted view of the world that politicians want us to believe. That we are all a part of an endless mass of normality, with no possibility, never mind desire to claim that we are different.

If you live long enough, you'll realise that nothing is impossible.

Death wipes out everything that has lived. Death leaves no trace, apart from the things I've always found so difficult to cope with.

If you dig too deeply into others, you can risk destroying a beautiful friendship.

Henning Mankell's

Mankell's first story i read is "The Dogs of Riga", a Vietnamese translation one. I read it because the name of the book interested me. I really did not like it much. Anyway I tried the second one "One Step Behind" and this really shocked and attracted me. I like it so much. And then like an addict, I have been finding all of his books, the later in Vietnam was "Firewall" also in Vietnamese translated one. And now in Canada I have really really so good opportunities to read Mankell's other books. Now of course also translation but in English version. I am so happy. He is really a great great author I admire. More and more I become Mankell's big fan.

Below are what i read:
1. The Dogs of Riga

2. One Step Behind

3. Firewall

4. The Pyramids

5. Faceless Killers

6. Sidetracked

7. The White Linoness

8. The Man Who Smiled

9. The Return of The Dancing master

10. Before the Frost

11. Kennedy's Brain

12. The Troubled Man

13. Depths

14. Chronicler of The Winds

15. A bridge to the Stars

16. Shadows in the Twilight

17. When the Snow Fell

18. Journey to the end of the world

19. Italian Shoes

20. The man from Beijing

Note.17 Kennedy's Brain quoted - Henning Mankell

Defeat should be out in the open, they shouldn't be hidden away, for it is defeats that make one a human being. A man who never understands his defeats takes nothing with him into the future.

Sorrow was like mice, it always found a way in.

Death was darkness, there was no light to be found there. Death was attics and cellars, it smelled raw, of mice and soil, and loneliness.

I never received any money from my parents. I still thank them for that even today. Nothing can spoil children more than giving them something they ought to earn for themselves.

They don't know what my name is, or where i live. There's a difference between knowing somebody, and recognising somebody. They're at ease because my face isn't that of a stranger. I belong here. They don't want to know any more than that, really. It's enough for me to be somebody who keeps calling in at the shop, doesn't cause trouble and pays his bills.

He does like to go back to places he's been to before. That's something that splits humanity into two groups - those who hate going back, and those who love it. You know where I belong. What about you?

Better to light a candle than to rant against darkness

If you want to be alone, think of me as an extra shadow. A sort of jacket you take with you over your arm when you're not sure if it's going to rain or not.

The lantern in the hand of Diogenes. I now realise that I'm living in an age where the concealment of truths has been elevated to an art as well as a science. Truths that always used to be allowed to emerge as a matter of course are nowadays being kept secret. Without a lantern in your hand, it is practically impossible to find somebody you're looking for. Cold gusts of wind extinguish the lantern's flame. You then have a choice: let it stay out, or light it again. And carry on looking for people.

Living means having the will to resist.

I know that there are gods for sale or for borrowing when the pain becomes too great, but that way has never brought me any consolation

If you don't learn the basic essentials of how an engine works, and what you can repair yourself, you're not fit to hold a driving licence.

People hardly ever have a conscience. Poor people don't because they can't afford it. Rich people don't because they think that if they do, it will cost them money.

My mother has never told a single lie in all her life. For her there is nothing but the truth. My father has always told her lies, about other women he claimed didn't exist, about money he'd earned but lost. He's lied about everything apart from the fact that he would never have survived if she hadn't been there by his side. Men tell lies. - So do women. - They do it in self-defence. Men have declared war on women in so many ways. One of their most common weapons is lies.

We forgot too easily that people all belong to the same family. And that every landscape has something that reminds you of other landscapes. If it's true that we all came originally from Africa, that must mean that we all had a black mother long, long ago.

We know all about how Africans die, but hardly anything about how they live.

I don't believe it's possible to share one's grief with anybody else. One is alone with one's grief, just as one is alone when one dies.

It's never good to die before you've finished saying what you have to say.

What is written in this book is exclusively the result of my own choices and decisions, of course. Just as the anger is also mine, the anger that was my driving force.