The Ghost Map (Steven Johnson)

I have mixed feelings about this read even though the premise of the book is a gripper--cholera is killing thousands of people in densely packed 19th century London--and John Snow tracks the disease to a source: a water pump that the residents are all using to collect water. Only no one believes him. Everyone--including the scientific community--says it has to do with "miasma," this theory that the stink of garbage and sewer infects people with disease. I would have preferred the author to draw the plot forward using John Snow, who is known today as the "Father of Epidemiology," how the events of that period unfolded with cholera itself as the heartless murderer, the femme fetale, and how Snow is stymied by the ignorance of the scientific community, who albeit in good faith sabotaged the health of the population with misdirected intentions. But Johnson doesn't do this. He goes round and round again, losing the plot line in a series of repetitions. And then in the end he keeps going, going into the this picture of how the city has become such a well-oiled, economically viable home to millions of people (where sewer, water, heat can be delivered to more people for less money than in the rural areas), tacking on a couple of chapters at the end of the book that lead the reader to envision the implications involved in the urban density of today. Only, he says the epidemic wouldn't be biological--like cholera or avian flu--necessarily, but technological. In the urban density possible today 25,000 people can be stacked in a building 110 stories high on a 1 acre of space. So, that unlike cholera, which spread comparatively slowly in a wider area, a terrorist attack of a space t his small would have an incredible magnitude and an effect which as we know was nearly instantaneous. And there is no cure either; nothing to stop the imminent deaths. So, when I closed this book I wondered if this book was about the cholera epidemic and how Snow's tracking system set the standard for a field--mapping out illness to locate a source. Or was it how science won out over the scientists. Or was this a story of how the city can grow to numbers unimaginable because of these ingenious systems we've devised to accommodate a mass of people in a relatively small area, numbers that can be easily decimated if the systems that were set up to accommodate the masses become inadvertently the very tools toward destruction. Or maybe it's all of these themes and stories combined, and that was just too much for me in a single book.

The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)

Barcelona, 1945. I'd picked this one from the three I have out from the library, even it was the longest at 486 pages and probably the most likely I could renew. Maybe it was because I was still mesmerized by WWII (Remember, I'd just finished reading Villa Air-Bel, which is also WWII, but in France). This story takes place in Spain. But the war is in the background, this horror of the government turnaround that led to mysterious deaths and tortures . . . but all of these seem to revolve around this terribly evil person: Fumero.But more likely, I was intrigued by the beginning of the book, the kind of haunting that comes from not knowing and needing to know what happens next. For this book is less about the book--The Shadow of the Wind--that becomes the title, but more about the young boy, Daniel, who slowly uncovers what happened to Julian Carax, the author of the book, The Shadow of the Wind, and what happens to Daniel in the course of uncovering Carax's own story. So, that I no longer care what the book is about that Carax wrote, just about the story unfolding. Perhaps too many coincidences happen along the way . . . but there was something about the tension created by the story of what happens next that kept me turning pages long into the night. Those nights when I go to bed two hours past my bedtime because I found I simply could not put this book down. So, would I recommend this book? Undoubtedly.