The Eternal Question

What to Read?

You can see by the review that I finished a relatively unsatisfying read last night and now three fiction books loom before me as possibilities:

The Romanov Prophecy Steve Berry(not Legacy as I erroneously posted last night
Sanibel Flats Randy Wayne White
The Shadow of the Wind Carolos Ruiz Zafón

Of this last, perhaps my correspondents in Spain can better inform me, but the translation appears to offer some linguistic delights. Among them this moment from the very beginning:

from The Shadow of the Wind
Carolos Ruiz Zafón

A few of his chums grumbled in assent. Barceló signaled to a waiter of such remarkable decrepitude that he looked as if he should be declared a national landmark. . . .

"I hate to bring up the subject," Barceló said, "but how can ther be jobs? In this country nobody ever retires, not even after they're dead. Just look at El Cid. I tell you, we're a hopeless case."

And there were about three quotable lines in between. The premise is intriguing. A young boy is taken into a place called "The Cemetary of Lost Books" where he finds one called Shadow of the Wind, the last novel of Juliá Carax. In pursuing Carax's work, the boy discovers that every copy of his novels is being systematically destroyed--he may own the last copy of Shadow of the Wind. Don't know much more than that from the cover, but it sounds very Perez-Reverte. The blurbs say, "Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Umberto Eco meet Jorge Luis Borges." Not a promising blurb, I'll grant you, rather like a raspberry, chicken, and asparagus milkshake. Nevertheless, I take the point that we're talkling postmodern aesthetic encounters magic realism. I should have thought comparison to the remarkable The Club Dumas would have been suffiicient--the novel already shares some similarities in plot elements.

But decisions, decisions. l rather think I should speed through the first two to land in the third and spend my time.