I read a library copy of Robert Harris' Second Sleep in 2020; enjoyed it so much that I downloaded the audiobook for a second "reading". And over the years, I've read Fatherland and Pompeii. So I picked up his The Ghost at my local library (odd they had it on the shelf, since it's a small branch). Always meant to watch the film adaption, The Ghost Writer, but never got around to it, even though I like Ewan McGregor, and Pierce Brosnan is good in certain roles.
* * * SPOILERS BELOW * * *
I was really enjoying this novel, mainly because it's about a writer. About halfway though, I found it implausible that the the ghostwriter would sleep with the ex-Prime Minister's wife and that he would investigate what got the previous ghostwriter killed. But I wound up giving this novel 3.5 stars because about the last 50 pages packed in a lot of plot. And I liked how Harris ended everything.
Most of my friends had long since entered the kingdom of family life, from whose distant shores, in my experience, no traveler e'er returned.
All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I knows this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books — books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it. . . .
We had put up with soon-to-be-forgotten actors who had egos the size of a Roman emperor's, and entourages to match.
"You know, people get it all wrong. It isn't having power that's exhausting — it's not having it that wears you out."
"He [Adam Lang] may not have had an ideology, but he sure as hell had an agenda."
I was like a screenwriter producing lines with a particularly demanding star in mind: I knew he might say this, but not that; might do this scene, never that.
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