So, here’s where I’ve been. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday last week: at home, feeling very sorry for myself due to a bad cold.

You mention a cold symptom, I got it. The full works.

Feverishness? Tick.

Headache? Tick.

Sinus pain? Tick.

Runny nose? Tick.

Sore throat? Tick.

Chest pains? Tick.

Phlegmy cough? Tick.

Fortunately I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t read.  Thank god for that.  So, having come back from America with a few thrashy books, I settled down to read them over those days.

Ho boy.  When the Americans do thrash, they seriously do thrash.

So, book #1.  We bought it on a whim - Hubby needed a book to read on the flight home, we read the blurb on this one, got the giggles and thought, yeah why not.  It’s like the book version of a Steven Seagal movie, but thrashier.

The plot goes something like this: a bunch of bandit Mexicans (who naturally were trained by America’s finest in the drugs war before they turned bad) cross the border into Texas to kidnap a busload of schooolgirls because one of them happens to be the bandit general’s daughter, and the girls are taken into Mexico.  Naturally the US Government refuses to mount a rescue mission; international law, sanctity of borders, etc.  So one of the girls’ uncles - a Vietnam vet - gathers together a band of ex-soldiers (”I drove a helicopter during Desert Storm” was one woman’s assertion; and it had to be a woman, of course) and together they storm into Mexico and rescue the girls.

Yes, it is as bad as that.  In fact, the book was worse.  Talk about trashy.  It was a complete pile of crap.  It was full of assertions about “the greatest country in the world”, “who cares what France, Germany and Britain think”, stuff like that.  Oh yeah, and the classic: why is the government of the greatest nation on earth so afraid of standing up for its right, dammit! I managed to finish it, but only because the only book I’ve started that I couldn’t finish remain Sophie’s Choice, but boy was it a struggle.

The next book was better - well, it had a much better plot to start with.  It was one of those Da Vinci types; you know, where somebody finds something that could rock Christianity, and the Church (or elements within the Church? Or the Church’s enemies?) tries to stop that from becoming public.  It was OK, except that I got annoyed by the author’s insistence on telling the readers where everything was - imagine a sentence like this: They drove to Some Place (twenty miles southwest of Rome).  It was fine the first time, but I tell you, it irritated the hell out of me after the first couple of chapters.  Note to author: do not patronise your readers.  It also had a couple of the “we’re the greatest nation on earth” lines, but they were just about bearable.  You could call it the American red neck’s version of the Da Vinci Code, I guess.

But thank god, the third book I bought out there is a gem.  It’s a brilliant book called The Good German by Joseph Kanon, and is set in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of WWII.  It’s not one for the faint-hearted, but it’s restored my faith in American writers - there are some good ones out there!