well, one good thing about work...

[wildcard_47]

...It's usually so slow that I can pull out a book and get fifteen to twenty minutes of uninterrupted reading done at a time.

Today, I'd forgotten my usual reading material (the horror!), so I stopped by Waldenbooks to pick up a Jodi Picoult novel I've been itching to read. (It's "The Tenth Circle", if anyone's wondering.)

There are three majorly cool things about this book:
1. It's AWESOME, because Picoult is a great writer.
2. One of the characters is a graphic novel illustrator; Picoult had three and four page excerpts from his graphic novel (there were probably five or six sections of these in total) scattered throughout the book.
3. THERE IS A SECRET CODE HIDDEN IN THE GRAPHIC NOVEL PAGES.

You think I'm lying about #3. I swear, it's true! Within the illustrations, eighty-six letters are hidden; they spell out a quotation by Demosthenes; it's supposed to best represent the theme of the book.

Not that the theme of the book really mattered to me at that point, I was too busy squeeing about 'secret codes' and pretending acting six years old again. If only I'd had my trusty Carmen Sandiego decoder with me....I'm sure I would have discovered the quotation much sooner that way!

Comments

[dozmuffinxc.livejournal.com]

Mhmm! I really enjoyed her style, though MSK is the only one of her novels I've read. I literally came upon it by chance: I was assigned to write a book review for my high school's paper, so I meandered over to the library and grabbed whatever looked good. Lo and behold, that's the one I picked out! It had me sobbing at the end, huddled outside the newspaper office on the dusty floor.

[dozmuffinxc.livejournal.com]

Little tidbit of irony: at mum's school, the teachers swap books. She came home with a few, and one of them was The Tenth Circle! I was tempted to buy it when last I was at the bookstore (still hanging onto that gift certificate), but it seems that good things come to those who wait :)