"Darwin's Radio"

Darwin's Radio (Greg Bear)

This book bored the shit out of me. According to the back cover, the book is about a guy named Christopher Dicken (yes, really) who's on the hunt for a disease hiding inside human DNA. That sounds interesting. The first fifty pages of the book are about a guy poking around an ice cave with two frozen Neanderthals in it and a lady from the UN being asked to look at a recently dug up mass grave. This is not interesting. In fact, our man - who, again, is seriously named Christopher Dicken - doesn't show up until page 40. And it's not like these previous 40 pages were exactly burning up with action; they could be cut down to about six pages max without losing anything except word count. In reading Amazon reviews, I was horrified to see the sentence "After page 40 or so, there is nothing more to be learned"; I can only imagine the endless tracts of lifeless text following the point where I gave up. I feel like the guy at the beginning of the horror movie where the viewer's yelling "Get out of the house!" who gets out of the house and drives out of the movie alive. That being said, if you're intensely interested in reading about fictional frozen Neanderthals, mass graves robbed of all drama by having pages of sparse details and boring dialogue, or if you just need a good book to put you to sleep, I highly recommend it; otherwise, stay away.

Grade: D-