Eclipse .. By Stephenie Meyer

 

Life or Death?

Mortality or Immortality?

Vampire or Werewolf?

Bella Swan is a human girl - tormented by the herculean decision to choose between something good versus something indispensable. As the cover of the book suggests, she is torn, trying to force the two magnets of her life with opposing sides to stick with each other. But like oil and water, they are not meant to be mixed together.

The third book of the Twilight Saga picks up the story from the return of Bella's vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen. Even though she is happy and content to be spending all her time with Edward, she terribly misses her werewolf best friend, Jacob Black, who refuses to talk to her because of the natural enmity between vampires and werewolves.

That is not the only problem that Bella is facing currently. She has a sadistic vampire trying to revenge her mate's death with her own and also the Volturi - the vampire royal family - who insisted that her heart should stop beating one way or another in the near future because humans weren't allowed to know they existed. As a consequence of all these reasons, she has no other choice but to become a vampire, for which she is quite ready if the alternative is to leave Edward and that she cannot bear.

However, Jacob despises Bella's decision to give up on her human life. He offers his love and protection for life to her and pleads her to stay human and choose him instead. 

From the open hostility between Edward and Jacob to the agonizing terror of the vampire army and the wretched suspense of their creator's identity, this book was an epic adventure to the readers. I particularly enjoyed the unspoken comradeship between the Cullen and the Quileute families, which started to brew because of their mutual love for Bella.

Stephenie Meyer has evolved with each of her books in this series. She has taken her story-telling to another level by sharing Rosalie and Jasper's past and the Quileute legends in the most intriguing way possible. Even with all the love triangle predicament that was created, she managed to take the story forward with an unprecedented level of precision and pulled off the most epic battle between the good versus evil vampires.

Even though this book has gathered a lot of mixed reviews like its predecessors, I will go out on a limb and would describe it as a captivating series and would recommend it to those of you who wouldn't mind a bit of "fantasy for teens" at any stage of their lives. 

Do check out my reviews of the previous two books of this series:

Twilight

New Moon

And keep your eyes peeled for my blog on the last and final book of this series - Breaking Dawn.

Happy Reading!!!

Inferno .. By Dan Brown

 

There's a switch. If you throw it, half the people on Earth will die. If you don't, the human race will be extinct in a hundred years. What will you do?

Humanity's fundamental question is asked to all who are in denial that our time on earth might be numbered and it's coming to an end sooner than we can imagine!

Dan Brown is my favorite author in the modern world and there is no doubt he keeps on producing a nail-biting, fast-paced drama that takes us back to some of history's most chilling episodes that we might otherwise keep away from. And this time, he has us on our toes and makes us face the crucial realities of over-population and the burden it is to our mother nature and suggests that the Black Death might be one of nature's ways of punishing mankind's multitude of sins.

Poussin painted The Plague of Ashdod in 1630-31 (Credit: DEA / G DAGLI ORTI/ De Agostini via Getty Images)

With exquisite details, the novel entices us with its nonstop action thriller with Robert Landon and his lady accomplice - Dr. Sienna Brooks. They are running from assassins and armed soldiers, to find the location of a bioweapon, threatened to be released to the world by a master transhumanist and Dante fanatic, Bertrand Zobrist, who wants to curb the world from humankind’s biggest fear - extinction by over-population.

Their mission is to decipher an obscure Dante poem, re-engineered by Zobrist, that will reveal the location and the true nature of the deadly plague, which Zobrist created to reduce the population of Earth so that humans can achieve transhumanism before the probable apocalypse of time.

Bertrand Zobrist had boundless hope for humankind and believed we are living on the threshold of a glittering "posthuman" age - genetically enhanced species. However, he also understood that we'd not live long enough as a species to realize that possibility. So, he took matters into his own hands to save us from the brink of extinction and blamed the World Health Organization for stopping him from doing so. He aptly quotes the below line from Dante's poem to describe WHO's denial towards the perils of over-population and to do nothing about it!

      The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their  neutrality in times of moral crisis.  
                                                                                                                                                                         - Dante Alighieri

 

I always seem to learn a great deal from reading Dan Brown's books and this novel explores the centuries-old poem - The Divine Comedy of Dante; Sandro Botticelli's Map of Hell; Vasari Mural and the magnificence of the gilded mouseion - Saint Mark's Basilica and Hagia Sofia. 

The historical references of major artifacts are a literary feast for your senses. Dan Brown takes us through famous museums, old crypts, and celebrated tourist spots of Florence, Venice, and Istanbul, where Robert’s knowledge of symbolism; famous frescoes with their inconspicuous messages to the world; secret passages, and their historical significance enable the World Health Organization to unearth Zobrist's menacing ploy. 

This book, without a doubt, is an absolutely phenomenal read and an eye-opener to the unprecedented situation that we are currently facing with the coronavirus pandemic, which could be another blatant reminder that one way or the other, nature always finds a way to keep the human population in check or we actually might be a species who is on the brink of collapse. 

Imagine how different our world might be if more leaders took time to ponder the finality of death before racing off to war.