Well, I thought that I’d talk briefly about thriller novels by Lee Child (which, in recent years, are now also co-written with his brother Andrew) and why they are a surprisingly useful thing to keep in your “to read” pile.
If you haven’t heard of Lee Child and/or Andrew Child before, they are famous for just one series of books. A long-running collection of more than twenty stand-alone novels focusing on an intelligent – but muscular – former military policeman called Jack Reacher who wanders around the US, solves crimes, foils evil plots and/or sometimes fights bad guys. A few of the novels are stand-alone prequels set during Reacher’s military career, but many of them follow the formula of him showing up in a small American town and finding himself in the middle of a mystery and/or some trouble.
These books aren’t exactly high-brow literature, but they don’t need to be. They are written in a snappy, fast-paced way and – whilst some are better than others – they are designed to be thrilling entertainment. They’re vaguely reminiscent of old “men’s adventure” novels but they have a much wider appeal because Reacher is a very likeable character, he respects women, there are often detective elements to the stories, the side-characters are usually likeable etc…
With the one exception of “Blue Moon” (2019) – a novel which makes the average action movie seem pacifist by comparison… – these novels usually don’t just focus on mindless fighting. Action sequences are often carefully-placed, realistically quick and much more about Jack Reacher’s skills and training than “mindless action hero” stuff. Again, there’s also a mixture of detective and/or traditional thriller type stuff in there as well. And these books are written in a fast, matter of fact style.
Anyway, it’s useful to keep one or two of these novels in your “to read” pile because they require next to no effort to read. If your enthusiasm for reading is dwindling or you’re between books or anything like that, they can act like a sort of “spark” to rekindle your reading. Again, the writing style is fast and simple. The stories are often intriguing or gripping enough that you’ll want to see what happens next. They are “novels as entertainment” in the best possible way. Novels aimed at a mass audience and clearly designed to be fun to read.
Seriously, even back in about 2014-18, when I hardly read anything…. I still managed to read a couple of Lee Child novels. I think that I even stayed up and binge-read “Night School” (2016) in a single night back then. Again, these are novels which require next to no effort to read… and this is what makes them so brilliant! They are novels for people who don’t usually read novels, and I mean this as a compliment.
If you’re in your teens or older and totally new to recreational reading, these are good “starter” books. They’re easy to read and much more entertaining than anything you were forced to read in school. And, if you’re an experienced reader, then it’s worth keeping a few of them for the times when you just don’t have the enthusiasm to read anything else. They’re fast and fun and they remind you why novels are such a great medium.
Yes, other authors write fast and thrilling novels – Matthew Reilly’s “Area 7” (2001) is a good example – but one of the main advantages of Lee Child novels is that not only are they very easy to find (a new one is released pretty much every year) but, because of their bestselling popularity, they are also often ridiculously cheap and plentiful on the second-hand market as well. Not only that, because the series has been going since the 1990s, there are – again – more than twenty books in it, so there will usually be at least one or two that you haven’t read yet.
In summary, it’s worth keeping at least one or two of these novels on your “to read” pile because they require zero effort to read, they tell fun and gripping stories, they can be read in pretty much any order, and they are both cheap and easy to find as well. And, again, if you’re new to the idea of “reading for fun”, then these books are a surprisingly good place to start.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
