I have seen the movie, and I have read the book, and I am about to say something I rarely say, so pay attention: I preferred the movie. I preferred the MOVIE, okay?

This guy is dragged out of the ocean half-dead, and when he regains consciousness he doesn't know who he is. All he has to guide him is a Swiss bank account number that was surgically implanted under his skin, removed by the doctor who saved him. The movie made this seem so exciting and interesting, I was dying to know what was going on. The book was sometimes exciting, sometimes more like a Senate hearing: men in suits, interchangeable but it was important to keep them straight, discussing things cryptically and at length.

I'll say this, also: it is a LOT more exciting to WATCH a man spring into action with killer moves he didn't realize he possessed, than to READ that same springing. Still, the movie does leave out so much information. Well, perhaps what I really want to say is this: that the movie is so different from the book, you will probably like both in different ways.

The Hatbox Letters, by Beth Powning (2004)

I was so certain I liked this book, it took me 150 pages to realize I didn't.

It's about a woman, widowed suddenly in her 50s, contemplating her life. I LIKE contemplation. She is sorting through a box of old family letters, discovering secrets. I LIKE old family letters, I LIKE secrets. But I grew tired of reading the book. The letters seemed manufactured, not real, and what the woman "discovers" is mostly imaginary: she learns, for example, that her grandfather's sister died as a little girl, and so she imagines this whole dramatic death scene--but it's not like she discovered that was the way it happened, and so it feels irrelevant rather than revealing.

The writing style is pleasing and interesting, and another reader might revel in it. There is the occasional misfire ("[The osprey's cry] is savage and yet sweet, like the memory of consolation"--which stopped me short, wondering if the memory of consolation was in fact savage and yet sweet), but mostly the language is appealingly evocative and expressive and insightful. The lead character examines a photo of the grandfather's sister who died: "This little girl, Kate thinks, with the pity of omniscience, has only four more months to live." The pity of omniscience. That's good stuff. Or when she is home after a failure of a date: "As she walks down the hall, she listens, thinking that emptiness is less the absence of sound than it is the absence of the possibility of sound. The air is filled with what is, rather than what might be. No one will cough, or rustle paper or open a closet door."

Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood for contemplative. Spring is coming, and contemplation works better when it's warm inside and stormy outside.