Misleads and Twists

Welcome to the world of twists and turns, mind bending fun and suspense. Are you up to letting your brain relax in order to see new sights and working it hard to follow the maze of clues and misleads? If you are up for a challenge, you will like our two new choices !

Fun for Your MInd

The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions

By Al Seckel

Pages 352

ISBN-10: 1435212509

From Amazon:

Prepare to be amazed! Inside the covers of this incredible, colorful collection are hundreds of the world’s most powerful optical illusions. They’re beautiful to behold, and stunning in their trickery. Some of the mind-boggling images seem to spring into action, vibrating, pulsing, and spinning like a hula hoop. Other ambiguous illusions feature two subjects in one: the fun is in finding them both in the single picture—including a mouse playing hide and seek in a cat’s face and a strange desert mirage where palm trees imperceptibly morph into camels. And still more, like “The Impossible Terrace,” which couldn’t exist off the page: just try to figure out if you’re viewing the space from above or below. Every one is astonishing.

About the book:

Each page contains an amazing optical illusion or interesting puzzle, many beautiful, some strange, and some simply odd.  There is a large enough variety, from double pictures to impossible geometry to strange  perspective, within these pages to please almost everyone.

My take:

Many of these illusion will be familiar such as the old woman / young woman picture or Eschure's wonderful drawings. Other may be new. There are several little 'quizzes'. All in all, this is a fun book and definitely a book to share with others. I enjoyed double checking the 'are these lines straight' type illusions and testing if I can discover the hidden pictures. The ones that make you see something that isn't there are especially fascinating. 

I recommend this to anyone who loves optical illusions.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2011

Shutter Island

By Dennis Lehane

Publisher: Ullstein Taschenbuchvlg. (May 31, 2005)

Pages:393

• ISBN-10: 038073186X

From Amazon:

Summer, 1954.

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them.

But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems.

And neither is Teddy Daniels.

Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe’s radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing. . . .

Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?

As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount:

How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room?

Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes?

Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before?

What really goes on in Ward C?

Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?

The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island. Because someone is trying to drive them insane. . . .

About the book:

The story, set in 1954,  opens with Detective Teddy Daniels and new partner, Chuck Aule, on a ferry headed to Aschecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Once at the hospital they are to investigate the disappearance of a triple murderess Rachel Solando who somehow managed to escape from a locked room on a locked ward by slipping passed a group of orderlies and two check points. The hospital sits on an island that no one can swim away from; there are no boats missing; no ferries have gone out since the disappearance. Rachel must still be on the island but no one can find her. A cryptic message was the only thing Rachel left behind, a message Teddy feels has something to do with her disappearance.

As a hurricane approaches the island things begin to get fuzzy for Teddy. It seems that the hospital staff and the head of the hospital, J. Crawley have something to hide. Each time Teddy seems to find an answer he discovers they have lied or misled him. Further, Teddy himself is experiencing odd visions. Rumors of the disappearances of other patients, strange surgeries, and odd medical practices are beginning to look less like rumor and more like truth.

To complicate Teddy's investigation, the man who set fire to his apartment, killing Teddy's wife, has been sentenced to Aschecliffe. Teddy is torn with desire to confront the man and to kill him. But when he does speak to patients, including the arsonist, everything is a puzzle.

My Take:

I truly enjoyed this book, though much of it was confusing.  I was desperate to know what became of barefooted Rachel and the scene in the cave was both confusing and frightening. I was less concerned with Teddy confronting the arsonist than I was with the idea the hospital staff might be drugging the two detectives. Piecing together everything was a challenge, but worth every moment. There was more than enough suspense to keep me turning the pages. If you like stories that keep you guessing, stories with unique twists, you should enjoy this one. Be forewarned, I walked away from the end of this story with questions.