So anyway, the one I finished was Pompeii
, by Robert Harris. That was a good book. It's about an engineer who works on the aqueducts. He's recently transferred in and has to repair a line by the volcano. There's plots and schemes. Mostly, though, it feels as though the point was to show the event from every angle, the characters came second. For example, our engineer starts off across the bay, goes across to Pompeii, travels up to the top of the volcano, goes back down to Herculaneum, heads back to Pompeii, turns and heads back to Herculaneum, goes by horseback all the way around to Misenum, back across on a boat, swept down to whatsit I can't remember the town, walks back to Pompeii, and then "manages to survive somehow". I can overlook the character going all over experiencing every aspect of it, but the method he uses to survive is... disappointing. I guessed at what it was going to be but even as I read it I was like "noo, that would not actually work".Anyway, I enjoyed learning so much about how aqueducts work. It was not boring or tedious or overwhelming. I think the book was good enough that the lame ending was not enough to ruin it as a whole.
spoiler
He gets into the aqueduct and goes along the tunnel and gets out further down the line.
