-A
very short list this quarter. I've been far too busy to read and my
down time, what little I've had of it, has been spent mindlessly
playing Spider solitaire.-
Goodbye
For Now by Laurie Frankel – a
love story of sorts. Sam, an exceptionally smart software engineer
working for an online dating service develops an algorithm that
actually matches you up with your soul mate. He tests it on himself
and finds and falls in love with the one who happened to also be
employed by the same company. In fact, it works so well, he gets
fired because the company doesn't really want people to meet their
soul mate on the first try because if they do then the company
doesn't make money. When Sam's soul mate Meredith's grandmother dies
suddenly, she is inconsolable and talks Sam into developing an
algorithm that will let her email and chat with her dead grandmother.
Eventually, with the help of Meredith's cousin, they develop it into
a company to help people with their grief. As you might guess, the
inevitable happens and Sam is left bereft. It's a sweet story about
love, loss, mourning, and finally, living.
Black
List by Brad Thor – what does
it say about the reader (or about the heros) when the guys you are
rooting for, the ones you want to win in the end, are basically cold
blooded killers? Perspective is everything, right? The main
character, Scot Harvath, a highly trained and skilled
counterterrorism operative, kills, like, 21 people before the book is
over. Granted, they were all bad guys who were trying to kill him
first and his usual victims were government identified enemies of the
state. Still... The story unfolds as a female hacker, Carolyn, is
trying to send off terribly incriminating evidence of a plot to
overthrow the government by releasing a virus to bring down the
internet before she is caught and killed. There follows an attempt
to kill Harvath, his boss, and all the other operatives that work for
that organization, and it is mostly successful, in an attempt to set
up a frame for the coming 'digital Pearl Harbor'. The story
continues as Harvath meets up with an internationally known hacker,
the recipient of the flash drive, as they try to unravel the attacks
on Caroline and Harvath and the Carlton Group. It's a good story,
well written, and there is a lot of scary information about
surveillance techniques, the role of the internet, and just how often
the government spies on us thanks to the abrogation of our civil
rights in the aftermath of 9/11.
Corduroy
Mansions by Alexander McCall
Smith – I was a little disappointed in this novel which was fairly
entertaining and enjoyable enough. It was very reminiscent of Maeve
Binchy with a central location, in this case the old home turned into
three flats, and separate story lines for all the characters that
occasionally intersect but not as well done. I didn't feel like he
tidied everything up in the end, there were a lot of loose ends.
It's like the story just stopped without any resolution. But beside
that it was a decent, but not great, read.
Earth
Unaware by Orson Scott Card and
Aaron Johnston – this is a prequel to Ender's Game and it centers
on the first contact between humans and formics. Out in the Kuiper
Belt, the free miner families excavate metals from the asteroids and
send them by unmanned quickship to one of the Weigh Stations that
buys the metals. The families live their whole lives on their
spaceship homes in the outer reaches of the solar system. On El
Cavador, Edimar, whose job it is to scan space and interpret the data
from the Sky Eye, finds an object moving much faster than any human
ship is capable of and decelerating on a path that will take it to
the solar System. Unable to contact the Italians family with whom
they have just had a trade meeting, they hurry to intercept them when
they notice another small craft coming from the direction of, what
they now believe to be, an alien spacecraft. They are too late
however and find the four ships of the Italians to be just a debris
field. While they search for survivors, the probe returns and they
have an encounter with the aliens. On board El Cavador, Victor
volunteers to modify a quickship and take the 6 month journey to
Earth to warn the home planet at great risk to his life. After
Victor's departure, El Cavador contacts two other ships in the
vicinity to come up with a plan to try and stop the now obviously
hostile aliens. It's a good book, but then I'm a big fan of Orson
Scott Card. Ender's Game is the story of how humans finally triumph
over the formics, the hero of which is a young boy.
Old
Twentieth by Joe Haldeman –
another sci-fi tale. I had a hard time getting into this one which
is why it took me so long to read. I finally finished it this
morning and my end reaction was WTF!? I thought I knew what the
story was about but now I'm not so sure. A vaccine of sorts is
developed that basically causes the body to repair itself ad
infinitum making people, for all intents and purposes, immortal.
Because, as we all know, when pharmaceuticals first come out they are
exorbitantly expensive so that at first only the wealthy and powerful
can avail themselves of it. Eventually it would have become
available to everyone but panic took hold of the population and a war
between the immortals and the nots broke out. The immortals won by
developing a toxin that killed everyone that had not had the
treatment. They soon discovered how much they had depended on the
segment of society that hadn't been wealthy enough to have had access
to the treatment. This is all narrated and filled in as background
by a guy who was 16 or so when the war happened. He's over two
hundred now and on a starship with 800 other volunteers headed for an
earth-like planet 20 light years away. His job on this multi-ship
expedition is to run the 'time-machine' for the residents, a sort of
virtual reality travel agent/technician to the past (the total
sensory illusions are built up out of people's memories and histories
so only the past is available). At least half the story takes place
in the time machine on the ship where Jake begins to notice
'anomolies' and one day on one of his 'observational trips' he meets
himself and himself says 'we have to talk'. Anyway, people start
dying, the first two while they were in the machine and then they
hear from earth that people are dying there too, mostly first
generation immortals, about half in their own time machines and true
to form, a third person dies on the ship but not in the machine.
There are discussions about going into suspended animation and Jake,
as a 1st
generation immortal makes plans to submit until brighter minds can
find out what is happening and fix it but before he does he wants to
go back in one more time and talk to the program that has recently
revealed itself as an AI. He has begun to realize that things are
not what he thought. Life is an illusion and it's on a loop while
the 600+ surviving in stasis immortals hurtle to their future 18
light years away in a dead ship. Or was that also illusion?
How
It All Began by Penelope Lively
– An older woman is mugged from behind, falls, and breaks her hip.
The story starts as she hits the ground. Writing in a narrative
style, the author tells the stories of the people affected by this
happenstance and how their lives are changed because of it. The
actions of a complete stranger cause a chain of events that affect
far more than anyone would suppose. Took me a while to get into it
but that probably has more to do with my state of mind than the
quality of the book.