fall reading list

-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 1^st 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.