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Charles Stross returns to his Laundry Files series with The Rhesus Chart. This is a difficult book to describe without giving away too much of the plot. If you’ve read previous entries in the series you’re probably not wasting your time reading my words --- you’ve already got your hands on the book. So, assuming you’re a neophyte, Bob Howard is our hero. He works for a government agency that monitors what might be called extra-reality incursions. Basically people who understand higher mathematics, philosophy, or other logical sciences develop an ability to reach outside of reality and invite the tentacle monsters from beyond in. This is not good so Bob’s agency works to ameliorate everything bad that can go down. In this particular volume Bob stumbles across an external incursion by a parasite that functions by making the affected vampires (or close enough that we might as well call them that). This is only the beginning and the plot really explodes from there.
This never-before-translated masterpiece—by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble when he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party—is based on a true story.
It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.
In the end, it’s more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order—it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right, and for each other.
Todd Glass has been a stand-up comedian for over 30 years. He was also gay and keeping that fact strictly sub-rosa during the period. In his book The Todd Glass Situation he shares his story. The book is full of interesting tidbits about being a comedian. You get a sense of how collegial that profession seems through Glass’ eyes. The book also explores why someone would keep being gay secret and what the process of giving up that secret later in life is like. All in all an interesting book from a number of viewpoints.
The Great Bath of Mohndo-daro is one of the most striking monuments left by the famous Indus or Harappan civilization. Located within the semi-arid wastelands of Sindh province in Pakistan, it represents a unique feat of planning and hydraulic engineering dating from the 3rd millennium BC.
Fans of Robert J. Sawyer will enjoy Identity Theft. This is a collection of short stories that is sure to entertain and engage. The stories vary in length and cover a wide range of topics. Sawyer has a deft hand with SF and always rewards reading.
In Working Stiff by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell we follow one woman over the course of 2 years as she learns the skills she needs to be a medical examiner. These 2 years are in New York City and span the period of time covered by 9/11 so from that point of view it is a fascinating look at a different aspect of that particular event. It is also interesting because the authors provide non-fictionalized detail about what the job of medical examiner is really like (not as glamorous as TV would have you believe). The writing style leaves a lot to be desired… this is not a book to read because it is well written but rather a book to read for interest.
Mercedes Lackey brings us another tale from the Five Hundred
Kingdoms with Beauty and the Werewolf. In this world there is a non-sentient force
known as The Tradition that strives constantly to bring stories to life, in
other words the plots of fairy tales are continually echoed in real life and
people are forced into playing out roles from these same fairly tales. In this particular tale Bella is the daughter
of a wealthy merchant. One night on her
way back from a visit with Granny (the local wise woman --- i.e. witch) she
encounters, & is bitten by, a wolf.
The wolf turns out to be the cursed local nobleman and Bella is
forthwith sent to live in his home until it can be proven that she won’t turn
into a wolf at the full moon too. Bella,
however, is a feisty and determined girl so she sets out to remedy all the
problems she runs into --- including the curse that Sebastian is suffering.
In Soccernomics Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski use statistics and economics to analyze soccer (particularly the English Premier League) in a variety of ways to answer questions & make predictions. Each chapter takes a question or issue and exhaustively explores it via the medium of statistics. Representative chapters include The Worst Business in the World: Why Soccer Clubs Don’t (and Shouldn’t) Make Money, Need Not Apply: Does English Soccer Discriminate Against Black People?, The Country That Loves Soccer Most, The Curse of Poverty: Why Poor Countries Are Poor at Sports, and Core to Periphery: The Future Map of Global Soccer.
In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?—a complete mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?—an even greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozeh’s parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, although they don’t get the jokes even when she translates them into Farsi). Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughing—without an accent.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North begins by setting up a class of people who live their lives,
die and are reborn as themselves but with all their memories. So generally the first time they are reborn
they experience a bout of insanity as they try to cope with being a child who
rembers a complete life. Eventually as
their lives pile up they adjust and are able to capitalize on the fact that they
already know what will happen in the world to steer their own lives in many
different directions, avoid calamity, and ensure comfort. Harry August, as you’ve no doubt guessed, is
one of these individuals. Then as Harry
lies dying for the twelfth time he is visited by a little girl who gives him a
message from the future to take back to the time of his birth --- the world is
ending, sooner then it should. So Harry
is reborn and undertakes to find out why this is happening. Harry who was born in 1919 and generally dies
sometime in the 90’s takes us on many different tours of the 20th
century as he lives his lives and endeavors to find the cause of the changing
future & solve it.
Graeme Simsion brings us a very different love story in The Rosie Project. Our narrator is Don Tillman. Don is a genetics professor and can be described as not neurologically typical. He has decided he wants a wife and so creates a carefully designed, scientifically sound survey designed to find the perfect partner. Needless to say things do not go as he expected.
In Smoke Gets in Your Eyes Caitlin Doughty gives us a book that is part memoir part polemic about the
current American cultural attitude toward death. Doughty writes of her time working in a
crematorium, reminisces about her personal encounters or lack of them with
death, and posits that our current cultural practices around death & dying
reinforce a fear of death in the population at large. While her experiences are quite interesting
and her larger point has some merit she overplays her hand. I found her apparent belief that no one can
learn without direct concrete experience very irritating after a while and did
not recognize my own beliefs and attitudes nor those of my friends and family
in her depiction of the current cultural state of death.
“an intrepid and progressive essayist, speaker, organizer, politician and one of the intellectual pillars of the Mexican revolution of 1910. Forced into exile in the United States for his opposition to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, he began publishing a radical newspaper, Regeneracion, which by 1914 was headquartered in Los Angeles. Convicted of U.S. neutrality law violations and imprisoned, Magon and his brother Enrique languished in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary where Ricardo died, perhaps by assassination, in 1922.”
Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour tells the tale of Emi Price the summer she graduates from high
school. Her brother, off to Europe, lets
her stay in his apartment with the challenge that she make something great take
place there. Emi manages to do just
that. During the course of the summer
Emi recovers from her first love, solves a mystery involving a film legend,
finds her artistic (and presumably her eventual professional) feet, and falls
in love.
My Real Children by Jo Walton is a fascinating story. In
it we meet Patricia, in 2015, very old and suffering from dementia she is
usually described by her nurses as very confused. She has reason to be confused as she can
clearly remember living two completely different lives that stemmed from one
yes/no choice she made in her early 20s.
The book follows Patricia’s remembrance of both lives and reveals that not only Patricia’s life is different in each life but the entire world around
her --- for whatever reason her own yes/no choice sent the world on two very
different paths.
A Mohawk turn is a turn from forward to backward, or vice versa, from one foot to the other in which the curve of the exit edge continues the curve of the entry edge.
The latest Jack Reacher novel (Personal by Lee Child) lives up to the standard set by earlier volumes. In this book Reacher is pulled into the
search for an expert sniper who is suspected of having plans to assassinate one
or more of the attendees at a G8 meeting.
The suspected sniper is someone Reacher had put into prison earlier in his
career and circumstances reveal that the sniper has a grudge because of it…. So
the whole thing is personal.
Thirteen linked tales from Strout present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection. The opening Pharmacy focuses on terse, dry junior high-school teacher Olive Kitteridge and her gregarious pharmacist husband, Henry, both of whom have survived the loss of a psychologically damaged parent, and both of whom suffer painful attractions to co-workers. Their son, Christopher, takes center stage in A Little Burst, which describes his wedding in humorous, somewhat disturbing detail, and in Security, where Olive, in her 70s, visits Christopher and his family in New York. Strout's fiction showcases her ability to reveal through familiar details—the mother-of-the-groom's wedding dress, a grandmother's disapproving observations of how her grandchildren are raised—the seeds of tragedy. Themes of suicide, depression, bad communication, aging and love, run through these stories, none more vivid or touching than Incoming Tide, where Olive chats with former student Kevin Coulson as they watch waitress Patty Howe by the seashore, all three struggling with their own misgivings about life. Like this story, the collection is easy to read and impossible to forget. Its literary craft and emotional power will surprise readers unfamiliar with Strout.
John Scalzi has a new book out. Lock In is essentially a FBI
hunts down the bad guys type thriller but Scalzi sets it in an interesting
world. In this world a certain percent
of people (not a terribly big percent) suffer from a condition where they have
no conscious control over their bodies --- they are locked in. As a result of this many tools have been
developed to allow them to interact with the world physically via robots and
virtually in online spaces. Our
narrator, Chris Shane, suffers from Haden’s Syndrome (the condition in
question) and is a brand new FBI agent who is assigned to investigate a Haden
related murder that proves to be a conspiracy.
America’s Boy by Wade Rouse is a straight up memoir of an
ordinary childhood in the American South.
The virtue of the book, at least for me, was that it got me thinking
that it would be fun to write about my own life. The author uses a straightforward scaffolding
for his story that looks to provide an easy foothold for trying something
similar yourself. His approach is to
chapter by chapter call out the characters (i.e. other people) in his life.
Anyway I am going to give it a try.
If you’re looking for a sweet little story about a teenage
girl going through some growing then you need look no further then Drama Queens In the House by Julie Williams. Jessie Jasper Lewis
has just graduated from High School (at 15, she’s a bit of a brainiac). Her family are theater nuts and have infected
her though she appears to have little or no talent for theater-ish endeavors. At the same time her parent’s marriage is
breaking up and she must cope with realizing her father is gay & dealing
with her mother’s reaction to that situation.
The book is a quick, easy read with charming characters and not a lot of
drama (despite the title). Recommended
for teens looking for a slice of life book.
If you like a light-hearted mystery then you’ll get a kick
out of Ghost at Work by Carolyn Hart. Bailey Ruth Raeburn our
narrator and detective is dead. She’s
explored the afterlife and has come around to volunteering at the Department of
Good Intentions. She’s sent back to her
hometown for her first case and told to help Kathleen, the pastor’s wife. She arrives to find Kathleen standing over a
body, in full panic mode so helps Kathleen dispose of the body. Now this is not quite as bad as it seems in
the long run because Kathleen actually was being framed. Bailey Ruth then
proceeds to figure out who the murderer is and get that person
caught.
In Here’s Looking at Euclid Alex Bellos takes us on an informative tour of some concepts from
mathematics. His tone is interesting
& conversational and he relates his information in a way that even the non
“math nerd” will understand. I found
myself sharing some of the concepts covered with my co-workers (all of whom are
a bit math phobic).