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In April we will be reading My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte
Taylor. In this book Taylor, who by
profession is a brain scientist, explores the stroke she had when she was 37…
details of its occurrence, how she recovered, & what she learned from the
experience. She also educates the
reader about the phenomena of stroke as an illness. The book looks to be quite interesting and we will learn, at the
very least, how to recognize the symptoms of stroke in ourselves or the people
in our lives.
The week’s question
was what was Murder, Incorporated?
Murder, Incorporated was a group formed from tough Jewish kids from the
streets of Brooklyn in the 1930’s.
“These were men who readily killed with gun, knife, or whatever was
handy in order to make a crooked buck.”
It was estimated that the group was responsible for 400 to 500 murders
nationwide.
Kim Harrison has been writing a series set in Cincinnati and
revolving around the character of Rachel Morgan for a while now. Long enough for Rachel to go through some
seriously life changing events. Rachel
lives in a world that went through a catastrophic epidemic that decimated human
population. After it the “supernatural”
type creatures came out of the closet (so to speak) because they were
needed. At the start of the series
Rachel is a witch working for an investigative service with a pixie and a
living vampire (someone who’ll turn into a vampire once they’re dead) as
partners. Twelve books later, in The Undead Pool,
she has morphed into a day walking demon, with her original partners as her
business partners (& friends) and with a complicated romantic relationship
with an Elf. Here she must stop a plot
to kill all the undead vampires in Cincinnati, figure out what the story is
with the Elves’ Goddess, and cope with all manner of tricky issues.
This week’s
question was what is an MTB? An MTB is
a Motor Torpedo Boat. This was a “class
of naval vessels displacing about 100 tons, capable of up to 40 knots and armed
with torpedoes.” They were used
extensively in WWII.
One of my favorite writers for tween and teen agers is
Tamora Pierce. She writes books set in
a world where magic is possible, tells very interesting & adventurous tales
(her books are entirely suitable for adults too), and peoples them with
believable characters … particularly with girls & women who are fully
realized and not pigeonholed into roles.
Overall any of her books has much to recommend it. She tends to write in cycles of three or
four where some peripheral character in one series will become the central
character in another. Anyway, in Battle Magic we pick
up the adventures of Briar, Rosethone, and Evvy as they cope with war between
(their world’s analogs of) Tibet and China.
You don’t need to have read the previous books featuring these
characters to enjoy this book.
Jack McDevitt returns to his tale of Priscilla Hutchins in
Starhawk. This book covers a much earlier part of her
life. She has just completed her pilot
training and is on her test mission when the book starts. We follow her for the next year of her life,
in typical McDevitt fashion, as she and the people around her deal with issues
of terraforming other planets, exploring local (astronomically speaking)
mysteries, and dealing with the fact that people (as always) are insane… there
are a number of terrorist acts in this book.
The book is a nice “slice of life” look at life in 2195-6.
An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairers time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, "Tinkers" is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.
In Robopocalypse Daniel H. Wilson tells the tale of the
day when all of our advanced technology unites against us and moves in an all
out war to take us (human beings) out of the picture. It almost goes without saying that this is a very suspenseful
book. I enjoyed it and would recommend
it to both people who like science fiction or those who enjoy stories of all
out war.
Jim Butcher is one of my favorite authors. Furies of Calderon is the first of
his Codex Alera series. Here we meet
Tavi and watch him struggle to overcome challenges made worse by his lack of an
ability prized in his society, furycrafting.
The world he lives in has elemental furies that most can communicate
with. This communication confers
advantages to people. A person who
can communicate with air elementals, for example, can fly. Our boy triumphs despite his shortcomings
(always heartening in a book) and has adventures that make for some very good
reading. The world building done in
this book is very thorough and very interesting. I would strongly recommend this book to lovers of fantasy
fiction.