Category: books

The Sun is God by Adrian McKinty

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I love the McKinty books, but this is my least favourite, so far.

For some reason it just didn’t work for me.

Nudist sun worshipping cult in German New Guinea?

It sounded intriguing.

Synopsis:

Based on real events, a story of murder set in the South Pacific before the First World War.

It is 1906 and Will Prior is in self-imposed exile on a remote South Pacific island, working a small, and failing, plantation.

He should never have told anyone about his previous existence as a military foot policeman in the Boer War, but a man needs friends, even if they are as stuffy and, well, German, as Hauptmann Kessler, the local government representative.

So it is that Kessler approaches Will one hot afternoon, with a request for his help with a problem on a neighbouring island, inhabited by a reclusive, cultish group of European’cocovores’, who believe that sun worship and eating only coconuts will bring them eternal life.

Unfortunately, one of their number has died in suspicious circumstances, and Kessler has been tasked with uncovering the real reason for his demise. So along with a’lady traveller’, Bessie Pullen-Burry, who is foisted on them by the archipelago’s eccentric owner, they travel to the island of Kabakon, to find out what is really going on.

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Heist of the Century by Rene Maurice

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I read the translation by Ken Follett titled Under the Streets of Nice.

Based on the true story of the break-in into a Société Générale bank in Nice, France 1976.

At the time it was the biggest heist in history.

In the book the leader of the ragtag band was Albert Spaggiari. A larger than life character.

For example, Spaggiari contacted the CIA bragging that he was the brains behind the bank robbery. Offering to work for the Americans in their future clandestine break-ins.

After finally getting caught, the ringleader escaped to Argentina becoming something of a folk hero in popular culture.

He died of lung cancer on 8 June 1989.

In truth stranger than fiction, the incompetence of the French police was unbelievable.

You Are Not Alone by Hendricks & Pekkanen

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Another hit book from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen.

Highly recommended if you like psychological thrillers.

Witnessing a suicide proves almost fatal for the witness herself.

Shay Miller would not have been on that subway platform had she not taken the 22 seconds required to tie up her ponytail.

Because she did, she is the sole witness to a suicide that changes her life.

But is she stalking the friends of the dead girl, or are they stalking her?

It seems to be both, as Hendricks and Pekkanen (An Anonymous Girl, 2019) unfold another one of their intricately plotted, female-focused thrillers. …

Kirkus Review

Amazon

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

The two authors seem incompatible. But they certainly work well together.

Anthem – a novella by Ayn Rand (1938)

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Many young men, including myself, are influenced by Ayn Rand, a flawed human being. No doubt. I doubt I could have lasted 5 minutes of her chain smoking harshness.

Not a particularly good writer.

But her her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, introduced many to a philosophical system she called Objectivism:

  • individualism
  • pursuit of happiness
  • individual rights
  • laissez-faire capitalism

We joked that Randian economic policy would be to SHOOT the UNEMPLOYED.

Academic philosophers have mostly ignored or rejected Rand’s philosophy. But it’s been embraced by some Libertarians and American conservatives. Also, impressionable young men.

Anthem is a dystopian fiction novella in an unspecified future date. The concept of individuality has been eliminated.

A young man known as Equality 7-2521 rebels by doing secret scientific research. When his activity is discovered, he flees into the wilderness with the girl he loves. Together they plan to establish a new society based on rediscovered individualism.

Anthem is hilariously simplistic. But I can see it as a precursor to The Fountainhead.

related – We  is a dystopian book by Soviet dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921.

The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state.

It is believed that the novel had a huge influence on the works of Orwell and Huxley, as well as on the emergence of the genre of dystopia.

All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

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Elan Mastai is a writer and producer on the Emmy-winning TV series “This Is Us”. 

All Our Wrong Todays his first novel. I’m sure it will be turned into a film.

There are some things I quite liked about this book. And many things I didn’t. It’s an odd book — written as a casual memoir.

Tom Barren lives in a alternative universe to our own. A techno-utopia. Unlimited clean power supply. Flying cars.

Unfortunately Tom makes a rash decision that drastically changes not only his own life, but the very fabric of the universe itself.

In a time-travel mishap, Tom finds himself stranded in our 2016, what we think of as the real world. For Tom, our normal reality seems like a dystopian wasteland.

Time travel is near impossible to story logically. In fact, one story line is the impossibility of time travel.

The Beauties by Anton Chekhov

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I’ve never really got into short stories.  Nor Chekhov.

But I was convinced by Phillip Pullman that this short story is a masterpiece.

You can listen to it on The Guardian.

Chekhov’s genius lies in the way he manages to convey with such apparent effortlessness a profound sense of the mystery of beauty, and of the sadness of those who observe and think. The narrator of this apparently inconsequential tale fixes on exactly the right details, from a myriad of possible ones, to strike at the heart. It’s a masterpiece of minimalism.

A schoolboy is accompanying his grandfather as they drive in their carriage along a dusty road across the steppe on a sultry August day. They stop for refreshment at the house of an Armenian friend of the grandfather. The boy, the grandfather and their Ukrainian driver are all struck by the beauty of the Armenian’s daughter.

Some years later, now a student, the boy is on a train that stops for some minutes at a country station. He gets out to stretch his legs, and sees a girl on the platform talking to someone in one of the carriages. She is very beautiful.

It’s about as spare and empty of plot as a story could be; two impressions that barely even amount to anecdote.

Like Waiting for Godot, it’s a story in which nothing happens, twice

Who has not fallen in love at first glance of a stranger?

Walk the Wire by David Baldacci

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I QUIT the Amos Decker books.

No doubt Baldacci has fun writing these absurd plots, but they MIGHT be making me stupider. 😀

Walk The Wire (2020) is the 6th book featuring Memory Man, the brilliant, obese FBI consultant.

I do like Decker. And I did enjoy learning more about fracking in North Dakota in this episode.

But I have to quit.

A Painted House by John Grisham

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Certainly Grisham is an excellent story teller.

I was charmed by the simplicity of this tale. It reminded me more of something that might be written by John Steinbeck.

Inspired by his childhood in Arkansas, A Painted House (2001) is Grisham’s first major work outside the legal thriller genre in which he established himself.

Set in the late summer and early fall of 1952, its story is told through the eyes of seven-year-old Luke Chandler, the youngest in a family of cotton farmers struggling to harvest their crop and earn enough to settle their debts. …

It was made into a television film in 2003, starring Scott Glenn and Logan Lerman.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty

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McKinty is my favourite author of late.

Gun Street Girl the 4th (2015) in the Sean Duffy series.

Dark themes. Yet I laughed at something on nearly every page.

When Duffy grudgingly takes on a double murder case, he finds himself on the trail of a conspiracy which could cost him everything.

Belfast, 1985.

Gunrunners on the borders, riots in the cities, The Power of Love on the radio. And somehow, in the middle, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy is hanging on, a Catholic policeman in the hostile Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Click PLAY or watch the Tom Waits song from the same era on YouTube.

A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre

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Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

More entertaining than the fiction of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or John Le Carré.

In the case of Philby, truth stranger than fiction.

I can see how Kim Philby evaded detection for so long — but not Guy Burgess. He was a hopeless alcoholic looking for trouble, yet kept getting promoted.

Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot.

Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time. 

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