Of course we all know Sherlock Holmes.
He’s Cumberbatch.
But I’d never read the original Arthur Conan Doyle short stories, first published on 14 October 1892.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is excellent, well worth reading.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Without Remorse is long. Stephen King long.
… Kirkus Reviews gave it a mixed verdict, stating that it is “twice as long as the two rather creaky storylines can bear …”
The writing is not particularly skillful.
Chronologically it’s the first in the Jack Ryan universe.
But I’d never gotten much into the Jack Ryans: Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski.
Jack Ryan is not an important in Without Remorse. This book introduces a more interesting character, John Clark, portrayed by actors Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber over the years.
Published 1993, it’s dated. Every marijuana users is EVIL, for example. And likely to die.
That’s the bad news.
But, surprisingly, I made it through.
I enjoyed learning about John Clark (real name John Terence Kelly), the former Navy SEAL. His particular skills are fascinating.
His main talent is killing people. Vigilante justice.
In any case, I’ll give Red October a try. Second book chronologically in the series.
Amazon’s first and longest running original series is one of their best.
Season 6 is based on The Overlook and Dark Sacred Night.
One of the many things I love about this show is how closely they stick to the feel of the books.
Great writing.
Great actors. An ensemble cast. Older and more believable than most American TV stars.
Troy Evans and Gregory Scott Cummins as Detectives Crate and Barrel steal the show every time they get on screen, for example.
It’s interesting to see Bosch’s daughter Maddie (Madison Lintz) get more important over the seasons.
Complex yet easy-to-follow multiple plot lines.
Bosch’s surprising yet perfect partner is J. Edgar, played by Jamie Hector.
Lance Reddick as Chief of Police Irvin Irving is always good. He gets married this season to Linda Park.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Season 7 will be the last in this series. I was hoping they’d bring in a new character from the books: Renée Ballard. But rumours are she won’t be in the final season.
She’s a Bosch-like intense female detective working the night shift (“late show”) in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives.
related – Why Amazon’s ‘Bosch’ Is the Underrated Mystery Show You Should Be Watching
The Kongoli virus in the book is much more deadly than COVID-19.
Kongoli kills hundreds of millions. Leads to world wars.
But, for the most part, readers are shocked at the many parallels between this fiction and COVID-19.
It’s a cautionary tale. And an excellent book.
The central figure is an American microbiologist named Henry Parsons. His personal story is engaging.
Henry tries to discover whether Kongoli arrived naturally like past viruses, or if humans (Putin) had been experimenting with bioweapons.
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law.
In 2007 he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. A book about Islamic terrorism.
The End of October is fiction.
Wright’s fictional tale is about a mysterious virus that starts in Asia, sweeps across continents, cripples the health care system, wrecks the economy, and kills people worldwide.
“I knew from talking to all these medical experts that something like this was going to happen,” Wright says. “They all knew it. They just didn’t know when.”
Wright began writing the novel in 2017 and turned in his final draft in the summer of 2019.
Wright had started thinking about this plot line after Ridley Scott asked him what kind of disaster could cause what happened in the Cormac McCarthy novel The Road.
Netflix is among the studios considering making The End of October a film.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I really enjoyed these 3 books by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari.
Like Bill Bryson, he can make academic subjects interesting and lively.
Critics call it sensationalist infotainment.
He is a simplifier. I like his frequent analogies to well known references.
There are endless interesting factoids.
Critics complain he gets some facts wrong by over-simplifying.
In Sapiens he postulates that humans now rule the earth because of our ability to organize and coordinate in large numbers.
Bees, ants and other species cooperates even better, but they are too inflexible to evolve. And have comparatively small numbers.
We are the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in our imagination, such as gods, states, money, human rights, corporations and other fictions, and we have developed a unique ability to use these stories to unify and organize groups and ensure cooperation.
He feels humans will continue to evolve, likely into some computer / human hybrid.
Click PLAY or watch his TED Talk on the topic on YouTube. (17min)
Very good.
Tessa Harris studied at Oxford where the eighteenth-century story is set. History is her passion.
Book 1 of 6 in the Dr. Thomas Silkstone Series
The death of Sir Edward Crick has unleashed a torrent of gossip through the seedy taverns and elegant ballrooms of Oxfordshire.
Few mourn the dissolute young man–except his sister, the beautiful Lady Lydia Farrell.
When her husband comes under suspicion of murder, she seeks expert help from Dr. Thomas Silkstone, a young anatomist from Philadelphia.
I enjoyed the third book of the trilogy just as much as the first two.
Author Jason Matthews (born 1951) spent 33 years working for the CIA. He knows what he’s talking about.
Genres: Thriller, Suspense, Spy fiction, Political thriller.
These are his only 3 books to date.
This dazzling finale to Jason Matthews’s New York Times bestselling Red Sparrow Trilogy, called “a primer in twenty-first-century spying…terrifically good” (The New York Times Book Review), confirms the critical acclaim he received for the first two novels, praise that compared Matthews to John le Carré and Ian Fleming.
The sequel to Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews is at least as good.
Russian spy Dominika Egorova gets close to Putin — while also working for the CIA.
By close to Putin I mean he’s smaller than the average Russian bear, if you know what I mean. 😀
As Dominika expertly dodges exposure, she deals with a murderously psychotic boss, survives an Iranian assassination attempt and attempts to rescue an arrested double agent—and thwart Putin’s threatening flirtations …
Red Sparrow (2013) is a novel written by Jason Matthews, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative …
Dominika Egorova, or “Red Sparrow”, is a former Russian ballerina who is forced by her uncle to undergo espionage training for the Russian government at the Sparrow School, where people are trained to seduce their targets.
Other key figures are Marble, a Russian double agent who provides intelligence to the CIA, and Nate Nash, a CIA internal-ops officer who recruits and handles intelligence assets for the agency. …
Most interesting to me was the depiction of surveillance and countersurveillance techniques, said to be quite accurate.
I enjoyed the recipes included at the end of each chapter.
To me it is a dumbed down John le Carré spy novel. Less confusing than Carré. Still enjoyable.
It was made into a 2018 film adaptation with Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton. Reviews were not good.
Click PLAY or watch a trailer on YouTube.
Having dealt with the distant past in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) and with the distant future in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), Harari turns in 21 Lessons his attention to the present.
I really enjoyed this book. Harari is a BIG PICTURE guy who quickly puts things into perspective.
His chapter on God is excellent, for example.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)by Yuval Noah Harari … attempts to untangle the technological, political, social, and existential quandaries that humankind faces. …
In The New York Times, Bill Gates calls the book “fascinating” and his author “such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking.” For Gates, Harari “has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century.”
related 2020 interview:
Rick McCharles 