Category: books

Outlander – book 1

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A romance. More a bodice-ripper … Outlander (1991) was not nearly as good as I had hoped. I won’t continue with either books nor TV series.

Outlander is the first in a series of eight historical multi-genre novels by Diana Gabaldon.

Published in 1991, it focuses on the Second World War–era nurse Claire Randall, who travels through time to 18th century Scotlandand finds adventure and romance with the dashing Jamie Fraser.

… A television adaptation of the Outlander series premiered on Starz in the US on August 9, 2014. As of fall 2017, the series is airing in its third season and has begun pre-production on the fourth. …

World Without End by Ken Follett

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The audio book is 45 hrs long. A sweeping historical novel set in 12th-century England during the time of the Black Death. The plague.

It follows characters over 40 years.

The Church is still powerful. New architecture and building techniques are revolutionizing the lives of people as they move from serfdom to free entrepreneurs.

It’s a bit of a soap opera with too high a percentage of the pages devoted to love stories and romantic disaster.

Still … I’ll be continuing on to book 3 in the series –  A Column of Fire, published 2017.  It’s set in the same English city starting 1558.

World Without End is a best-selling 2007 novel by Welsh author Ken Follett. It is the second book in the Kingsbridge Series, and is the sequel to 1989’s The Pillars of the Earth.

World Without End takes place in the same fictional town as Pillars of the Earth — Kingsbridge — and features the descendants of some Pillars characters 157 years later. …

A television miniseries based on the novel aired worldwide in 2012.

For We Are Many (Bobiverse #2)

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Released April 2017, I wouldn’t rate the sequel as good as We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Book 1 2016.

Still … it kept me going. Science Fiction nerds will love it.

Bob and his copies have been spreading out from Earth for forty years now, looking for habitable planets. But that’s the only part of the plan that’s still in one piece. A system-wide war has killed off 99.9% of the human race; nuclear winter is slowly making the Earth uninhabitable; a radical group wants to finish the job on the remnants of humanity; the Brazilian space probes are still out there, still trying to blow up the competition; And the Bobs have discovered a spacefaring species that considers all other life as food. …

GoodReads

It gets confusing keeping track of Bob’s clones. Happily he posted a family tree.

Artemis by Andy Weir – a review

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Wait for the film.

That’s my advice.

Recall Matt Damon – The Martian. … Mark Watney, I mean.

Weir’s first book was a huge, surprise hit.

Yet Weir, who wears a jaunty cap and a cheery grin during most of his public appearances, says he is plagued by crippling self-doubt. What if he’s a one-hit wonder, he wonders? What if his just-released follow-up novel, “Artemis,” fails to measure up? Has his success been a fluke? Weir is clearly suffering imposter syndrome anxiety.

L.A. Times

The charm of The Martian was contrast between the down-to-earth, relatable protagonist and the fascinating hard science of travel to Mars.

In his second book Weir recreates Matt Damon … this time as a young, female Muslim  named Jazz.

You have to admire his attempt at diversity.

The title Artemis refers to the name of the first lunar city, population 2,000. His characters are members of the underclass of workers, criminals and opportunists.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of.

Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

Amazon

Many don’t find Jazz believable. But she’s a geeky 14-year-old boy’s dream girl. Profane. Irreverent. Bawdy, but there’s no sex. After all this book is written at a children’s level.

The plot is stupid too.

But it doesn’t matter. Weir won Best Science Fiction in the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards for The Martian. And he wins again this year for Artemis.

Before he wrote it, Weir had a traditional print book deal. And because its 2015 adaptation of “The Martian” was such a success, 20th Century Fox has already agreed to turn “Artemis” into a movie, to be directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who previously directed “The Lego Movie” and “21 Jump Street”).

My guess is that Artemis will make an excellent film.

This book is not nearly as good as The Martian. But I did enjoy the detailed science included on how humans could live on the Moon.

Daniel Silva – Mark of the Assassin & Marching Season

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The Mark of the Assassin (1998)

The Marching Season (1999)

Those are prequels to Silva’s much more famous Gabriel Allon spy thrillers.

Michael Osbourne is the hero of these two. He faces Jean-Paul Delaroche, the world’s most dangerous assassin.

I’d say the Osbourne books are as good as the Allon series. Highly recommended.

Silva: 

In 1999, after publishing The Marching Season, the second book in the Michael Osbourne series, I decided it was time for a change.

We were nearing the end of the Clinton administration, and the president was about to embark on a last-ditch effort to bring peace to the Middle East. I had the broad outlines of a story in mind: a retired Israeli assassin is summoned from retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist bent on destroying the Oslo peace process. …

The Accidental Series – Daniel Silva on the Gabriel Allon series

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis Taylor

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A book for nerds written by a nerd.

Bob got rich selling his software company. But is killed crossing the street in Vegas.

Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. …

Amazon

He’s a human (sort of) Von Neumann probe.

This book is juvenile. It will appeal most to teenage geeks. But I enjoyed it thoroughly too. There are many interesting concepts.

The down-to-earth tone is somewhat similar to Old Man’s War and The Martian.

Check some GoodReads reviews.

The second book in the series is supposed to be even better. I’ve already downloaded it.

Jack Reacher #22

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I’ve enjoyed all the Reacher books. This is one of the best.

I downloaded Lee Child’s  most recent book on the day of release November 7, 2017.

A former major in the United States Army Military Police Corps, Reacher roams the United States taking odd jobs and investigating suspicious and frequently dangerous situations. …

The plot finds Reacher once again in the Midwest, this time being thrust into an investigation involving the illegal opioid trade, the pharmaceutical companies that often turn a blind eye in the name of profits, and the people dependent on them.

The Midnight Line

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

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Highly recommended. Best book I’ve read in some time.

The Pillars of the Earth is a historical novel by Ken Follett published in 1989 about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England. It is set in the middle of the 12th century …

The book traces the development of Gothic architecture out of the preceding Romanesque architecture, and the fortunes of the Kingsbridge priory and village against the backdrop of historical events of the time. …

Before this novel was published, Follett was known for writing in the thriller genre. The Pillars of the Earth became his best-selling work which was later made into an 8-part miniseries in 2010. …

It is fantastic. Though I have very little interest in either history or architecture, I was entertained for over 40 hours of audio.

The story leads up to the murder of Thomas Becket by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral.

Gothic architecture characteristics include the pointed arch, the ribbed vault (which evolved from the joint vaulting of Romanesque architecture) and the flying buttress. During the course of the book these innovations come to England.

Reims Cathedral

Ken Follett:

I knew it had to be a long book. It took at least thirty years to build a cathedral and most took longer because they would run out of money, or be attacked or invaded. So the story covers the entire lives of the main characters. My publishers were a little nervous about such a very unlikely subject but, paradoxically, it is my most popular book. It’s also the book I’m most proud of. …

I’ve downloaded the sequel World Without End (2007)

Cryptonomicon (1999)

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Several times over the years I’ve tried to read this book.

I finally succeeded.

Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods.

One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deceptionoperatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures.

The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency …

It’s been called the “ultimate geek novel”. Praised by many.

Personally I found it too difficult. Too long. There were too many characters introduced. I never really grew to care about any of them.

Not recommended.

Origin by Dan Brown – a review

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Origin is a 2017 novel by American author Dan Brown and the fifth installment in his Robert Langdon series, following Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, and Inferno.

I’m a sucker for Tom Hanks, the Harvard University professor of religious iconology and symbology. 

Did enjoy the 4 proceeding books.

I like the exotic settings. The insights into history. The references to science.


Origin takes us to Spain. Bilbao and Barcelona.

People complain that Brown’s books are formulaic. This one follows the usual formula though the chase is not quite as convoluted.

My favourite character is Winston, a quantum-computer AI assistant, named after Winston Churchill. This book is tech heavy, another thing I enjoyed.

The plot is as grandiose as it gets:

Where do we come from?
…. Where are we going?

Those who hate Dan Brown will really hate this book. For those who enjoy the escapism … it may be his best yet.

I recommend the book. GoodReads has it at 3.94 / 5 as I post.