Category: books

Hard Luck Hank – comedy Science Fiction

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By Steven Campbell.

Warren gave me a copy of book 2 – Basketful of Crap

I finally got around to listening to the audio book read by the fantastic Liam Owen.

Haven’t laughed out loud so often at a book since A Walk in the Woods.

Eat suck, suckface.

Hank is a thug. He knows he’s a thug. He has no problem with that realization. In his view the galaxy has given him a gift: a mutation that allows him to withstand great deals of physical trauma. …

Screw The Galaxy (Hard Luck Hank #1)

I read book 1 second. And I’ll definitely continue on to book 3 …

Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck

Now a successful series, this was a kickstarter project at first for author Steven Campbell.

Click PLAY or watch a crappy preview on YouTube.

The Human Division by John Scalzi

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The Human Division is a science fiction novel by American writer John Scalzi, the fifth book set in the Old Man’s War universe.

I’m giving up on the series after book 5.

Though it’s still well written, this book was too scattered for me. It’s a compilation of 13 separate episodes.

I’ll wait on the movie version.

 

 

Lincoln in the Bardo – a review

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This book is terrible.

It won the Man Booker Prize. All kinds of critics love it.

The audio version slightly better. But one hundred and sixty-six individual narrators (led by Nick Offerman & David Sedaris) still couldn’t make it either interesting or understandable.

The most popular review on GoodReads:

I really tried, but listening to this book is impossible. I want to appreciate the voices, the story, but I can’t get past the format. Like wading through footnotes. Is it possible to ignore the format when you READ it? About to throw in the towel and get a refund.

The most popular critical review on Amazon:

The style was original but tedious. The various voices, very truncated at times and others long …

I was comparing Dostoyevsky’s far superior and adventurous novella Bobok where the decaying corpses quarrel and grumble and a sharp and memorable view of Russian society emerges. This book is not memorable save for its unrelenting tedium.

George Saunders has long been accepted as one of the masters of the American short story.

In this, his first novel, the Lincoln trapped in the bardo is Willie, the cherished 11-year-old son of the great civil war president.

As his parents host a lavish state reception, their boy is upstairs in the throes of typhoid fever. Saunders quotes contemporary observers on the magnificence of the feast, trailing the terrible family tragedy that is unfolding. Sure enough, Willie dies and is taken to Oak Hill cemetery, where he is interred in a marble crypt. On at least two occasions – and this is the germ of historical fact from which Saunders has spun his extraordinary story – the president visits the crypt at night, where he sits over the body and mourns.

The cemetery is populated by a teeming horde of spirits – dead people who, for reasons that become an important part of the narrative …

NY Times review 

I switched to low brow Hard Luck Hank comedy SciFi books.

John Scalzi – Old Man’s War – books 3 & 4

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The Last Colony is a science fiction novel by American writer John Scalzi, the third set in his Old Man’s War universe. It was nominated for a 2008 Hugo Award in the Best Novel category.

Retired from his fighting days, John Perry is now village ombudsman for a human colony on distant Huckleberry. With his wife, former Special Forces warrior Jane Sagan, he farms several acres, adjudicates local disputes, and enjoys watching his adopted daughter grow up.

That is, until his and Jane’s past reaches out to bring them back into the game–as leaders of a new human colony, to be peopled by settlers from all the major human worlds …

GoodReads

Zoe’s Tale (Old Man’s War #4) is the same story as book 3 but told from the perspective of 15-year-old Zoe Boutin Perry.

I admire John Scalzi’s guts for moving from science fiction to young adult.

Any male author trying to be believable as a teen girl is up for challenge. I thought he pulled it off.

It reminded me of the great Robert J. Sawyer writing from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl in the WWW Trilogy.

Also Ender’s Shadow, the retelling of Ender’s Game from the perspective of Ender’s sidekick Bean.

I’ll continue on to book 5 – The Human Division.

In December 2017, it was announced that Netflix had acquired Old Man’s War and would develop it as an original film.

Mount Royal University library, Calgary

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I’m a library aficionado visiting many around the world every year. My own city — Calgary — has offered some of the crappiest.

The University of Calgary modernized long after I’d finished my degree. I’ve only been there a few times. And the new Calgary Downtown Library will not open until  November 2018.

Happily the library most walkable for me has just gone ultra-modern. I love it.

The Riddell Library and Learning Centre (RLLC)  opened Sept 7th, 2017.

From treadmill desks to cubbies for catnaps, everything a student needs to feel learning-ready will be available …

Soundproofed project rooms allow users to record, edit and manipulate sound and video to create podcasts, music and media-rich presentations.

Visitors can take a break from research or end the day in the café or fireplace lounge. Group-use rooms will increase from three to 34. The number of student stations (or seats) will nearly triple from 650 to 1,800.

Currently, the library’s holdings include twice as many eBooks as print, and its collection of eJournals outnumbers print journals by about 80 to one. Balancing the collections is a matter of establishing a long-term strategy, says Shepstone. …

THE LIBRARY REIMAGINED

External community members may book Group Rooms in-person at the Service Desk.

I grabbed this one with a view of the Taylor Centre for Performing Arts.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Cool as it is, I actually prefer to work in an empty classroom. With blackboard for brainstorming. Most Universities lock them up when not in use, but MRU leaves them open.

Surprisingly every classroom still has an overhead projector. And they seem to be well used.

related – Rocky Ridge Library at Shane Homes YMCA opened January 15.

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