Summer reading

[barmar]

Just finished "Dead Until Dark", the first of the Sookie Sackhouse novels that inspired the "True Blood" TV series. It doesn't have multiple plotlines like the TV show (needed to stretch the story out over a season -- the plot of the book would fit in a 2-hour movie), it's basically just the story of Sookie and Bill meeting and falling in love, along with the mystery of the waitresses being murdered. Still, it was a fun, easy read.

[mike777]

Sooner or later I get to most all of the Daniel Silva novels. I just finished his next to latest book, The Rembrandt Affair. In any series that features the ongoing adventures of a single main character, there is a problem in keeping it all fresh. Silva manages this better than most. Probably this book works reasonably well as a stand-alone volume. It helps to know that Gabriel Allon is a now aging Israeli spy/assassin who, before recruitment, was (and still is) a talented restorer of paintings. His first wife, and his child, were the victims of a car bomb intended for him. She is still alive, but destroyed mentally. His second wife, Chiara, is also an agent. The rest will fall into place if you read it.

 

These international thriller things are always a matter of personal taste. Some other things from this genre that I have liked are "The Day of the Jackal", "Gorky Park" and 'Marathon Man". Of these, The Day of the Jackal was made into a good movie (1973, not the absurd 1997 revision). The other two lost a lot in translation to the screen.

 

 

I enjoyed all of these also including the Rembrandt Affair.

 

I am reading Ghost Story by Butcher now and also Fire and Rain by Browne which is about the music scene in the year 1970.

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Also just finished this one:

 

"David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in..."

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/the-beginning-of-infinity-by-david-deutsch-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

[mikeh]

I want to endorse the post that suggested Blind Sight by Watts.....great read, and intriguing take on the cost of consciousness in terms of the utility of intelligence.

 

I read a lot of sci-fi. Just finished The Windup Girl....winner of the Hugo and the Nebula. It is an extremely well drawn picture of an entirely plausible dystopian future. While I enjoyed every aspect of the novel, one aspect of it that distinguishes it from some of the more preachy dsytopian novels is that the characters know the history that got their society into this mess, so there is no exposition....the past is referred to only in the way in which we would refer to the past in our day-to-day actions, grumblings and so on.

 

It is a bit late in the summer to suggest a huge work such as the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, but if you are interested in a very well-written, complex tale of the mid to late 17th century, with musings on the nature of science, money and human nature, combined with flat-out good story telling, this 2700 page multi-novel (but written as one work, not a series of sequels and prequels) will reward you for the effort. It's an odd mixture of genres, but is sold as science fiction because that is the genre in which Stephenson's work generally belongs (tho another excellent work is Cryptonomicon, which really isn't sci-fi either)