utenzi

I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway. My review of it appears here and below: This is a very well written book. It's really two books, a straight forward police procedural married to a more challenging narrative relating to a painting and its origins. Either part alone would be a nice 3-star book, however the two combined with Nevala-Lee's skill make this a 4-star book. And when you add the wonderful ending, it's definitely 5-star. The book begins by setting up the two parts with an art auction at Sotheby's for a recently discovered painting by Marcel Duchamp, Study for Etant donnés, and on the police procedural front a body is discovered under a boardwalk that had apparently been there for years. The painting sells for 11 million, over 3 times the expected price, and that discrepancy fuels an investigation by art mutual fund researcher Maddy Blume that eventually turns tragic. This investigation drags Maddy through peculiar historical organizations and cult...

I finished reading Michael Connelly's book The Brass Verdict and really enjoyed it. No, this picture isn't here to indicate that the book was corny. Not at all. I just happened to catch this fellow snacking on some corn on my parent's porch this afternoon. It was a brisk afternoon and the squirrels--as well as a couple of birds--were taking the cold as a sign that it was nigh time to get their Winter storage issues in order. Back to the book, I pretty much read this entire book in one sitting. From midnight to 5am I gnawed my way through all but the last 80 pages. This book, while employing both LAPD Detective Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer character Mickey Haller, focused mainly on Haller via a high profile celebrity case involving a movie producer accused of killing two people. His wife and her lover--and just weeks after she showed interest in divorcing him--highly suspicious timing, you might say. Haller had the case fall into his lap via an unusual situation that a...

I am so sleepy. It's all my fault, of course. Last night, around 8pm, I started reading a new book from the library. Power Play by Joseph Finder . I finished the book this morning at 6:50am---which made trying to go to sleep at that late hour quite moot. I used to do that sort of thing all the time when I was a kid, and even in my 20s and 30s. But now that I getting to the outer edge of my 40s, reading all night long really makes going to work the next day difficult. Very difficult!  Zzzzzz. The book was quite interesting. It involved a fellow that had a difficult childhood and how those early difficulties allowed him to deal well with a sticky situation. The sticky situation was his being kidnapped along with a bunch of executives of his company and held for ransom. As you can probably guess, violence and cunning quickly come to the fore in the plot. It was a good book though after a while the flashbacks to the fellows childhood, while quite illuminating, did get a mite tedio...

I'm being a weenie today. My lower back was bothering me quite a bit at work yesterday and since it's not improved overnight I just Emailed in sick. I do have to do some computer work this morning on some graphic files but my chair here at home is one Hell of a lot better for my back than the one at work. I finished reading a book late last night by Douglas Preston titled Blasphemy and enjoyed it quite a bit. I don't think I'd have ended it quite the way that he did---I prefer endings where the guy does get the girl---but I liked this novel better than his last book Tyrannosaur Canyon , and that one made it to the NY Times Bestseller list. Blasphemy is a January 2008 release and it has Wyman Ford, a minor character in Tyrannosaur Canyon , as the protagonist. He's employed by the science adviser to the President, on a hush-hush basis, to investigate why a big money research project is behind schedule. He soon finds out that the real reason he's hired is that th...

Two nights ago I finished reading a book, Hollywood Station , by Joseph Wambaugh, author of The Choirboys and The Onion Field . Today, I'm watching the first season of Deadwood on DVD. I've not read any of Wambaugh's other books though his election to Grand Master status in 2004 speaks well of his body of work. I can say that Hollywood Station is a very well written book though written in an unusual style. When reading Hollywood Station you have a feeling like you're reading a cop's diary of what has been going on at the station for the past month or so. There's a staccato delivery and abundant use of cop talk that gives such strong immediacy. Of course if you're not familiar with some of the terms--and many of them I'd not heard before--you can feel a little lost. There's a large number of characters in the book and Wambaugh gives them all life but you have to really concentrate at times to keep on top of things. Since each pair of cops is exper...

I've read two books this past week. Restless , by William Boyd, which I finished on Tuesday, and The Rake , by William F. Buckley jr, which I finished just a few minutes ago. Both books were recently published, Restless in late 2006 and The Rake in 2007. Both books are well written, which isn't surprising given the literary background of both authors. Boyd has won a number of awards despite having written only 8 novels. Quality, not quantity, y'know? And Buckley is a legend though he's more well known for nonfiction--but he's written a number of spy type novels and they're quite good. I picked up Restless due to a strongly positive review of it in one of the magazines I read as well as it making the years best list in Newsweek. I agree that it's quite good though I might not include it in a "best of" list. In this book Boyd bounces between the world of WW2, in various countries, and suburban US in the 1970s. There's quite a contrast in time p...

I received a book I ordered last week from Amazon on Friday. It's titled " The Cook's Book " as you can see in the picture down below. Jill Norman is the editor but the writing is done by top chefs, each writing about their own specialty. I read a review of the book on a cooking blog a month or so ago, probably Ariela's lovely site, Baking and Books . In any case, I had the book on my ordering queue for a while and finally decided to buy it. It's not cheap. The book lists at $50 but discounted down it's around $30-35. It is most definitely worth the money. Just as eye candy for your coffee table it's worth the moola but when you consider actually using it... the possibilities are astounding. The book has mouth watering illustrations of food--the photography is amazing--but even more important to us amateurs, it's well illustrated with basic and advanced cooking techniques. It's a mid-level book that gracefully allows beginners to join in. Nice!...

It was a pretty quiet weekend. Lots of rain and thunder on Saturday night / Sunday morning but it didn't interfere with any activities--at least not for me. I did stay up most that night reading Simple Genius by David Baldacci (of Absolute Power fame). I thought the book started a bit slow and awkward but that was just the first 10 pages or so. Other than that--and a few technical flaws particularly dealing with kayaks and river flow dynamics--it was a very good book. I started it on Thursday night and finished it on Saturday despite not being able to pick it up on Friday. It had to be good for me to read it that fast. Chris and I watched a DVD on Saturday that was pretty good. As you can probably guess from that picture to the left, the DVD was Volver . The movie is in Spanish so if you watch it, you'll have to either understand Spanish or deal with subtitles. It's worth the extra bother 'cause while it's definitely quirky it's also a very good character stu...

Bad Luck and Trouble (May, 2007) by Lee Childs. In many ways, Jack Reacher is stubbornly married to the idea of living an unexamined life. He's no Platonic scholar. He wanders the country, kicking ass, and then at the end of any of these books, he just wanders off into the sunset to some new destination. Introspection is not part of his repertoire. However in this 11th book in the series, surrounded by his old MP friends from the service, Reacher realizes several things. First, that he actually does have friends. Second, that he has missed them and the camaraderie they shared back when they were a unit. Reacher also is forced to consider the idea that maybe the choices he’s made since he left the Army were bad ones. Would he have a fuller life if he wasn't isolated and alone? If you've read other books in this series, I bet you can guess the answer he comes up with by the end of the book. This is my favorite book in the series so far. Reacher isn't as alienated and vio...

I'm a little late to the party on this novel. It was published in 2005 and is very much a testament to the times in which it was written. Unfortunately the times haven't changed much in the past two years so the insight within the pages is just as much valid now as it was then. The author, Richard A. Clarke, has been in upper level government service since 1973 when he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence. He served in the Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton and GW Bush administrations. Now he's chairman of Good Harbor Consulting and no longer in federal service, no doubt due to his well publicized differences of opinion with the neocon politics at the heart of the GW Bush Administration. That said, it should be no surprise that in Mr Clarke's book there's a lot of politics. There's also a lot of political action and cloak and dagger spy work. In many ways this reads like a trimmed down Tom Clancy novel--the part that was trimmed is the troop level act...

Boomsday written by Christopher Buckley. 318 pages. April 2007. $24.99. Twelve. The protagonist of this book starts out in life with the name Cassandra Cohane, but after getting screwed--in the figurative sense--by two Baby Boomer men, one being her father and the other a junior congressman from Massachusetts--Cassandra changes her last name to Devine. The respective screwings turned Cassandra against the Baby Boomer generation and therein lies the plot, such as it is, of this book. Christopher Buckley, best known for the book Thank You for Smoking , is an amazing satirist and his pen is quite sharp in Boomsday . It's his best book since Thank You for Smoking (TYS). Like TYS , this book involves Washington insiders be they K-street spin doctors, politicians, or the wealthy hangers-on of the political set. It's a great romp. I started reading Boomsday on Sunday and finished it this morning. It was a great accompaniment to the movie I saw Sunday night, Man of the Year , due to...

Ren and I watched two movies today. Inside Man by Spike Lee and The Da Vinci Code by Ron Howard. I'd heard a lot of bad things about Da Vinci Code so I wasn't expecting to like it, especially since I thought that the book wasn't written very well. Imagine my surprise then when I found myself liking the movie. I thought the movie held the interest and theme far better than the book did. Shortening the globe trotting that goes on was a very good move on Howard's part. In the book, Brown just didn't know when to stop with the continuous clues to yet new locations or the preaching about the Feminine Devine stuff--the movie handled it a lot better. Inside Man really impressed me. I was quite taken by the movies pace and approach to giving hints and clues in very small doses. While I have some reservations about the final scenes of the movie that didn't spoil the enjoyment of the excellent pacing and writing of the movie. And talk about an all-star cast. Denzel W...

I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma last Saturday morning just before going to that Science Blogging Convention I posted about last Sunday. It's a book that is very difficult to put down. The book is well written which is no surprise since Michael Pollan has long been a contributing writer at the New York Times as well as a professor of journalism at UC Berkley. Pollan asks the question "What should we eat?" in this book and the answer occurs organically during the course of the book. By the time you've finished the last chapter you'll know the answer to that question and I doubt it'll be the same as before you started the book. In that sense The Omnivore's Dilemma is revolutionary. It will affect the way you look at food and change your world view of the morality of food and of the government agencies that have aided in making our food choices of today what they are. Is that a run on sentence? It felt rather long and breathless. First of all, l...

I've finally started reading Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. I've had it for over 6 months and am only getting started on it now. I'm only on page 57 and it's already gotten me pissed off multiple times as well as given me quite a few things to think about. For example, in 1919 a typical farmer in the USA would be able to support his family and 12 other people, producing on average 20 bushels of corn per acre. And at that time about one in four people living in the USA lived on a farm. Contrast that with today when there's only 2 million farmers yet those few produce most of the food that we need--and in many areas a lot more than we need. Each farmer now produces enough food for 129 people and each acre of land grows 200 bushels of corn. Each number about a 10 fold increase in less than 90 years. The reason for this change? Improved crops, of course, particularly corn, as well as using better equipment such as tractors instead of horses. But i...

Let's start out by my saying that I don't think Crichton's written a real novel in quite some time and this book, Next , is not an exception to that. However I did enjoy reading it and I would recommend it for people with an interest in or fear of genetic / science research. Let me justify my remarks a bit. I think Crichton is a very good writer when he bothers. However he's only got so much time and his creative energy is split in many directions which results in books that are multipurpose. Lost World and Prey were little more than movie scripts spun into books. State of Fear was a polemic on global warming much in the style of Da Vinci Code . Crichton's current book, Next , is a different type of non-novel. This book is like a few Powerpoint slides filled with bulleted points but fleshed out in a fictional fashion. The result is what seems at times to be almost random jumps between thinly described characters--characters which serve mainly to illustrate the ...

Book Review: Isolation Ward Isolation Ward , a debut novel by Joshua Spanogle , is a good effort. Published by Delacorte Press earlier this year (2006) it strikes me as a book that was green lighted at a high level with less editorial oversight than usual. As a result the first few chapters seem unpolished and the ending is a little strung out but the writing after the first few short chapters is quite good. I definitely recommend it. Spanogle is a medical student at Stanford and his experience in the field shows. The writing about science and medicine in the book are first rate and that's quite important because the plot revolves around Dr Nathan McCormick and his investigation into the possible outbreak of a new infectious disease, possibly a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola. This disease presents like flu at first but quickly escalates into a lethal hemorrhagic-like disease. Dr McCormick, a junior doctor with the CDC who's stationed in Baltimore, is called in to consult when a s...

I read a book by Joe Haldeman over the weekend. The title is Old Twentieth referring to the 20th Century. Haldeman writes science fiction and he's most well known for the excellent book The Forever War which was his highly fictionalized reflection on the war in Vietnam and his part in it. He won the Huge and Nebula awards for that novel. The two most prestigious awards in the SF genre. This book isn't bad, but I'm glad I picked it up from a remainders table. For $7 it's fine, but I'd not say it's worth the list price of $24.95. In a limited way it reminds me of The Expected One , a book by Kathleen McGowan that I read last week. In both these books there's a thread running through them that is supposed to be the "extra material" but ends up being more interesting than the main plot. In McGowan's book it's the excerpts from Mary Magdalene's diary, in Old Twentieth it's the summaries of different years of the 20th century and some ...

The Expected One is by Kathleen McGowan. I'd heard about it from Nancy on her blog Crazed Mom . I posted a pre-review of sorts last week when I'd read the first 80 pages and didn't like it at all. However while I still hold to those criticisms I think the book is quite interesting and for some people it'd be a great book to read. I'm very glad I read it and might well buy the sequels that are sure to follow. While many of the standard writing devices don't work well in McGowan's hands, her novel is a very interesting one. Working in soil already tilled by Brown's wildly popular and poorly written book, The DaVinci Code, McGowan makes a much more interesting case for historical oversight. In this book McGowan hypothesizes that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, which is pretty safe territory these days, but also says that Mary was first the wife of John the Baptist before he lost his head in politics. I'm agnostic so I only know the ins and outs ...

Caffeine is an interesting drug. Caffeine is a plant alkaloid which we extract primarily from coffee beans though significant amounts are also found in th tea bush Camellia sinensis. Caffeine is very popular due to its stimulatory affect on the central nervous system. Most people who partake of this drug do so in one of 3 forms, coffee, tea or soda. Coffee typically delivers the largest dose with 100mg per 8 ounces being typical. Tea only has a third as much caffeine and soda has a fifth. Chocolate limps way back behind these infusion style drinks in caffeine content. However there are some people, like me, that take caffeine in other ways. Periodically I take prescription drugs for migraine headaches. Many of these drugs contain caffeine, which is a little weird because caffeine is one of the triggers for migraines. The reason that these drugs contain caffeine is because caffeine, which is usually a vasoconstrictor, can actually increase the effect of certain vasodilators so that des...

I'm thinking of rereading The Da Vinci Code (by Dan Brown in case you've been living in a cave in Tibet these past 3 years). All the hype surrounding the movie release has been getting to me and I'd like to refresh my memory. I don't take this decision lightly since this is one of the worst written books I've ever finished. Usually when writing is this crappy I just toss the book aside, but the plot--can I call it that?--was sufficiently interesting in the first half of the book that I was hooked. I say "first half" because by the second half my reason for finishing the book was more a fascination to see just how bad things would get. The same reason people slow down to look at car wrecks, I guess. I read the book in May of 2003, a month after it was released and well before the landslide of publicity. There's a lot in the book I like, I just wish someone who could construct complete sentences had written it. Or knew what the word "plot" mea...