I heard about this back when it first came out in French, and now there’s an English translation. Even though I have no immediate plans to become an organic vegetable farmer, I’m inspired to improve the practices in my garden.
I have read:
My list of what I've read. Everything goes in here, even the embarrasing stuff. That way I, (hopefully), don't get duplicates as gifts, and eventually I can be proud of my long list.
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Origin
Pretty good. Too bad I called it way before the big reveal at the end.
The 5 Second Rule: Transform your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage
This book could be much more condensed, but the core theory seems surprisingly effective.
Invisible
This appears to be the first James Patterson book I’ve read, and I see why his bio in the back of the book is so over the top, starting with “James Patterson has created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today.” If Invisible is representative of all his books, he’s really good! The twist was really well done.
Looking through today’s lens of not having achieved the promised equality between men and women, this jumped out at me:
You could be the most generous and loving father, the most charitable of men, but if your buddies knew about those photographs of barely legal Asian girls you’ve downloaded to your computer, they’d remember that above all else—you’d be the pervert, first and foremost—so you keep it a secret. You could be a faithful wife who would never cheat on your husband, but if he know that you touched yourself in the shower while thinking of the grade-school principal or some movie star, his opinion of you would change, so you hide it.Pages 149–150 of my copy
Men have to look at child porn for people to turn on them, but women just have to masturbate? That passage comes from one of the killer’s journal entries, so I really hope that it’s chosen intentionally to shock, and not Mr. Patterson’s opinion.
Speaking of the killer’s journal, the journal entries are interspersed among the normal chapters and set in a sans-serif font, which I find really jarring in a cheap paperback. It might work on nice smooth white paper, but on rough, yellowish, paperback paper it’s weird to me.
These are minor complaints for the moment. I will likely read more James Patterson. The plot kept me hooked and the reveal was superbly executed.
Net Force: Night Moves
Did Tom Clancy actually write this? I’m not sure, but I can’t find any other author listed. Night Moves is the only book I have read from the Net Force series. The book was written in 1999, and is set in 2011 – the “future” where computers, and especially Virtual Reality, are way more advanced than they are today in 2018, and people use really cringe-y computer slang to go with their cringe-y VR worlds and “hacking” by doing things like walking through a VR jungle.
The storylines of Alex Michaels and John Howard’s son, (I don’t remember, and didn’t write down, his name), could be completely cut from the book. Michaels, the alleged leader of the Net Force team, spends the entire book struggling with his romantic entanglements, (which even the book, written before the turn of the millennium, admits would make heads spin in PR – never mind the current environment around sexual harassment in the workplace). He doesn’t do anything to move the core story forward. As for Howard Jr, a high school student and competitive boomerang thrower, he throws boomerangs with names that were probably cool in 1999 and tries to figure out which girl he should go for – that’s not the Clancy I came for!
There’s the core of a decent story here, between hunting down a former Russian operative in the Nevada desert, to tracking down a bad actor with a supercomputer, and a billionaire English lord who likes black powder, but it hasn’t aged well, and has more storylines than desired.
