[review pending]

[review pending]

My friend Sara wrote this book. I rad an early draft wich had nothing at all to do with this book. I read it all in one sitting on the plane on the way home. It’s an interesting noval following the non-main character from her last book Empress of the World. I have to say two things about this book besides that I liked it. One: I was, like many of the other reviewers, a little bummed that the main likable character from the first book didn’t show up in this one and that the relationship had sort of fizzled in to not much. I’m sure it’s realistic, but I don’t like the main character of this book as much. It just means I’ll have to wait to see if she reappears in a later book. Two: when I first read that there was going to be some sort of play as a central part of this book, my immediate thought was “Oh shit, not a bunch of heavy-drama drama people...” and actually that fear was unfounded. Sara has, as usual, created a bunch of interesting and fairly complex characters that are fun to follow around for a summer.

There’s really a schism between thriller mystery type books that were written pre super always on Internet, and books written afterwards. This is a nice mystery surrounding some smart scientist types and something that happens with the space progam. There are flashbacks to when they were all in college together, and then the main story takes place in the late fifties when one person wakes up with no memory in a random park men’s room and has to reconstruct his life. Better than most of the summer reading I’ve been plowing through this season.

[review pending]

This was an odd YA book that friend gave me. It takes place in the late 18th Century and follows two dirt poor young women as they try to make sense of their world of violence and crime. One is a thief, the other is a whore. One doesn’t know how to read, the other is disdainful of anyone who would suggest that she might want to do somethign other than what she’s doing now. The book is full of bad sex and wanton violence and a lot of people in really destitute circumstances that don’t improve much at all as the book progresses. It was interesting enough to me, as an adult, but it seemed a little heavy to give to a teenager, though I readily admit that I may be out of touch with what teenagers are reading nowadays.

Fun! This book is full of fun science and engineering jokes some of which I found hilarious and many of which were over my head entirely. It’s a collection of articles, essays, poetry and illustrations of a scientific nature most of which seem designed to amuse or share some sort of professional in-joke. I understood some of it and was totally lost with others. However, one of the great things about it is the cross-disciplinaryness of the whole thing. So, you get poems about the second law of thermodynamics or drawings about how to use a small dog to teach physics.

I feel like I need a whole new category here for genre fiction or maybe just summer reading. This was another summer reading book. It was okay. Moved along well, interesting plot. However, I felt that the writing wasn’t really up to the plot that had been devised. By the last few pages of the book I felt that there were a dozen loose ends to wrap up and I missed a few of them. The story is a somewhat complicated legal thriller about a guy at a law firm who thinks he has uncovered something unsavory about one of the law firms big pharmaceutical clients. It used to be that you could only have Nazis play the totally unsympathetic roles, now I guess you can have Big Pharm as well. The story is inteersting if somewhat far fetched and maybe I’m just slow but the wrap up at the end wasn’t quite obvious enough for me so some details remain a bit of a mystery.