Category: Books

Friday Reads: The President is Missing by Bill Clinton & James Patterson

From Amazon.com:

“Clinton and Patterson are a dynamic duo weaving a suspenseful and gripping technothriller that will leave readers wondering, ‘Could this really happen?’ Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, starred review

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Friday Reads: Mother American Night by John Perry Barlow

From Amazon.com:

John Perry Barlow’s wild ride with the Grateful Dead was just part of a Zelig-like life that took him from a childhood as ranching royalty in Wyoming to membership in the Internet Hall of Fame as a digital free speech advocate.

Mother American Night is the wild, funny, heartbreaking, and often unbelievable (yet completely true) story of an American icon. Born into a powerful Wyoming political family, John Perry Barlow wrote the lyrics for thirty Grateful Dead songs while also running his family’s cattle ranch. He hung out in Andy Warhol’s Factory, went on a date with the Dalai Lama’s sister, and accidentally shot Bob Weir in the face on the eve of his own wedding. As a favor to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Barlow mentored a young JFK Jr. and the two then became lifelong friends. Despite being a freely self-confessed acidhead, he served as Dick Cheney’s campaign manager during Cheney’s first run for Congress. And after befriending a legendary early group of computer hackers known as the Legion of Doom, Barlow became a renowned internet guru who then cofounded the groundbreaking Electronic Frontier Foundation.

His résumé only hints of the richness of a life lived on the edge. Blessed with an incredible sense of humor and a unique voice, Barlow was a born storyteller in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. Through intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances from Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia to Timothy Leary and Steve Jobs, Mother American Night traces the generational passage by which the counterculture became the culture, and it shows why learning to accept love may be the hardest thing we ever ask of ourselves.

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Friday Reads: The League of American Writers: Communist Organization Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942 by Tom Wolfe, Jr.

Tom Wolfe’s 1956 PhD dissertation. It’s actually way more interesting than it sounds and makes me want to read more about the LAW.

Posted in Books Tagged with: Tom Wolfe

Friday Reads: Fellside by M.R. Carey

From Amazon.com:

A haunting and heartbreaking thriller from the author of the USA Today bestseller The Girl With All the Gifts.

Fellside is a maximum security prison on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to end up. But it’s where Jess Moulson could be spending the rest of her life.

It’s a place where even the walls whisper.

And one voice belongs to a little boy with a message for Jess.

Will she listen?

Discover M. R. Carey’s powerful new novel – a chillingly atmospheric tale filled with tension, action, and emotion.

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Friday Reads: Twisted Prey by John Sandford

From Amazon.com:
Lucas Davenport confronts an old nemesis, now a powerful U.S. senator, in the thrilling new novel in the #1 New York Times-bestselling Prey series.

Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before.

A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the U.S. Senate, where Lucas had predicted she’d fit right in. He was also convinced that she’d been responsible for three murders, though he’d never been able to prove it. Once a psychopath had gotten that kind of rush, though, he or she often needed another fix, so he figured he might be seeing her again.

He was right. A federal marshal now, with a very wide scope of investigation, he’s heard rumors that Grant has found her seat on the Senate intelligence committee, and the contacts she’s made from it, to be very…useful. Pinning those rumors down was likely to be just as difficult as before, and considerably more dangerous.

But they had unfinished business, he and Grant. One way or the other, he was going to see it through to the end.

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Friday Reads: Alien: The Cold Forge by Alex White

From Amazon.com:

A dramatic new Alien novel, as Weyland-Yutani seeks to recover from the failure of Hadley’s Hope, and successfully weaponize the Xenomorphs.

With the failure of Hadley’s Hope, Weyland-Yutani has suffered a devastating setback–the loss of the Aliens they aggressively sought to exploit. Yet there’s a reason the Company has risen to the top of the food chain. True to form, they have a redundancy already in place… the facility known as The Cold Forge.

Remote station RB-232 has become their greatest asset in weaponizing the Xenomorphs. However, when Dorian Sudler is sent to RB-232 to assess their progress, he discovers that there’s a spy aboard–someone who doesn’t necessarily act in the company’s best interests. For Dorian, this is the most unforgivable of sins. When found, the perpetrator will be eliminated with extreme prejudice. If unmasked, though, this person may be forced to destroy the entire station… and everyone on board. That is, if the Xenomorphs don’t do the job first…

Posted in Books Tagged with: #frdayreads

Your pedantry isn’t as new as you think it is…

In writing about robots, brilliant Isaac Asimov is conforming to a highly respected literary tradition. The first robot (although the word itself was not invented until decades later) to achieve international notice was the celebrated monster created by Mary Shelley. Ever since 1818, the monster has been known erroneously as Frankenstein. Actually, it was the young medical student who put together the odds and ends of corpses he snatched from graveyards and dissecting rooms who was named Frankenstein. Mrs. Shelley never named the monster itself. Yet at least once a week we hear some distinguished (if illiterate) statesman arise to talk of the atom bomb in such terms as, “It will be impossible for us to control the Frankenstein we have created.” (This is a minor and perhaps needless observation, but the constant reiteration of the mistake has annoyed me considerably for some twenty years, and I would like to put my annoyance on record.)

—The Fiction Factory by Quentin Reynolds, 1954

Posted in Books Tagged with: frankenstein, horror

Friday Reads: A Higher Loyalty by James Comey

From Amazon.com:

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Friday Reads: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

From Amazon.com:

At once provocative, terrifying, and darkly subversive, Dread Nation is Justina Ireland’s stunning vision of an America both foreign and familiar—a country on the brink, at the explosive crossroads where race, humanity, and survival meet.

Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever.

In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead.

But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It’s a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.

But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose.

But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies.

And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.

Posted in Books Tagged with: #fridayreads, zombies

Friday Reads: Transformations by Mike Ashley

From Amazon.com:
When we think of science fiction, we think primarily of movies and television shows, but this assumption belies the fact that the genre’s initial rise to prominence came in pulp magazines. With lurid covers and titles like Galaxy, If, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, the science fiction pulp magazines created the visual and thematic vocabulary that continues to animate today’s science fiction blockbusters.

In Transformations, the second volume in his acclaimed three-volume history of science fiction magazines, science fiction historian Mike Ashley brings his unparalleled knowledge to bear on the period from the beginning of the Cold War through the end of the 1960s, an era of tremendous change in the writing of and the marketplace for science fiction.

Ashley begins his story with the decline of the pulp magazines at the end of the 1940s and their replacement by new digest-sized and glossy magazines. That switch, and the increased respectability that came with it, coincided with a true golden age of science fiction writing in the early 1950s, with such giants of the genre as Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and Harlan Ellison all publishing regularly in a wide range of such magazines.

As Ashley shows, by the end of the decade, sales had slumped, all but six of the science fiction magazines had folded, and the future looked bleak—until the surprising rebirth of the genre through the work of British writers Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. Ashley also considers how the popularity of Star Trek and the movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey influenced the future of the science fiction magazine.

For fans of science fiction seeking to understand how their favorite genre evolved from Amazing Stories to Babylon 5, Transformations will be essential reading.

Posted in Books Tagged with: #fridayreads