So, we spent a week at the beach recently and since it rained on three of the five days I had plenty of time to read.
The Liberation of the Philippines: Luzon, Mindanao, the Visayas: 1944–1945 is the penultimate volume on Morison’s epic History of United States Naval Operations in WWII. The book does exactly what it says on the tin, covering everything that happened in the P.I. after they naval battles around Leyte. Morison’s particular strength is slotting everything from the higher echelon planning to the experiences of the sailors into one well written, cohesive, picture.
Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World by Rob Sheffield was an excellent history of the band told mostly through the historiography of the recordings, but with frequent discursions into the lives of the boys outside the studio as well as how the band and their music contemporaneously affected popular culture. I’ve long been a casual fan of the Beatles, but now that I’ve read this I realize that there’s a lot more to them than I thought.
The Plot: A Novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz was an excellent little thriller from the author of You Should Have Known, the novel upon which the recent HBO mini-series The Undoing was based. This book starts with a washed-up, one-hit-wonder, author scratching out a living teaching creative writing coming across an obnoxious, condescending student with a can’t miss, totally unique, plot. A few years later, the author discovers that the student had died in a car accident without ever writing his book. After a minimal amount of soul-searching the author writes a novel based on the student’s plot, which rapidly takes the world by storm becoming “THE” books of the year, and all is well until one morning the author opens an email reading; “You’re a thief”. Things start to go pear shaped from there. I enjoyed this immensely and never anticipated the resolution. I recommend it highly
On the other hand, Off World Hotel & Resort: A Sci-Fi Mystery Trilogy, Episodes 1,2, & 3 by Dave Terruso was not a winner. The story starts off strong, Christie, a middle aged woman is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and her children get together a fund a weekend get-away to a fantastically luxurious resort on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The resort catering to only the richest and most famous of society, is limited to 25 guests at a time and is reachable only by a single teleportation device located in Venezuela. The first book sets up the story, covers Christie’s arrival, a day or two of frolicking in luxury, and the fact that someone has blown up the teleporter link stranding the guests on the resort for three years until a rescue ship can arrive. Given her terminal illness this is a death sentence for Christie and means that while she has a year or so left to live, she will never see her kids or grandkids again. The second and third books cover Christie’s investigation into who blew up the teleporter and why. As the books progress they get lamer and more far-fetched, until at the end I was just incredulously ploughing through the last one to see how bad it would get. Anyway, you have been warned.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built is the latest book by Becky Chambers who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. This book is the first installment in her Monk & Robot series and it’s set in a world where hundreds of years ago, human society was heavily dependent on robots who performed, essentially all the labor. At some point, those robots became sentient, quit working for humans, and left disappearing into the wilderness. Now, hundreds of years later an itinerant “Tea-monk” comes across a robot who has emerged from the wilderness charged by his robot peers with discovering “what humans want”. The book is fascinating, enthralling, and it was just about the perfect thing to read in the beach house while the rain pounded against the windows. I recommend it highly and can’t wait for the next installment.
Swap Night on Union Station by E.M. Foner is the 19th book in the series dealing with EarthCent’s senior ambassador on Union Station one of the multi-specie stations on the Stryx run tunnel network. Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of this series and this book is no exception, but as might be expected from a series with 19 books in it, this isn’t the place to start!
I’m Gonna Live My Life Like a Jimmy Buffett Song, Jack and Di Rum Song, and Let Di Song of Change Blow Over My Head all by Anthony Bjorklund are another series of books that do exactly what they’re supposed to do. In this case our hero, Jack Danielson, is a PR flack with a high-maintenance girlfriend, a boss who makes his life hell, and an aversion to Minneapolis winters. One day on his way home from work, Jack’s Chevy Suburban gets totaled and he wakes up in hospital. His girlfriend is mostly pissed that he missed a scheduled dinner with her family and his boss is pissed that he’s been off work so long. Jack decides to chuck everything, quit his job, break up with his girl, sell all his worldly goods, buy an old beat-up Cadillac convertible, and hit the road to live his life like he was in a Jimmy Buffett song. The books mostly succeed. They’re not particularly well written nor are the characters all that and a bag of chips, but the books were an excellent way to kill a few days on the beach drinking mai-tais with periodic breaks for swimming. If you’re a fan of Jimmy Buffett, you’ll probably like these.
70 for the year
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