I admit, I’ve read/listened to every book Janet Evanovich has written (even the ones from the early nineties). They are like candy after a serious novel or piece of non-fiction, and I can zip through them in a flash. I’m partial to the earlier Stephanie Plum, so I thought I’d give one of her new series a shot. Wicked Appetite, featuring the characters of Diesel and Carl the monkey from the “Plum Lovin” series introduces a cupcake maker named Lizzy, who lives in Salem, Massachusetts […]
Secret Societies, 24 hour bookstores, Oh My! Festina Lente!
I love this book – read it a couple times, listened to the Audible version – so yeah – I’m a fan. Ok here goes: combine one out of work web designer, a mysterious bookstore, a secret society, Google, Hadoop, encrypted messages and cute Data Visualization girl from Google and you have Mr Penumbra’s 24 bookstore. This book actually uses Hadoop as a plot point! So cool for us geeky data types. It is a little “San Francisco techie hipster” so maybe it […]
The Hunchback of Lausanne
Let’s see – toss together angels, call girls, a cathedral “guet”, Nephilim and creepy disconnected “shadows” and you get…”The Watchers – first of the Angelus Trilogy” by Jon Steele. A bit of a retelling of the “Hunchback of Notre Dame” going on here. There are three main characters – the first (and most likeable) is Marc Rochat – the “guet” of the Cathedral of Lausanne. “Guet” is an old military term for “watcher” and it is Marc’s job to “call the hours” when the […]
“There is a hole in the world, and the light is running out of it. And the words go with the light.”
After the glory that is The Tombs of Atuan (for me at least), The Farthest Shore comes as – well, “disappointment” isn’t the right word, because I am always thrilled to return to Earthsea. But it’s less of a revelation, perhaps, and doesn’t touch me as deeply as Tenar’s story. Which doesn’t mean that it’s a bad book. Far from it! The Farthest Shore features Ged, now Archmage, in the role of a mentor to young Arren, a prince of Enlad. It has been years […]