Monuments Men is the story of the MFAA, a special part of the Army created during WW2 who were tasked with finding the art that the Nazi party had stolen. These are not your 18-year-old GIs but rather (mostly) American and British men who worked in professions like art history, restoration and curating previous to the war. I live for shit like that; however Monuments Men failed to capture my attention. It’s been a while since I’ve read such a dense book. Monuments Men reads very much […]
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 […]
This Book is Brilliantly Bonkers
Pros: An amazing main character and two very excellent supporting characters. I want to be friends with these people. A completely insane story that makes me want to write clichés about rollercoasters. (Nonstop thrill ride! Hold on tight! Etc.!) Funny stuff. Gross stuff. Surprisingly thought-provoking stuff. A palpable sense of dread during the appropriate suspensey parts, and an urge to stomp around heroically during the ‘frak yeah!’ parts. An ending that manages to not tie up everything in a neat little bow, but still be […]