I always like spending time with Gabriel Allon, but I wonder just how many missions he has left in him. When The English Spy begins, Gabriel is anxiously awaiting the birth of his twins while restoring the Caravaggio he recovered a couple books ago. But well, in steps Graham Seymour after a Princess Diana type character is blown up on her yacht.At the heart of the bombing is an ex-IRA rebel named Aemon Quinn (remember I listen to these things people so I'm sorry about the spelling). Turns out this is just one of the guys who captured and tortured Christopher Keller when he was an SAS man in Belfast. Aemon Quinn has been working on behalf of belligerent governments ever since. His plot pulls in both Keller and Gabriel.Keller begins his transition back to life as an Englishman and away from his time as a paid assassin. There are a lot of "coincidences" and connections in this book which are a bit of a stretch, but Gabriel still runs a tight ship and a good operation. When he's the chief of the office I don't know how much more action his 60 year old body can take, but I guess I'll find out when I'm finally caught up with Silva's feverish writing pace. All in all, all the beloved characters are in this book and all the elements that make for a good Allon novel. But how much more gas does this favored spy have? Are the books making a turn to start following Keller instead?
3 1/2 / 5 Stars.
Last year around this time, I promised a friend of mine I'd go see a live show of a podcast she had fallen in love with. I am a casual listener of podcasts, meaning I'll catch them when I'm in the mood, but that's not often. I prefer audio books after all. But in the spirit of camaraderie, I began listening to The Adventure Zone podcast. Essentially, three brothers and their dad play dungeons and dragons. Hilarity ensues. My friend's enthusiasm, and constant texts asking "what episode are you on now," kept me going through the first couple episodes when I wasn't really sure what I was listening to. I'd never played D&D before and had never really had the desire to. How could listening to other people play be more exciting than actually playing yourself? Somehow the McElroy boys and their father answered this question with their sharp wit, hilarious banter, and above all, excellent story telling. What began as a one-off detour for the family turned into a 69 episode quest of three adventurers, Elf Wizard Taako, Human Fighter Magnus Burnsides, and Dwarf Cleric Merle Highchurch. Each arc had the trio finding a "Grand Relic." An object of immense power sought by evil-doers. And well, I'm not giving away the rest of the story. Go listen already.I know this may sound a little too fantasy for some, but honestly the character relationships and the overall story wound so tightly that I jettisoned all other hobbies for the last twenty episodes and treated it like a brand new initiate trying to speed through the first four seasons of Lost. It goes without saying that the live show was amazing. I still think of TAZ often and even though they've moved on to another story in season two of their podcast, I'm kind of not "over" the original. So thank goodness those geniuses decided to put the arcs into comic form. The Adventure Zone: Here there be Gerblins is the first arc from the podcast. "It won't work" some said. "Moving from an audio to a visual medium is too hard" said others. They were all wrong. The comic works on a comic book level because the strength of the story was so great. They've tightened where they needed to tighten. Removed a lot of superfluous jokes while still keeping the humor. Even the dungeon master appearing in the upper corner from time to time feels totally normal. I'm so glad they have already decided to do the second arc from the show: Murder on the Rockport Limited because the story just gets better as it goes on.
5/5 Stars.
"The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it."It's crazy to think, that in surviving four different Nazi concentration camps, Viktor Frankl was still able to find meaning in his life and in his suffering. Man's Search for Meaning, first published in 1946, is brief and poignant. How did Frankl survive the camps is not the real question. How did he find meaning in his suffering is more to the point. Frankl serves up depravity from a detached point of view, and offers sympathy and grace equally to those who did not survive, and to those that became monsters to survive. In so doing, he offers a better way, a hope for ourselves when all else seems lost:“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”I've been on a huge "Choose Joy" kick lately, all the while understanding that choosing joy may be easy when you live a life of privilege. But here, Frankl suggests that joy is even available for those who do not have all the benefits of a gifted life. And that even death with dignity is a meaning unto itself.
5/5 Stars.
There's a definite flow to the language of this book that takes a minute to get into, but once you get used to it, the prose of Sing, Unburied, Sing is really beautiful. And the story, oh God, the story. SUS is told from three perspectives: first, JoJo, a 13 year old boy who is trying to learn how to be a man from his grandfather, Pop. But JoJo faces challenges in the form of his barely engaged mother and his incarcerated father. This beautiful boy saves his whole heart for his three year old sister, Kayla. Oh, and his grandmother is dying from stomach cancer. Oh and his uncle, Given, was shot and killed by some racist Good Ole Boy because he shot a deer with an arrow better than this POS used a shotgun. So JoJo and Kayla are dragged by their mother to pick up their father from jail. On their way upstate, they are taken to a meth kitchen and a meth dealer's house, the entire time JoJo having to steal food for him and Kayla, otherwise their mother, Leonie would completely forget. And once they pick up their father, Michael, better decisions are still not made. The story of this family would have been enough on it's own, but Ward attempts to go deeper and further by involving ghosts in this story. Leonie is haunted both literally and figuratively by her dead brother, Given. JoJo meets a ghost in the form of a former prison inmate who was contemporaries with his grandfather. The boy was 13 when he was incarcerated with much older men. But in Mississippi a 13-year-old black boy is seen as an adult, as a threat. And this comes down on JoJo just as hard as it did on the ghost, Richie. And there's no resolution to this issue because this is America. But the journey of the story is well written while heartbreaking for all the failings of the parents and the despair of the grandparents.
4/5 Stars.
Wow! What a crazy ride this book is. The fact that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984 cannot be underscored enough. So Case is a hacker, a "cowboy." At some point he tries to steal from his own employer who then chemically castrates him, preventing him from entering "The Matrix", a virtual reality cyberspace where networks appear as objects, as does the "ice" which protects it from hackers. Barred from the only job he loves, Case becomes a low level drug dealer in Chiba City, Japan. He encounters Molly, a leather clad ninja bad ass who recruits him to work with her boss Armitage. They offer to fix his condition in return for his work hacking the Tessier-Ashpool family mainframe.In their pursuits, Case and Molly must break into Sense/Net and steal the stored memory of Case's mentor, Dixie Flatline, so named because he flatlined while in the Matrix and died, thus allowing his memory to be stored. Along the way, Case and Molly discover Armitage is an alter-ego for Colonel Corto, who was the sole survivor of an attempted attack on Russia's network. If this all sounds like the movie, The Matrix, and it sounds like it could have been written today, you are completely right. There's no doubt this book serves as the foundation for so many concepts, images, and terms we are familiar with today. This is a book that should be re-read because I'm sure it's so much easier to understand the second time around. I lost track of minor characters from the beginning who later became important and I think this would be cleared up reading it a second time. Also, there is no grounding character in the book to introduce you to Case's world, so the reader has to figure it out as the book goes along and that can take a lot of energy.
4/5 Stars (If I ever re-read this book I'll revisit this rating because I have a feeling it will improve).
I know wading into anything political these days is foolish. It's one of the reasons I left Facebook behind. A place where even close friends or family can rip each other to shreds through the glowing warmth of their computer screens. And I'm particularly nostalgic these days for the measured and considered way in which President Obama seemed to discuss things. I wanted to see if that was merely rose-colored glasses hindsight or if I was remembering correctly.The Audacity of Hope was written when Barack Obama was a newly minted Senator. And the book centers around various issues and problems facing our country. It was startling just how much the problems he discusses facing 2006 America sound shockingly similar to the problems facing 2018 America. But the part that shines through the brightest is President Obama's pragmatic and realistic approaches to problems. He may not come up with the same solutions as his conservative critics, but his thought process in getting to the solutions are evidence based and practical. There's no hysteria or lectern thumping in this book. Just conversational discussion of income and racial inequality that still exists in our country. His fundamental question throughout the book is what do we value? A few gems on values that really struck a chord with me:"Where do you put your time, energy, and money? Those are your values."
"Values are faithfully applied to the facts before it. Ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question." The book was a refreshing step back from the increasingly hostile political culture we find ourselves in today. Disagree with him, sure, but let's forego a Facebook flame-out.
4/5 Stars
I always like spending time with Gabriel Allon, but I wonder just how many missions he has left in him. When The English Spy begins, Gabriel is anxiously awaiting the birth of his twins while restoring the Caravaggio he recovered a couple books ago. But well, in steps Graham Seymour after a Princess Diana type character is blown up on her yacht.
