David Woodger

Last year I read Scar Night, the first in this trilogy. The main characters of Dill (the angel) and Rachel Hael (the un-tempered Spine assassin) are back. Briefly we meet up with Carnival as well. But this book expands on the world surrounding Deepgate and the whole mythology surrounding the archons (angel warriors) and the demigods. There are new characters like Hasp, who befriends Dill in Hell. And Alice Harper who regrettably finds herself acting as an agent of Menoa, Hell's de facto ruler. Other gods come into play including Cospinol, the god of brine and fog. And Cospinol's number two man, a giant named John Anchor (who is a really cool character). But the story is not as cohesive as Scar Night's story. There is much going on and much strangeness. It's a bit confusing in the first half but starts coming together more in the latter half. All in all, I'm a big fan of this trilogy so far. The story is endlessly inventive, gothic, and weird. I'm looking forward to the concluding book in the trilogy, God of Clocks, which is due this summer.

A linked story collection shot through with a theme of keys, this one sounded promising. I read the first story in its entirety and enjoyed it. But I kept thinking I was missing something. Then into the second story I persevered for at least a dozen pages before skimming to the end because I had no idea what was going on. Tried the third story but quickly lost patience. Nope.

Ha! My Science Book Club picked this (mostly because I suggested it and they're too lazy to come up with other ideas!) Maybe telling the gang that this book was short got it picked. And it IS short. Just over 200 pages of large print on small pages. But what an interesting 200 pages it was! Filled with anecdotes that illustrate the points the author was making, I learned so many cool things about the brain as I zipped through this book in three days (that's fast for me). It's told in a breezy, perfect-for-laymen fashion and has only further piqued my interest in this subject. It also poses some ideas that will linger with you. It's a great introduction to this subject.

At some point months ago I listened to a book-related podcast that basically said, “Read this as soon as it's published.” And it grabs quickly too. A young girl rides her new bike into the woods and falls into a large hole in ground. She's found and is okay, but she's sitting in the palm of a giant metal hand that carbon dates as older than thousands of years. It's in a shaft surrounded by glowing runes of unknown origin. The story is largely told in a series of interviews. But don't let that put you off, it was a very fast read with several good surprises and was just plain wicked cool and lots of fun. First of a trilogy called The Themis Files.

A few weeks ago I was flipping through the New York Times Book Review when I came across a brief, favorable review for this science fiction tale. This one was pretty wild too. The author is a former rocket scientist who now works in the field of commercial robotics so the science within The Collapsium is both informed and a little dizzying. But you don't need to be a rocket scientist to enjoy this book (or even a super genius like me). The hero of the story is the brilliant scientist Bruno de Towaji, the inventor of collapsium, and a royal consort of Queen Tamra Lutui of Tonga, the figurehead queen of the solar system. Collapsium is collapsed matter in the form of egg-sized black holes which allow virtually instantaneous transmission of information and matter — including humans — throughout the solar system. Basically collapsium allows people to fax themselves to various fax ports set up throughout the solar system via a collapsium network. You can also create copies of yourself! While Bruno has been enjoying a self-imposed exile conducting experiments on his own manufactured planet, rival scientist Marlon Sykes has been busy building a ring of collapsium around the sun to improve the current collapsium network. But then a saboteur causes this Ring Collapsiter to fall toward the sun, imperiling the entire solar system, and Queen Tamra calls on Bruno de Towaji for help. I found this book to be as entertaining as it is bizarre. Not only does the author do wildly fun things with the element collapsium, but another element called wellstone is thrown in as well. Wellstone is programmable matter capable of emulating almost any substance whether it be natural, artificial, or even hypothetical. McCarthy spins this improbable tale with wit, verve and humor and the result is a thrill-ride of wild science and adventure.

I began the year with Daniel O'Malley's debut, The Rook, and loved it, so when this sequel came out it was snapped up fast. It was actually high on my son's To Be Read list and he read it first (in 4 days!). The world of the Checquy Files is weird, cool, exciting and funny. In this story, there's a fragile alliance beginning between the Checquy (a British secret service of the supernatural) and the Belgian “Grafters”, experts in super-advanced physiological modifications. And then there's a shadowy group, the Antagonists, that want to shatter this new alliance. Such a fun read! One of my favorite new authors.

From the back cover:
In the year 2018, a daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. But Sergeant Sue Smith discovers that this virtual world robbery may be linked to some real world devastation.

The story is told from the perspective of three characters (and in the second-person style of video game instructions). There's Sargeant Sue Smith of Edinburgh's finest; Elaine Barnaby, a forensic accountant; game-developer Jack Reed (who has a few well-hidden secrets). This techno-crime thriller has a number interesting ideas (some of which are waaaay esoteric). Along the way, there are various terms like LARP, griefing, and nerfing that it helps to be aware of. It's pretty cool and of course, as the characters start digging into the mystery, it gets bigger and more dangerous. Although I'm not a gamer, I enjoyed the story, but I imagine gamers would get even more out of it. Much of the author's ideas seem all too plausible.

This series has been my current go-to series to read aloud to my son, Luke (almost 9 years old). They are good creepy fun. Our hero is apprenticed to a Spook, a man who rids the county of creatures of the dark be they boggarts, witches, or any other ghoul from the Dark. It's dangerous work and full of suspense. The characters themselves are wondeful. They are so easy to picture in the mind's eye. We'll be starting the third book in the series within days.

So I did something I never thought I'd do: I joined a book club. It's a science book club, but for one reason or another the first book chosen is science fiction with some “hard sci-fi” within it. This book was very popular in China and a 2015 Hugo Award winner. It's starts off interestingly enough with characters dealing with the Cultural Revolution of the late 60s, a tumultuous time in Chinese history. And then it jumps to the present and our protagonist is a nanotechnology developer named Wang. As I read along, I knew that at its heart, this was a first-contact story, so I was interested to get to when that actually happened. But my interest began to fade for several reasons:

> One-dimensional characters – Wang, himself, is a bit of a cipher. And the flamboyant cop “Da Shi” was a laughable cliché.
> Wang spends several chapters immersed in an online video game called Three Body that spans eons and is supremely boring.
> Character motivations were either unbelievable, undiscernable, or too Chinese for me to grasp.
> It's not an exciting story. Very little seems to actually happen. And, through no fault of the translation, this book reads like an outline, written by a high school physics geek – dry, amateurish, and dull.
> And it ends abruptly and unsatisfyingly – it's the first of a trilogy, but that doesn't excuse this ending.
> Near the end of the book, I had to skim a bit, something I rarely do. That's never a good sign.

This wins a Hugo?!

This story spans about 300 years and follows the two Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, as they arrive in New France (Canada), and become wood-cutters, a.k.a. barkskins. Set mostly in Canada, and New England, the story also moves to Europe, China, New Zealand, and across the United States. It's a story about the rampant deforestation that occurred in the name of business, and the cultural annihilation of the Indian tribes of the area. I was in the mood for a big meaty novel and I'm a big fan of the Pulitzer Prize-­­winning book, The Shipping News, so this one sounded interesting. And it was. I was hooked from the get-go. Ms. Proulx is an accomplished writer – this is her tenth book – and a wonderful storyteller. You can tell a ton of research went into this fat novel. I never got bored and finished it in about a month.

I found this fattie (736 pages) while clicking through the fantasy listings on Amazon. It came attached with gushing praise from many sources. Set in a medieval-like world (de rigeuer for fantasy), it's the story of Kvothe, a man who began his life in a troupe of traveling minstrels and actors and then later enters a university devoted to the study of magic. Kvothe relates his tale in three days to the Chronicler (so this is only a third of the story.) Rothfuss' story is engaging and detailed but the pacing is slow and the action is minimal. That said, I'll be reading the next installment when it becomes available. My wife's reading this now – she had little options at the time – and so far she finds it to be rather “dark.”

I came very close to not reading another Brandon Sanderson novel after reading and hating Elantris. But then I got into a book-geek discussion about some fantasy series and another reader convinced me to give this one a try. Also, I was curious because of Sanderson taking on the Wheel of Time series (which I've yet to begin). A common thread among fantasy aficianados regarding Sanderson is the respect he's earned for his well-developed systems of magic. That's in evidence here. In this world, magic is known as Allomancy and is based on metals. Mistings are people who have the ability to use one of the allomantic metals, whereas a full Mistborn has the ability to use all of them. In the central city of Luthadel, the seemingly invincible Lord Ruler maintains his dominance over the nobility and a large class of serfs called skaa. It's been centuries since the last skaa rebellion was brutally put down and no one believes the skaa even have the will to mount another. But there's a skaa thieving crew that have a plan. This story contains some interesting characters, a unique magic system, a decent plot, and some exciting action sequences. I enjoyed it. I also liked that even for the first book in a trilogy, it's a fairly self-contained story. It had a great finish too.

I've only read one other book by this author, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – which I thoroughly enjoyed. This one is a ghost story. I flew through it. And apparently he borrows both some ideas and some characters from The Bone Clocks in this story. It didn't matter to me. I thought the plot was pretty cool but now I know some key ideas behind the story of the The Bone Clocks, so it's not really on my To Read List any more. I prefer surprises. I really enjoy Mitchell's writing style. I'm sure I'll read more by him.

I first heard of this book from my Swedish step-father-in-law. I had asked him who his current favorite author was last August. Stieg Larsson's three books are very popular in Sweden. His second book is due to be published in U.S. this summer. Shortly after handing in the three manuscripts for his mysteries, he died.

This was a very cool mystery about a disgraced journalist hired to investigate the disappearance of a young girl in the late sixties. The characters are all fully-realized, interesting individuals and story takes several interesting twists and turns. Curiously, the book's title in Sweden was Man Som Hatar Kvinnor which translates as The Man Who Hates Women. I like the English title better. Recommended for mystery-lovers.

(There are a few Swedish words that are left in the text, but you'd guess their meaning from the context. Fröken is one example. It means Miss. And it may help to know that the suffix gatan means street.)

Crais is best known for his series of novels featuring Elvis Cole but I haven't read any of those. This is the second novel I've read by him, the first was Hostage and that was a great page turner, just an excellent story. This one's a page turner as well. Detective Carol Starkey, still recovering from a bomb blast that killed her (for a couple minutes until she was revived), is investigating another bombing. Someone is targeting bomb technicians. About halfway in comes the first big plot twist and from there it rockets along with several new twists thrown in. Naturally things end with a bang. Fun story. This was an excellent crime novel diversion.

Finished reading this aloud to my kids about a week ago. I'd previously read it when I was ten years old. They enjoyed it but we all thought it was sad when Charlotte died. It's interesting to get to the subject of death when talking with your kids. I stopped myself from quoting the movie Rango: “Circle of life!”

Here I go all math geeky again. I picked up this slim book (about 250 pages) a couple years ago and then I started thinking about it and felt compelled to read it. (Voices in my head. You know.) The golden ratio, or phi (pronounced “fee”), was first discovered by Euclid (remember him from geometry class?). Somewhere around 300 B.C. Euclid–

YOU: Whoa-whoa-whoa, wait a minute, Woodge... you actually read another book about math. For fun?! Are you for real?
WOODGE: Yeah, you TV Guide-reading eejit! Get yer head out of your ass! This stuff is interesting!
YOU: You are frikkin high.
WOODGE: Okay, yeah, fine, go back to your latest episode of THE APPRENTICE but I'm talking here so Shut It.

Anyway, Euclid put it thusly: A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser. The resulting ratio is phi, an irrational number equaling approximately 1.6180339887... it goes on forever without repeating a pattern. Phi is said to be the most irrational of irrational numbers. (The most famous irrational number is pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's diameter.) Irrational numbers are called that because they can't be expressed as a ratio of any two rational numbers.

YOU: Dude, I'm falling asleep here.
WOODGE: Oh, don't be such a baby, the book is much more interesting than the nitty gritty of numbers ‘n' stuff.
YOU: Huh? Did you say something? Donald Trump was saying something profound.
WOODGE: Mm-hm.

Anyway, this book was a breeze to read, even I was surprised. It delves into history, art, astronomy, philosophy, poetry, and is full of good quotes and fun historical facts. It also debunks a number of myths associated with the Golden Ratio. Much of this erroneous stuff can be found in other books treated as facts but Mario Livio, a theoretical astrophysicist by trade, gets behind the mumbo jumbo and gives you the straight dope. Maybe you've heard that the Golden Ratio is all over the Parthenon or was a big factor in building the pyramids or was the basis for many of Piet Mondrian's paintings? But that's just wrongedy-wrong-wrong! But some of the diverse places that the Golden Ratio actually does appear includes: the petal arrangements of roses, pentagrams, Platonic solids, the shape of distant galaxies, nautilus shells, and accounting fraud.

Much more than just blathering on about a freakin' number, this book gets into history and touches on Euclid, Pythagoras, Alexander the Great, Galileo, Johannes Kepler (and the fact that his mom was arrested for being a witch – Burn her! Burn her! She's a witch!) and art history, and whether or not God was a mathematician.

And of course there's Fibonacci and his series of numbers which have a very close relationship to phi. The Fibonacci series begins 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89... and each successive number is the sum of the preceding two numbers. If you take one of the numbers and divide it by it's previous number you get closer and closer to phi as you go further in the series. Fibonacci numbers are found everywhere; from the number of petals in a flower, to the number of spirals on a pineapple; to phyllotaxis (Greek for “leaf arrangement”); to the family tree structure of bees, et cetera.

I thought it all was pretty cool to tell you the truth.

WOODGE: So doesn't that sound pretty cool?
WOODGE: Hello? Anybody?

After reading the excellent Foundryside, the start of a new trilogy the author has started, I decided I needed to read more by this author. I had read the first book in the Divine Cities, City of Stairs back in 2015, and it was good, so I decided to continue with that one first.

This one begins with the one-handed semi-retired General Turyin Mulaghesh. She's a tough one and an interesting character to follow. Shara Komayd (the main character from the first book) sends her to the city of Voortyashtan to investigate the disappearance of a ministry operative. Let's just say she finds out some exceedingly strange things. And we'll eventually reconnect with Sigrud, a Dreyling northerner who played a big part in the first book. He is also a very fun character, i.e. exceedingly dangerous. This well-written story held my interest during the set-up and then starts ramping up big developments about halfway through. I'm moving book three up a bit in my TBR pile.

I also read this true story aloud to my daughter. A young Japanses fisherman gets shipwrecked along with his comrades in the early 1800s when Japan observed a strict isolationist policy. From there they embark on a real life adventure featuring whaling ships and learning about America and Americans first hand. The book includes many illustrations, period drawings, woodblock prints, etc. We learned a lot of interesting things about this time, especially about whaling. Interesting tale.

I needed another book to read aloud to the kids and this one was available. It's been around since 1900! It was very interesting to see all the differences from the well-known movie. The first difference that strikes you is that the Ruby Slippers are actually Silver Shoes. And nobody ever says “Follow the yellow brick road!” Instead, “the road of yellow brick” is mentioned. There's more interesting back-stories to the origins of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. It's kind of cool and a little gruesome getting into the Tin Woodman's back story – it's much more in keeping with fairy tales of old. But it's dealt with so matter-of-factly that my two kids didn't blink an eye at any of it. They enjoyed the story and looked forward to every night's reading from it. As for me, it was fun actually reading the source material to such an old, well-loved movie.

Well, it was better than the second book. This one has a new Presger (i.e. alien) Translator character, but it turns out to be mostly an oddball with strange eating habits, but you just know this character will have a bigger impact in the story much later on (wasn't wrong). There's still an obsession with drinking tea that happens so often it's weird. And using she for every pronoun (even for men) was only confusing. I knew Seivarden was a man from the first book, but every other character... who knows? Don't read this for the action because it's mostly a lot of talking. But more of interest happened in this book than the weak second book. Could have stopped with the first book.

Read this one 24 years ago. Smart dolphins! Aliens bent on destruction! I remember reading the last 70 pages all in a rush. I see this one listed as no. 2 of the Uplift Saga, but I thought it was a stand alone tale when I read it. It's been a while though.

My son discovered this author not long ago and quickly became a fan. He pressed this on me and said I should read it too. It's the story of a small band of thieves hired to break out a valuable prisoner from an impregnable fortress. It's also a fantasy so there are some magical elements which manifest themselves in the people known as the Grisha. The Grisha have varied powers that fall into about seven different categories, mostly having to do with manipulation of elements. They've appeared in a prior trilogy set in the same world as this one (one I haven't read.) The band of thieves, six of them, are interesting, distinct characters, each with their own motivations. The plot is straightforward, linear, and easy to follow. It was an enjoyable story. It continues in the followup called Crooked Kingdom.

Sometimes a horror story is just the thing. This one is set in a furniture megastore called Orsk, a thinly veiled version of IKEA. There's plently of sort-of-Swedish brand names of various products, a twisting maze store layout, and references to notoriously problematic assembly instructions. The stores employees have been experiencing weirdly ruined merchandise and spotted some strange characters in the store. This leads one floor manager to gather a few employees for an after hours late shift to try to figure out what's going on. Things go rapidly downhill from there. I loved the setting and the story zips along. It begins with a dark sense of humor and then gets into some typical horror stuff. Fun ride.

(Also of some amusement is that my 10-year-old daughter was very interested to hear my summary of the story. I wonder about that one.)

This book was first read to me back in third grade. I read it myself ten years ago and then read it aloud to Luke over the past week and a half for a bedtime tale. I had forgotten all about the Cloud-Men but remembered the rest of it well enough. Luke loved it. This is the fourth chapter book I've read to him since the end of May and I'm pretty jazzed by how much he enjoys stories. After finishing this classic (with his ears glued to every word) he said to me, “I want another chapter book!” (I've got a few in mind for the next read-aloud. Some newer tales.)