Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

I thoroughly enjoyed Ready Player One while I read it. But this book is right in my wheelhouse: I grew up playing Atari 2600 games, programming early Atari computers, and hanging out in dark arcades playing Tempest, Battlezone and Donkey Kong. The book tells the story of an Easter egg hunt in an elaborate multi-player game that has become an escape for millions in a dystopian future.

Wade Watts, known as Parzival while in the game, is the main character and is well fleshed out because we get to know his inner thoughts and concerns. Unfortunately, he's the only character that comes to life. But this story is primarily driven by the hunt for the Easter egg. The style is fairly pedestrian and relies mostly on telling with very little showing.

As for theme, Cline tries to bring in the idea that escaping reality through video games is problematic and that people should face their fears and learn to deal with people in the real world. But this comes too little, too late because the theme wasn't developed throughout the novel. For instance, if Wade had chosen earlier in the book to hide from reality and it created a set-back in his quest, the theme could have been better developed. But as it stands, the theme felt tacked on at the end.

However, as a whole, I enjoyed Ready Player One and it shows that an excellent concept with a compelling plot can carry modest characterization and an unexceptional style.

The Martian, by Andy Weir

I simply loved The Martian. But take heed: I'm a science geek and if you're not also one, you might hate this book. Some portions are elaborate math problems that Weir walks you through step by step. It sounds boring, but it was actually fascinating to me because solving these problems was the only way Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut stranded on Mars, could stay alive.

What I liked best about The Martian was Watney's sense of humor. Even though he was often in impossible situations, he kept his sense of humor and always met his challenges head on, using science and his ingenuity to save himself time and again.

The book also covers events at NASA as they work to save Watney and on board the Hermes where the rest of his crew escaped to after they accidentally left him alive on Mars. These parts are also good, but Watney on Mars are the best ones.

I went to see the movie the day after I finished reading the book, and I had high expectations. Perhaps too high because I liked the book a lot better. The movie version made Watney more dramatic and lost most of his sense of humor. However, the ending of the movie where both the captain and Watney are involved in the final rescue was better than the ending of the book. In fiction, the hero always needs to be the prime mover in the resolution of the story.

The Great Train Robbery, by Michael Crichton

The Great Train Robbery, one of Crichton's novels from the middle of his career, reads more like non-fiction than fiction with extensive research into an actual robbery that took place in 1855. Even though it wasn't told in a dramatized fashion, the story was still very interesting. I also enjoyed reading about 19th century life in London.

Most of the book involves the copying of four keys needed to unlock the safe carrying gold on the train. The last quarter of the book involves the actual robbery itself and all the last minute changes in plans make this part especially exciting. But the real payoff of the book is the ending, where the criminal mastermind behind the crime announces his escape during his trial and then actually pulls it off.

It's interesting that Crichton seems to be telling an un-embellished history of the actual train robbery but still markets it as a novel. Perhaps he just figured it would sell more copies that way.

Dark Watch, by Clive Cussler

I still don't understand the appeal of Clive Cussler (or his co-writers who are probably writing most of his books these days). There's plenty of action, but it's boring and tedious because the characters aren't well developed. It's odd. Even though we get background on the captain and learn some of his motivation, I still didn't care about him.

But perhaps what turned me off most in Dark Watch was that the bad guys plan was to corner the market on gold so they could mess with the world monetary supply (or something). But this is completely ridiculous because the world hasn't been on a gold standard since 1974! Once I'd read that, I lost all confidence in the authors and it made it difficult to continue.

I only made it about half way through, and it didn't get any better. I suppose this just isn't my type of fiction. But there are plenty of people who do enjoy it, and that's cool.

The Finale Silence, by Stuart Neville

This is book four in the Belfast novels, all apparently featuring Jack Lennon as the protagonist, but it's the first I read from this author. It was decent, but not great, and I likely won't read another book by this author. It kept me interested but I never got too attached to any of the characters. The main character, Jack Lennon, is a bit of a loser in his personal life. And in his professional life, I don't remember him doing anything very daring or clever to solve the case.

I read this book a few months ago and it's tough to remember much about it. I did enjoy the beginning and actually liked the character of Rea. Unfortunately, she didn't live very long in the book, and a lot of what got me interested in The Finale Silence died with her.

In general, I think it's a mistake to develop a character only to kill them off in the middle of the book. While it will be shocking to the reader in the short term, it's also not fair to the reader either, and destroys some of the trust between reader and author.

A Disgrace to the Profession, by Mark Steyn

A Disgrace to the Profession, The World's Scientists--in their own words--on Michael E. Mann, His Hockey Stick, and Their Damage to Science is brilliant. Michael Mann sued Mark Steyn for calling Mann's so-called Hockey Stick graph of temperature change fraudulent. Steyn is fighting the lawsuit to fight for free speech, and part of his defense it to show that his characterization of the graph as fraudulent is not slander because other climate scientists also believe it is questionable, a few going so far as to also call it a fraud. This book is Steyn's research, organized by topic and very easy to read. Any one looking to see how corrupt climate science has become need look no further than A Disgrace to the Profession.

Whiskey Sour, by J. A. Konrath

Whiskey Sour was a decent book with an interesting protagonist, good suspense and efficient plotting. There were several times where I thought the story was going in one direction only to take a completely different turn which made it more exciting.

Konrath is a solid writer who excels at plot and suspense, and Whiskey Sour is a good example.

Finders Keepers, by Stephen King

I loved the first third of this book, and thought it would compete with Misery as my favorite Stephen King book. He introduced two interesting characters, one a thief with mother issues who is passionate about a particular writer, and the other a high school student from a troubled home who is passionate about the same writer. King goes into the magic that writers can have on people and the soul-filling nourishment that a good book can give people, especially ones who feel alone and alienated in the world. Finders Keepers was heading for great things with an important theme, something King hits upon once in a while.

And then Bill Hodges and his detective gang entered the book, and everything changed. Hodges was no longer the suicidal ex-cop looking for a reason to live (as he was in the first novel) and instead worries about his cholesterol. Gone were the important themes about literature to be replaced by an ex-con on the loose threatening people to get back what he stole thirty years earlier. The book became a standard detective thriller, which in itself wasn't bad, but it could have been so much more based on the first third of the book. I had gotten my hopes up for something along the lines of The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption, but instead got the more pedestrian Under the Dome.

The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane

This is the first Dennis Lehane novel I've read and I think I selected poorly. I was looking for a suspenseful thriller, which his earlier works apparently are, but with this book he was going for more of a "literary work." Unfortunately, "literary" appears to include a meandering plot and a main character who acts inconsistently and doesn't really believe in anything. I kept waiting to see what the book was really about, but I never found out.

Lehane brought up many potentially interesting themes--worker's rights, immigrant's rights, police men's rights--but the main character never took a consistent stand on these and so the book ended up not having any theme. The two mostly separate sub-plots involving a black man on the run after committing murder and Babe Ruth rising up to become a star were actually more interesting than the main plot because at least these characters knew what they wanted and fought for it (more in the former than the latter).

I plan to try one more Lehane novel, probably one of his earlier ones, and I'm hoping it's much more suspenseful. Lehane has a good style and can create interesting characters, but unless those characters do something that has an overall purpose, the books will be boring.

Pocket-47, by Jude Hardin

Pocket-47 was recommended by J. A. Konrath whose writing I like. Unfortunately, I did not like Hardin's writing. Sometimes the writing is clumsy, especially with the use of cliches, and this calls attention to the writer and takes the reader out of the story. The characters are also not very deep. We are allowed into the main character's head, but only just below the surface.

But the real problem with Pocket-47 is the structure. The first three-quarters of the book has the typical set-up, response, attack and semi-resolution, but then there's still a quarter of the book to go! The story then takes a three-month break and has the main character discovering that one of the bad guys is actually still alive. He proceeds to chase the bad guy into a white-supremacist military compound in order to expose them and their evil ways. But all the while this is happening we don't care because the girl from the first part is still dead.

It's very shocking to have to start a book all over again from the set-up stage when the reader is three-quarters of the way through. Hardin does tie the second story back to the first in the last several pages, but by that point we've given up caring. He has a few pages of exposition explaining how all the events were connected together--but we need to be figuring that out during the book, not at the end.

Perhaps Hardin thought he was doing something exciting with structure which would make his book more interesting. But for this reader, it backfired and made it more boring. Why is it so difficult to find a book with a standard structure which is well executed?

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

For the first three-quarters of the book, I thought this was one of the best books I'd ever read. I loved getting deep inside the heads of the two main characters and really learning what makes them tick. The suspense of trying to figure out who was the good guy and who was the bad guy was very well done and kept me reading. I was also very impressed with how well the female author wrote from the husband's perspective--she clearly has an excellent grasp of the differences between the sexes.

Even when the book started to get complicated and less plausible, I was still along for the ride. Things worked out well for the scheming wife and she had her husband right where she wanted him. But then...nothing. She didn't really want anything except to go back to having an adoring husband, something she should have known would be a lie. It was just too much that she went to all that trouble just to get her husband back as a doting fool. If the ending had been more meaningful, this would be one of my favorite books. It had the same potential of Replay, but in that case the book paid off with an excellent ending, and it is one of my favorite books.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns

I came across this book after visiting Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA. I remembered that Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead had been modeled after William Randolph Hearst and wanted to learn more. I did a search on Google and found a passage in Jennifer Burns' book describing the process Ayn Rand went through in writing The Fountainhead. I was intrigued to learn more about Rand's writing process so I bought the book which is a biography of Rand.

I wasn't interested in the details of her affair with Nathaniel Branden or her influence on the libertarians, but the details of her writing process were very interesting to me.  For example:

• She plotted out her novels before she started writing and then filled in the details with chapters which sometimes were only a sentence or two in her outline.
• She struggled with the resolution of The Fountainhead around which she could build a plot. It was only after working for free at an architect's office for six months that she learned that public housing was one of the biggest challenges for an architect. This gave her the idea for the ending and then she quickly plotted the rest of the book from this.
• The plotting of Atlas Shrugged went quickly as did the writing except for Galt's speech. She struggled between writing it as part of the story rather than as a philosophical essay in its own right.
• In Petrograd after the revolution, her father went on strike and refused to work at any meaningful job that used his intelligence. This impressed young Ayn and was inspiration for the plot of Atlas Shrugged.
• The Fountainhead had to be written and edited on a very rushed timeline. She had already missed the deadlines for a previous publisher who had cancelled her contract and she didn't want that to happen again. For me, The Fountainhead is much less compelling than either Atlas Shrugged or We the Living. Perhaps it is because it was the only novel she had to rush to complete.
• When she had trouble writing, she came up with strategies to break out of the writer's block (which she called the squirms). One technique was to take a walk on the path outside her home, collect stones, and then organize them by color and size.
• The reviews for The Fountainhead were mostly positive because she was someone new and had something fresh to say. The reviews for Atlas Shrugged were mostly negative even though the philosophy was the same. However, I believe the reviewer crowd finally figured out that she held them in contempt for being second-handers and they got their revenge with their reviews. However, it didn't work and Atlas Shrugged quickly became a best-seller.

Besides learning interesting things about Rand's writing process and her early life, the rest of the book was not very useful. Jennifer Burns does not understand Rand's philosophy and so her criticisms make her seem partisan to the libertarian faction. In addition, she gets several details wrong which should be corrected in future editions and on the Kindle version:

• She says Dagny Taggart's hair is blonde but it is brown.
• She said that The Passion of Ayn Rand film was made by HBO but it was Showtime.

At the end, she does make a useful observation that many of the books produced by The Ayn Rand Institute after Rand's death contain misleading changes to Rand's private writings, in particular her Journals. It is useful to know that these sources have been bowdlerized and are not necessarily representative of Rand's actual thoughts at the time.

Candide, by Voltaire

I read Candide over about two days. It was a very easy read considering it was written 255 years ago. I read this book because a respected leader I know often recommends this book as an example of optimism and perseverance in the face of adversity. After first hearing this, I looked it up on the Wikipedia page only to learn that it was written as a satire against the philosophical argument for optimism given by Leibniz.

Could it be true that this leader had completely misunderstood this novel as a satire and took it at face value? I read Candide to find out, and I'm still not sure. It is clearly a satire and Candide, the main character, is ridiculously naive. The book Candide is not at all subtle, with the characters being exposed to rape, hanging, torture, earthquakes, robberies, wars, etc., but Candide the character is still able to convince himself that it is all for the best and it is part of a grand plan.

Read with the proper context, Candide is an entertaining book and laugh-out-loud funny in several places. I also liked it that Voltaire inserted at the end some of his philosophy of life which is that being productive through work is one key to happiness.

The Innocent, by David Baldacci

I keep seeing David Baldacci books at the grocery store literature shelf so I thought I'd give him a try.  I don't like most of the regular authors I see there such as Clive Cussler, Janet Evanovich and James Patterson, but I do like some like Stephen King.

I started with The Innocent because it is supposed to be one of his best. While it is an easy read with likable characters, the plot structure was all messed up. The book is about a contract killer for the U.S. government who refuses to kill one of his assignments which makes his organization turn on him.  This is the first plot point but it occurs at about the 15% mark instead of the usual 20-25%. After this, there are no major revelations or other plot points until the 90% mark when the hero figures out what is going on. The last 10% is a mad rush to stop the bad guys and tie up all the loose ends. This last part is exhilarating, but it should have been spread out over the last 25% or even the last 50% of the book. The middle suffered from not enough progress and the end had too much.

This book just reinforces my belief that a four-part structure with set-up, response, attack and resolution are key for an entertaining story which keeps the reader interested for the entire novel.

Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger

Iron Lake is a pretty good mystery story. Krueger has an easy style which is poetic at times. His main character acts heroically and has a fair amount of introspection through which we learn to identify with him.

There are two areas where Iron Lake could have been better. The first is that the plot became overly complicated at the end in order to tie up lots of loose threads pulled on throughout the novel. At least for me, the various unexplained actions in the middle of the book were confusing enough that I ignored most of them so that when they were tied up at the end I didn't care anymore.

The second issue is that the point-of-view switched to a few other characters for about 5% of the book.  It is disconcerting to have the point of view of the main character for the first quarter of the book, switch to another person's point of view for one single chapter, and then forge on with the main character for another ten chapters. The point-of-view should be constant with one character or should rotate more evenly through two or more characters.

Given that this was his first novel, these flaws are easily overlooked; I plan to read his more recent effort, Ordinary Grace.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Penn Jillette recommended The Mezzanine and I really enjoyed it, although it's not for everyone. When I heard him say that Moby Dick is his favorite book, I tried to read it but just couldn't get past the language barrier of reading a book written over 150 years ago. From the different idioms, unknown words, alternate meanings of common words, and references which were only understood in Melville's time, I struggled to understand what was happening in Moby Dick. Well, thanks to Margaret Guroff's edition at Power Moby Dick, one can read her annotated edition and actually understand the book. Her annotations are short but incredibly useful to get the story and the humor of Moby Dick.

And so I dove into Moby Dick and enjoyed the set-up of the novel, roughly the first quarter of the book, up through chapter 36 where Ahab announces his obsession to kill the white whale who bit off his leg. But then I only made it up to about chapter 50. I couldn't continue because the novel became too unfocused. Melville drags out endless details of the boat and the process of whaling. He also makes many metaphors about race and class, most of which I didn't get and didn't care to get because they are irrelevant in today's world. What really made me lose interest was that Melville was not trying to tell a good story. Rather, he used a simple plot which gave him an excuse to ramble on about religion, sex, money, revenge, madness, exploitation, etc.

Come to think of it, this is very similar to Penn Jillette's book Sock, which I did enjoy because his rants are relevant to today's world. Now I understand why Penn likes the book so much.