Flashback - Dan Simmons - A Good Concept Gone Awry Due to Neo-Con Garbage

Page Count: 85,800

Expected Completion Date: Jan 10th, 2101

Book Count: 228

Title: Flashback

Author: Dan Simmons

     Well again it's been quite some time since I've written anything. That being said I have finished a couple books in between, just didn't make the time to write anything up. Going to try to be better about this because it encourages me to read -- my reading levels recently have been dismal, look at my expected completion date, we're up to 2101! Completely unacceptable :(

     This book had incredible potential for the genre but collapsed due to the author's decision to dive into topics that  he either doesn't understand or chose to portray in a completely out of reality scope. So the general idea of this book was pretty simple, US domination over, a few other countries have taken over, parts of the US have chosen to found their own countries or have become part of another country/entity. Pretty straight forward fiction reading. 

    Then the story has another thing going on, this drug called Flashback where all these people take the drug to be able to have an out of body experience of their own past - pretty cool stuff. This drug ultimately ties into the story quite well as one of the countries involved with global domination was the creator of the drug (and a future version of the drug) and is using the drug to essentially subdue the world - particularly the United States populace.

     All good up to this point, the story is straight forward, writing is pretty clean, the character development is well above par -- too bad this isn't where it ends.

     So the author chooses to explain WHY/HOW the US failed and, guess who is to blame? Yeah everything falls into the arms of our current President, President Obama. The author is either a) delusional or b) just doesn't understand history -- it's okay, a lot of people don't.  Assuming that the country is headed to this point at some point in the history - to say that our current President is even 10% to blame is just insane, President's for the past several decades have been making poor fiscal choices and equally hold the blame for everything that the author chooses to focus on - well, everything but one thing. Of course this neo-con Mr. Simmons chooses to say that military cuts (not even cuts! just slower growth) is partly to blame for this crazy future he creates. If our military expenses at the level of the next 10+ countries combined are not enough to protect ourselves and our interests, I think the question of poor management has to be addressed.

    So the author states that this President (and only this one of course), created a fiscal disaster - Dan Simmons doesn't acknowledge that the first bail out was President Bush, that's sacrilege to a neo-con. Doesn't look at the 2 wars which have carried a pretty penny, etc... etc...

     One more fun thing the author does is presents an impossible scenario - the US going bankrupt. Now there's quite a bit of econ behind this but basically, because the US debt is in US dollars, we cannot logically go bankrupt. We could in theory have hyper inflation but BY DEFINITION, bankruptsy is not possible given just the facts of the game, everyone accepts US dollars as the currency of our debt. So, if we owe, we can print - yes this could and does cause inflation - but this is DIFFERENT THAN BANKRUPTCY.

     So the author should have stuck to what he knows, story telling, and avoided getting into the realm of real world blame, as he clearly lacks some basic foundational pieces of education for this.

    The ending also could have been better - some tricky garbage that authors sometimes throw in to "make readers think" but....it fell flat here.

     Without the blame part this was easy B+ material, the pages wasted on dumping blame on a single person - well that brought it down to a D


Up Next: Cloud Atlas  

  
      

Been awhile, but, I'm baaaack

Well it's been awhile since I've actually blogged about reading, and in fact my reading has dropped substantially over the past few months -- actually I've been reading quite a bit but it's been the Economist (gift from +Bhavani Peesapati :) ) and the magazine takes me 8-12 hours to get through in a week.

That being said I'm definitely back and hope to have a summer full of reading as I'll be starting law school in the fall and think my reading will drop off quite a bit once that happens.

 So my next post will be about this book called Flashback--what a doozy that one was - some Republican fantasy about an apocalypse caused by President Obama....going to be a fun blog to write about ;)

The Night Strangers

Author: Chris Bohjalian
Date: 7/21/2012

This book was pretty unique for books that I've read in the past, it could be just that I've never strayed into this genre before but none the less, it kept me entertained.

The Night Strangers centers around a group of quasi-witches (herbalist) who have a recipe that requires harm to another but comes with great benefits for those who drink it. The book progresses pretty straight forward, tragedy -> change of lifestyle -> weird witchcraft -> really unexpected ending.

I gave the book a B mainly because it wasn't a page turner for me, took me about a month to read 375 pages but the payoff at the end was pretty solid. The writing style was simple, the story was unique, the characters well developed.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend the book to most of the people I talk to but, it's different, and if you're into different, this book is worth picking up.

Star Wars -- Revan

Title: Star Wars Revan

Author: Drew Karphyshhyn

Pages: 289

Date Completed: May 6

This book was exactly what I expected it to be, nothing fantastic, but none the less a decent sci-fi Star Wars read. Character development was solid (for the genre and audience that it's meant to be written for), plot was interesting & fast paced. Only complaint would be that the author jumped around in the plot a bit too much but none the less, a good read. 

Grade: B-  -- more because it's graded on a universal scale competing against all types of books, within the                        genre probably a solid B+.

No Apology....more issues

This book is bordering on simple rants of a paranoid man. After spending months studying for the LSAT's I'm just seeing a long list of logical fallacies which are really unacceptable for a man trying to become the President of the United States. His new thing is attacking arguments/stances based on our consensus on the "evil" of those stating said argument/stance. This is a CLEAR logical fallacy as it doesn't actually criticize the argument but instead relies on an emotional response from the reader when the name of the "evil" person is mentioned.

Simply ridiculous, 25 pages in, dreading the next 300 +

Also, no citations, how can this even be possible? 

Death from the Skies!

Page Count: 79,757

Expected Completion Date: Mar. 18th, 2095

Book Page Count: 216

Title: Death From The Skies!

Author: Philip Plait


Had I read this book before going to undergrad I probably would have seriously considered physics as a major despite high school failures in the field. Professor Plait is an incredible writer that has the ability to bring what might be too complicated for 99% of us to a level that is available for the most of us to understand, appreciate and marvel at. 


The universe is truly incredible. I'm not the type who routinely gets the opportunity to be wowed by life, and this one did it for me. Recognizing what goes on daily in our vast and incredible universe is nothing short of miraculous. The most memorable part of this book was the idea that the compound which helps us clog blood (iron) originated in a supernova at some point in the distant pass. That every cell in our body was star dust, and before that it was hydrogen, all hydrogen. 



The pressure and heat, the randomness, the incredible vastness, all lead to a sense of aw. The ability for all of it to kill us, the pure fact that sooner or later IT WILL kill us (unless of course we do the job before the Universe gets a chance). The sun will eventually die, the solar system will vanish, the galaxy will fade away. It's all in the distant (distant distant distant) future. 


Purely put, amazing

The Jaguar

Page Count: 79,450

Expected Completion Date: Jan. 16th, 2095

Book Page Count: 216

Title: The Jaguar

Author: T. Jefferson Parker


This book really lacked focus for me. Multiple story lines that weren't well developed ran parallel only to come crashing together in some half hazard way at the end. From my understanding the book is part of a larger series of books about a character by the name of Charlie Hood, my best guess is that these other books provide some background information about the characters in this book. None the less, a book should stand alone as well as fit nicely in a series, this one didn't do that.


The characters lack of development was just short of amazing. As I read the book I found almost all of the characters to be one dimensional, lacking any insight and instead focused on single simple items. Throwing in new characters was the norm for this author, most of which were given names and played somewhat major roles (such as helping to rescue the primary character's wife) but were never given a personality.


Another major fall back to this one was the climax. One (1) page (I know, I've never seen this before!). A single page ended a kidnapping which had lasted hundreds of pages. A couple characters dead, bang bang, all done. A 30 page ending followed where characters again were for the most part left singular.


The last chapter just finalized my view of the book. A whole new discussion/topic came up with a side character becoming the main villain because of some back history. Love was lost (in some corny way again in just a couple pages), and talk of super natural beings came in to the mix (no joke, new villain is the devil who has lived for centuries).


Terrible book, I have it a F