As I mentioned in the vacation summary post, I read quite a few books that week.
I thought I could throw up some quick thoughts about them here.
The Lost Fleet Series:
The basic hook in these books remains the complications of communication over solar system sized distances, given the painfully slow speed of light. The rest of the story was ok, but probably wouldn’t have held my attention. It helps that the books are an easy read, of the six books in this saga, I read two of them in a single day (one day per book). Strong points of these books: deals with religion without being disrespectful. The author did invent a faith that is very much not along the lines of Judeo–Christian, but sci-fi books gain points with me just for treating faith with some respect. Another strong point is the author keeping the book inside a PG-13 rating. Some of the other books didn’t and I just don’t see a reason for that. In short, the books are a fun read, but nothing too deep.
The Millionaire Next Door:
This book was amazing! I plan to devote an entire post to it later. The quick summary: “If you want to get excited about saving and living a thrifty lifestyle, read this book!” The book is mostly just detailing things the authors have discovered from years of doing marketing research, but I found it really really interesting, and motivating.
Altered Carbon:
The book boils down to a kind of private-eye story, that incorporates a lot of “way out there” science fiction elements. The story had lots of conspiracy, and suspense… kept me pushing to finish for sure. I keep trying to cut the author some slack for just wanting to have a conflict between religion, and tradition against technology, but I felt like the book really beat up on the Catholic faith more than necessary. I know that the kinds of things they were doing in the book would cause some real conflicts for people and churches, namely the ability to move your contentiousness to another body, more or less at-will. It made for an interesting problem to wrestle with, but given how many other things were made up, I don’t see the point in calling out an existing church. That wasn’t a major element of the book it just annoyed me. I should also include a warning that the language is course, and the book includes both sex and torture scenes that were a little more graphic than I prefer to read. Despite all my complaints, I do plan to pick up the sequel to this eventually.
Black Hawk Down:
The book on which the movie is based. As you might expect, it goes into much more detail about the battle depicted in the movie. I was really shocked at how inexperienced the Rangers were in this book. A year or so ago, I read the book “The Unforgiving Minute” that goes into detail about one man’s path through West Point, Ranger school and then on to Afghanistan. What that book tried to explain, and Black Hawk Down did a better job of explaining, is that, as hard and good as the training provided to the army’s best is, nothing actually prepares you to get shot at. We now have 50 years of practice training special forces, and it still hasn’t changed the fact that “green” troops are going to make a lot of mistakes in their first battle.
The second thing that really stood out to me in the book is how vastly different the culture of Somalia is from ours. The book is full of examples of women and children gladly acting as shields for the tribal fighters. Pregnant women running through gunfire to bring more ammo up to the fighters in cover. Frankly the behavior seemed more alien than some of the stuff I was reading in my sci-fi books. I haven’t nailed down what I think about that, or how a we deal with that without going places nobody wants to be… I probably won’t write whatever conclusions I come up with here…
I thought it was a great book, and I guess I would say if you could handle the violence levels in the movie, and you want to spend some time thinking about the actual conflict, you should check it out.
-Jordan
Nelsons 