Tom Clancy's Net Force: CyberNation (Perry)

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point, Steve Perry (2000)

This was the last in the pile of Net Force paperbacks I'd acquired. Unlike the others, this one had a title that actually had something to do with the plot. There was an online community called Cybernation, which wanted to be an independent entity among other nations. You can imagine what kind of Revolution would be required to bring that about.

Enter Net Force, which once again wins the day, but never entirely nor convincingly. Something always slips through their grasps.

Anyway, I thought enough about these books to pass the bunch of them on to another Tom Clancy reader, even if these aren't technically by Clancy

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Grim Grotto (Snicket)

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Grim Grotto, Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler)

After a bit of a wait, this 11th book in the series was released. I picked it up at a special appearance in a crowded theater on the Upper West Side where Lemony Snicket was too afraid to appear, so Daniel Handler appeared instead. (Some parents were concerned until their children clued them in.)

We unfortunately sat in the back of the theater and so we were the last to get on line to meet him and get an autograph. I read more than half the book while standing on line for two hours waiting to meet him on a lined that snaked through a corridor with numerous doorways, so you were never really sure how close you were. The "Evening with Lenomy Snicket" started about 7 pm. I left with two children about 9:30 pm. He was personable and spent a minute or two with every child, but that's what caused the backup. Unfortunately, some of his fans fell asleep on line or their parents gave up when they were getting close (though still a half hour away).

That said, the book was a little bit of an improvement over the last couple, but it still felt like it was being dragged out, and you had the feeling that the mysteries within would probably not be solved before book 13, if ever.

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Point of Impact

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point, Steve Perry (2000)

Another book in the series, which overall I enjoyed even though I can't remember much about the individual books other than I was started to get tired before I finished my stack of them. Again, I didn't have Perry's name written down, so I didn't know it from looking at the cover. This one had to do with drugs capable of inducing super-strength and intelligence being sold over the Internet. Drama ensues.

X-Files: Whirlwind

X-Files: Whirlwind, (does it matter who it's by?)

Another novel based on the show, but not an adaptation of any particular episode.
I don't remember anything about it in particular, but I would remember if I ever liked an X-Files novel.

So far, I haven't. What works for a one-hour television episode doesn't seem to work for a couple hundred pages.

The Kingdom of Infinite Numbers: A Field Guide (Bunch)

The Kingdom of Infinite Numbers: A Field Guide, Bryan Bunch

Every summer I try to read a book about math to expand my knowledge of the subject. I usually fail. I get part or even most of the way through the book and then I haven't a clue what the author is talking about anymore.

This book from the summer of 2004 was different.

Bunch writes a "field guide" for numbers, picking interesting numbers and describing what's interesting about them, starting with natural numbers like 1, 2, 3, moving on to 0, particular negative numbers and fractions, decimals, and specific really, really big numbers.

It was an interesting read. And I made it all the way through.

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point, Steve Perry (2000)

Don't remember it much except the personal lives of all involved move forward. A little research tells me this one had something to do with Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) driving people mad.

This was the book that got me wondering -- not that it was going to stop me from reading the next two -- if this ragtag team was ever actually going to be successful at something. Oh, sure, things get resolved but no one is going to confuse these books with real life operations at the FBI, not even those ten years in the future (which is almost now). So if the evil scientist geniuses can make quantum computers and manipulate radio waves to control minds, why do these technologies always get lost forever and how come, with all these evil scientist geniuses running around, none can duplicate the results? And how dumb are the folks who run Net Force if they can't recruit some of these geniuses who always seem to outshine their geniuses?

It's science fiction, whether they want to admit it or not. So if they want to establish that the FBI's Net Force suddenly have super-duper super computers, what's the problem? They're trying to keep it realistic?

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Night Moves

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Night Moves, Steve Perry

The apostrophe-s lets you know that Tom Clancy didn't write the book although I would've been hard-pressed to tell you who did. It's not in my list. I had to look it up online.

I received the 2nd book in the series, "Hidden Agendas", as a stocking stuffer a few years earlier. It was an okay book, although it had a bit of filler, mostly dealing with a character that I assume was important in the first book, but was totally ancillary to this story. It takes place in a future that would probably be here about now and deals with a unit of the FBI that fights crime on the Internet, and since they use virtual reality, they really do fight crime on the Internet.

This book, which is the third in the series, brings the team to England after one of them has a stroke induced over the Net and they must find who it is that can break into what should be secure computers.

Quick read.

Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, (Truss)

Eats, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss, 2003

With a title like that, accompanied by cover art featuring a homicidal panda, not to mention reviews I seen, I had to get a copy of this book because I was sure it would be a hysterically funny read.

It was not. It was the most dry book I'd read in quite some time. I guess I was expecting something along the line of William Safire's On Language columns. This was much more straight-forward and no-nonsense -- despite the book's title. Not to say that the author didn't make some excellent points on punctuation, she did. It just wasn't as enjoyable as I had hoped.

However, there's one anecdote that stands out in my mind. Truss takes "Warner Brothers" to take over the movie, Two Weeks Notice, which should have an apostrophe: Two Weeks' Notice. She returns to that point several times and mentions "Warner Brothers" quite a few times. What Truss fails to realize is that Warner Bros. is spelled with a period.

(I know that because I read it in Safire's column.)

Maybe (Maybe Not), (Fulghum)

Maybe (Maybe Not), Robert Fulghum, 1993

In the mid-90s, I had a 50-mile, one-way commute to work to Parsippany, NJ. I got a library card for the Morristown library (which was easier to get to than the Parsippany branch) and started checking out books on tape, mostly abridged.

This was the book that I had checked out in 1996 just before a blizzard, which dropped two feet of snow in New York City and more in New Jersey. I listened to this book on my Walkman over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour commute by subway and railroad. I bring this up so that you can get a complete picture of how early I got up, how long I traveled and how much snow was piled on the ground outside that Morris Plains station where I waited for a bus that went near my office complex. Imagine that you were in a car driving down that street just as I was listening to Fulghum explain the events surrounding the time he conducted the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony as it played the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth.

You would have asked yourself, why is that guy in a suit, carrying a briefcase and standing in a three-foot drift with the frozen wind blowing snowflakes in his face laughing hysterically??

When I saw a copy of this book years later, I had to read it unabridged. It was as good as it was eight years earlier although I didn't have Fulghum's voice reading it to me. Even if you don't read self-help or inspirational or religious books, this is one to read.

Let Freedom Ring (Hannity)

Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism, Sean Hannity, 2004

The syndicated, radio-talk-show host and Fox News commentator's first book is filled with his opinions, which you are free to disagree with, and facts, which you aren't, although how you interpret those facts might vary. If you're a fan, or just like-minded, you'll probably find a lot to like in this book. If you're not and you're still reading this, you're probably seething by now.

Feel free to read this as opposition research. Read it to find the "flaws" and "fallacies" and the stuff that he's just making up. However, also note that everything is sourced. I didn't check the sources, but if you think he's lying, you're free to do so. I'm sure many did back in 2004 when this book was first published.

The King of Shadows (Marston)

The King of Shadows, Ann Marston, 1998

Book five is an improvement over books three and four as it weaves together the stories of two descendants of the Celi who fight for justice and freedom and that of a Somber Rider who has the blood of the original, ancient and magical people of that land flowing through his veins. Events will set these three on a collision course and shape the future on the island.

Unfortunately, I had to do some research on this one, as I did with the last one. I don't remember anywhere near as much as I thought I would. Without checking, I wouldn't have remembered the title of the book, which is technically Book of the Swords in Exile trilogy, not book five in the Celi/Skai/whatever series.

Rogue Pirate (Betancourt)

Rogue Pirate, John Gregory Betancourt, 1987

I remember almost nothing of this book. I did a little research and found out that it was a TSR book for AD&D, and it had pirates in it. And sorcery. And mythical creatures and a big battle at the end.

I've read Betancourt's short fiction in the past, so I'm sure that I liked this (or, at the very least, didn't NOT like it), but I'm puzzled as to why I'd pick up such a book, which was #3 in a series, apparently. Library sale? Book raffle? The old used book store that had a 2-for-1 (and later a 3-for-1) trade-in policy?

This is the kind of book for which I needed a web log like this five years ago.