| 1. The Tudor
Plot - Steve Berry - Starting off the new year
with a new Steve Berry novel. This was good short story
about Cotton Malone assisting the Queen of England in
fighting an attempt by members of her own family to take
control of the throne. It also has a running theme about
whether Author was a real or invented person but in the
end Malone found Author's tomb in a cave in Iceland.
There is a lot of history presented in this story but I
am not sure what part is real and what part is made up.
Anyway it was a good read and I finished it in one day.
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| 2. The Atlas
Maneuver - Steve Berry - I enjoyed reading The
Tudor Plot above so I thought I would try another Berry
book. Bitcoins and block chains are a big part of this
story which takes place all over the world. In this
story St. John's Bank in Switzerland who hold both WWII
gold and a bunch of bitcoins is trying to convince
central and south American countries to utilize bitcoins
as their national currency. Of course these countries
don't have the full story that the bank, because of its
vast holdings, can manipulate the value of bitcoins to
their advantage. Cotton Malone gets pulled in to do some
simple surveillance for a friend in the CIA of a person
of importance who he later finds out he knows rather
intimately. Turns out this woman is the person who
invented bitcoins and that she is trying to stop the
bank for exploiting these 3rd world countries because it
is contrary to the bitcoin philosophy. Of course
this makes her wanted by all of the players world wide
and so she is captured in turn by the CIA, the Japanese
secret service, the Swiss police and others. In the end,
terrorists blow up the big meeting of the banks'
executives and county representatives seeking the use of
bitcoins. Malone's friend also dies in the attack but
has left a hidden computer program on the bank's
computers that if the bitcoin wallets of the bank are
accessed that the banks bitcoin inventory would be
distributed across all bitcoin owners across the world
which Malone see to. This was a rather long story but interesting enough to make me read it over a couple of days. I also learned some about block chain and bitcoins in the process as Berry always combines facts and fiction in his novels. |
| 3. I Heard
There Was A Secret Chord - Daniel J. Levitin - A
short read from an author that is both an accomplished
musician and a scientist. The emphasis of the book is
how the brain understands, processes and stores music.
He draws upon his experience with cases where people
have had various brain injuries and how that affected
their musical abilities both as listeners and
performers. People with these injuries help scientists
to understand how the various areas of the brain works
and how music is processed and stored. One bit of
information that resonated with me was how the brain has
some built in priorities for handling music allowing
people to recall songs from just bits and pieces of
melody or rhythm. He stresses that this ability is
far more pronounced than in many of the other brain
functions. He and other scientists are somewhat puzzled
by why this is so. He illustrates the concept he
presents with simple examples that I can totally
identify with. Being a musician made this interesting
reading for me. |
| 4. Origin -
Dan Brown - I hadn't read a Dan Brown
book in a while so I picked this up to read. Again I was
totally impressed with how he can tell a story that
keeps you engaged for the whole read. This is a story
about a genius futurist Edmond Kirsch who became a
billionaire by predicting major changes in the tech
field and capitalizing on them. He was also a devout
atheist who blames the Catholic church for his mothers
death. He is also a friend of Robert Langdon,
Brown's chief character in many of his books. Kirsch was
poised to present to the world his discoveries about the
basic question of the human race, "Where Did Came From"
and "Where We Are Going". Kirsch informed the world that
he was going to answer these age old questions and
scheduled an elaborate presentation to do so. As he
started his presentation, he was shot and killed by a
Spanish Navy Admiral who was brainwashed to believe that
what he was going to present would mean the end of
organized religion. Langdon then went on a mission to
fulfill Kirsch's mission to release his findings to the
world. In the process, Langdon was accused of kidnapping
the soon to be queen of Spain and almost killed numerous
times. In the end Langdon does release the findings to a
stunned world. Kirsch answered the first question by
using his AI supercomputer to simulate what would happen
if the chemicals on the ancient Earth came together in a
specific way and found out that over a vast period of
(simulated) time would produce DNA. So they answer was
we are a product of chemistry and physics with no God
being necessary. He answered the second question by
allowing the simulation to run into the future and found
that humans would be merging with technology to create a
new race of techno humans thus answering the question of
"Where We Are Going". All in all a very good read that will probably be made into a movie if it hasn't been already. |
| 5. The Medici
Return - Steve Berry - I had a hold on this
book at the library for a very long time so it was
obvious that many people have been waiting to read it.
Cotton Malone was again Berry's main character. The
story takes place in modern times when a priest running
for political office was told by his grand mother and
was trying to prove that he was descended from the royal
Medici family. This was important for two reasons.
First, the priest was trying to get endorsement from the
Catholic church for his political party and second,
because there was a document signed in the 1500 when the
Medici family loaned the Catholic church a huge sum of
money that had never been repaid. The loan was
guaranteed by a legal document signed by the Church and
therefore blessed by God stating that any successors of
the Medici family could call in the loan at any time.
Unfortunately, the Medici family went on hard times and
their reign in Italy came to an end so the loan was
forgotten and the money was never paid back. The priest
was trying to blackmail the Church for their support by
telling them the loan would be forgiven for giving their
backing. Of course the priest dies at the last minute so
all was for not. The hunt for this document was the main
theme of the story although corruption in the Catholic
church also played a staring role. This was not, in my personal opinion, one of his better story efforts although there was plenty of information about Italy and many of its, shall I say strange, festivals. It was obvious that Berry had traveled a lot in Italy for his research as most of the historical references and all of the locations discussed in the story were real. |