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I never particularly liked Warhammer 40.000, never played any board or computer games, based on this universe. In fact, armored felt boots are waay to nerdy even for me. But sometimes one can appreciate masterpieces even in the genres, which one doesn’t like. Unquestionable masterpiece was the latest computer game in the Warhammer 40.000 series –  Dawn of War 2.

With this game you can feel deep submersion into the history and universe of the Warhammer world. Characters are strong and story is dramatic. Not to mention a great playability of the game inself.

Suddenly I’ve realized there is a huge number of novels, written about the Warhammer 40K universe. There are literally dozens of them, written in the last decade.  I gave one a try.

The first novels in the series (I think) are talking about the beginning of the major good-versus-evil conflict  - Horus Rising.

Horus was The Warmaster, it’s some kind of secretary of defence (or, secretary of aggression, actually, because the Empire was quite active in the conquests). The Empire itself resembles the Roman Empire at it’s prime. Well, what else you want to take as an example for a dystopian war-oriented empire? The first book tells us about working days of Space Marines, armored super-soldiers of future and their first encounters with Chaos, the evil from the parallel universe.

Very very nice sci-fi, I enjoyed it a lot. I’ll try a couple of more books in the series to see where it goes from that.

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Altered Carbon is a dark cyberpunk novel by Richard Morgan. At the time, when most of the bestsellers are talking about vampires, catholics or wizards, it’s nice to find a good old-school science fiction action novel.

Richard Morgan is the flagship of cyberpunk of the first decade of 21 century (as was William Gibson in 80s and Neal Stephenson in 90s). The book has everything you need:

• Futuristic world: super-soldiers, virtual reality, artificial intelligences, Japanese mega-corporations, Anglo-Saxons billionaires.
• Fights: fist-figts, gun-fights, knife-fights, robot-fights, heavy artillery-fights
• Sex: normal sex, virtual sex, drug-induced sex, even love-making sex!
• Story: a nice crime and punishment script with a number of twists

Can’t wait to start with the sequels: Broken Angels and Woken Furies

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Yesterday i finished listening to the latest book of Dan Brown – “Lost Symbol“.

I like Dan Brown, he writes very enjoyable pulp fiction. I liked him even more, when he was  a science fiction writer (the first 3 books). Then he discovered that religion fiction pays much better, unfortunately

While reading “Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Daemons”, a lot of people were asking themselves – what kind of social contract fulfilled the author. Who was paying him for the critique of catholic Church and why?

Well, after “Lost Symbol” it’s clear who is behind all those books. Masons! Yes, the first time in Brown novels there is a protagonist worldwide organization- the masons. They’re good, rich, smart, sexy and winning at the end. Aha!

Seriously, it’s a very nice pulp fiction, I recommend it to everybody, who want to relax and have fun.

Spoiler Alert!

I find the finale of the book  just horrible. It would be much-much better to finish at the moment, when CIA-officer barks her final insult toward the main hero and goes away. That should be it! May be sex-scene  between main heroes, but nothing more about the masonic secrets.

Because he spoiled it all. This finale is even worse that the finale of “Lost”

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There are lies, damn lies and statistics. What happens if you apply the rules of statistical analyze to real life? Horrible, horrible things. You can prove almost anything and  break the same proof again and again.

Depends on how you apply your statistical knowledge. A book ”Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” is about the ways how you can apply mathematics to real life.

Does really pro-abortion laws helped to clean american steets from violence?  How people give names to their kids and what happens if you give a wrong name? The authors are trying to figure that out. One of the authors, Stephen J. Dubner is a journalist, that’s why the topics are very hot and controversial. Which makes this book fun to read. Do I believe the authors? Not much, they showed themselves, how biased could a statistical analisys become. But it’s interesting to read anyway.

If you like more sober and scientific approach to the problem of mathematics in real life, I’d recommend books by Nassib Taleb. He also likes to place horror in the minds of the readers, but much much more honestly.

But returning to Levitt and Dubner, I just found today they’ve made a sequel to their book – SuperFreakonomics. What else could they find to catch our attention? Suicide bombers, whores and dead horses on the streets of New York! Of course I’m going to read it, I find the topics  irresistible!

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Yesterday I’ve finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsing. It’s and old philosophical book about life and work.

Author is trying to answer on the questions how to life without screwing yourself up and how to perform your job correct. Correct not in the sense “to satisfy your boss”, but objectively, philosophically “correct”. He’s trying to create his own system of values, based on so called “Quality” and describe the world on the basis of these values.

Normally I don’t enjoy such books much, but this one was written by a technical man to a technical readers. Except for the last 10%, where he’s comparing his values to rhetoric and dialectic, I was able to follow his line of thoughts without any problems. The books is talking a log about interaction of modern technology and man. Even though it was written in 1974, long before information age and the Internet, nothing changed much. The problems with the man-machine interactions are basically the same. And the solutions, the author is giving, may even work today.

Fortunately it’s not a motivation book or psychological manual, it doesn’t have “10 steps to improve your life” and the end. The book is asking you to think and may be, if you feel like it, to change something in your life.

There is actually surprisingly little in the book about motorcycles or zen, which is also good. Both subjects could be quite boring.

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The books are getting bigger and bigger every year. They’re also multiplying, writers don’t just create novels, they’re creating long cycles of them.

Everybody wants to be like Rowling. It’s even normal to plan ahead, like I’m going to create a huge 10-volumes story about this character. I even know already names of the books. Sometimes authors even succeed.

In year 2009 the most popular author was Stephenie Meyer, creator of a long series of books about teenage vampires.

The positive part of such application of written talents  is The World. Some writers are great in creation of their own Worlds. If the series is big enough you have everything in it: history, politics, science, a dozens of different cultures and religions as well as types of magic.

The lies of Locke Lamora is the first book in one of  such thorough series. The story takes place in alternative reality, very brutal medieval style world, with magic and alchemy. It has tons of violence. And tons of details. About violence. So it’s a bit hard to read, if you don’t like pieces of meat on every page.

The main characters are members of con artist gang and their attempts to score a long con. Of course their plans don’t go as planned and of course they discover horrible mysteries. That’s how it usually works.

As I mentioned, I especially like those books because of the enormouns amount of details about this World.

The author has published the first two books around 3 years ago, but sins then – nothing. From his Livejournal blog you can find that’s he’s suffering from some mental distortions and undergoing  a therapy. Let’s hope he be better soon and finish his books!

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Today in the sportclub I’ve finished listening to the “Catcher in the rye” by Salinger. Sometimes I feel like reading the classic well-known books, even if only just to understand, why people like them so much. But I admit, I’ve only got the book because the Salinger deceased a couple of month ago. Otherwise I completely forgot I heard about it.

I liked very much the way the book is written. It’s short and absolutely irresistible to read (or listen). If you start – you never get bored till the end. Even if the subject is not that interesting.

It’s a story, desctibing the process of  puberty. The couple of month of active physical changes in the organism of young human, which completely screws him (or her). And, in this situation, the boy, undergoing the changes has enormous empathy. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but he’s feeling every bit of it. He can only feel that something is wrong with him and with the world. But there’s absolutely nothing happening to the world, it’s just his hormones are building his body for reproduction.

May be it’s a bit cynic to analyze all those “youth rebellion” from physiological prospective, sorry. Unfortunately it was some time ago for me, so I don’t remember much how he felt. And, obviously, I can not feel it again.

But the book is very good and worth reading.

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I was recommended this book by a friend of mine. According to him,The Yiddish Policemen’s Union it’s practically new standard of style. I don’t know much about those standards, but I liked it very much.

From the first chapter I felt myself completely surrounded by the reality of the book. I felt it, I could almost smell the world of pseudo-Israel in the cold region of Alaska. The story revolves around the main idea of Judaism – their country, which they’re denied one more time. What would happen if Israel didn’t succeed in 1948 and the Jews had to flee again. What if they’re still called “Yids”, not “Jews”.

The main hero is very likable (almost too easily likable) – an old alcohol-driven police detective, who, nevertheless is able to solve mysteries and find all the criminals. It’s a bit cliche, if you ask me, poor soul in a search of answers.

But there are many other, very interesting and not so obvious characters in the book. It’s a fiction book and it’s got quite prestigious awards – both Nebula and Hugo. There are not so many novels with both of them, you can find the list here.

If you start to like the story and setting  too much, you can always watch “A Serious Man” by Coen bothers, which gives completely different outlook on the Jewish situation in USA.

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I don’t like detective novels that much. After all the interesting investigation it boils down to simple murder (or simple theft). But sometimes some books are interesting on their own even in the genre, which is boring.

Stieg Larsson was a human rights defender. He especially didn’t like women and children abuse. So, there is a lot of those in the books. According to his wikipeida page he never written his books for money. In fact, he planned to write 10 novels just for fun of it. Unfortunately he died after finishing just three.

The main story of those 3 books are journalist investigations of different crimes, linked to a genius asocial girl – Lisbet Salander. A little bit of man-versus-government stuff, a little bit of protection-of-weak-against-tyranny-of-evil stuff. The books are quite new and deal with current, 21-century problems, which is always nice. We can recognize current events and current problems. It could be more interesting than classic literature, which could deal with social and political problems 100 years ago. He also gives some insides on Swedish politics, crime, police work and daily life.

Of course, sometimes you can guess that author was the protector of human rights. Especially he likes to protect a privacy of sexual relationships. Almost all characters in the books fuck a lot in different combinations  are quite promiscuous. And they become furiously enraged when somebody takes interest in that. The sentence ” One’s sexual preferences are NOBODY BUSINESS!!!!” screams dozens of times from the pages of the book. I may  agree with the point, but the enragement itself is also telling us something.

In any case I recommend to read those to everybody, interested in good literature.

Spoiler alert ON!

The “hacker” part is a bit naive from engineering prospective. The things Salander does could not be done by a hacker, sitting at home with their PC, no matter how technically good they are. Such things are done by people like her boss Armansky – with a lot of friends and informants in different organizations.

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