Duma key is one of the latest horror novels by Stephen King.  I liked old Stephen King of 80s –  Salem’s lot, Pet Cemetery and others are the best examples of smart honest horror novels.

Normally tt’s very easy to scary your by using typical strong images: just cut a limb from a child or a lover – and that’s it! Problem solved, everybody is scared and disgusted. Cheap and effective, like  Saw movies.

But sometimes a writer builds a sophisticated scene from normal day-to-day events and objects and makes you realize how scary it could become. That’s what I called “honest” in this context. Duma Key is definitely very honest and very scary.

Additionally there is a known fact – the best books are those, where the author describes himself and his own life. Stephen King, like the character of the book, suffered a body-crushing car accident and long recovery. And he’s a talented writer.

Injury, disability and pain combined with creativity could create monsters. That’s what this book is about. A typical down-to-earth businessmen Edgar Freemantle is in huge pain after a construction accident, which cost him his arm and some parts of his personality. But he receives a gift instead – he starts to paint beautiful pictures. However, it looks like the power was not for free and somebody is going to claim the price.

The book is long but it’s absolutely impossible to stop reading when you start.

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A couple of months ago I got a training in speed reading. Surprisingly It was quite hard (much harder then speed typing)

There are a number of courses available via the Internet. Most of them start with promising “incredible increase of the reading pace”. They talk about 2000-3000, sometimes even 10000 words per minute.

I’ve got one, called EyeQ Bin-n-Cue (I’m not sure this product even exist anymore).

After a couple of weeks I’ve reached  800 words per minute. And then stuck. Another 3 weeks and I was still at the same speed.  Something was wrong. Every time I’ve tried to read faster, I’ve started to skip words or the whole sentences and lost the meaning of the whole text.

Well, after some research in the same Internet I found that for average person 800 wpm is the actual limit of reading speed with comprehensing. Any course, which claims to give you more is not very honest.

Anyway, did it actually increase my reading speed in general? I think so, although not very sure. I don’t read much books anymore, but mostly listen to them in the car.

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The second part of the Horus Heresy – False Gods was written by another writer – Graham McNeill (honestly, I’ve never heard of him before). Secretary of Aggression of 40.000 years old Imperium of Man, Horus is joining the Dark Side and plotting against his boss – The Emperor of Man. The first time some mystic elements appear in otherwise pure technical world.

May be the Emperor is a little bit of god. May be the creations of Chaos are a little bit demons. Officially the government is pure materialistic.  But what could you do if mechanical devices start to register demonic activities and there are really measured consequences of miracles.

This book talks a bit more about normal mortal people, surrounding immortal Astartes and Primarchs. They also started to play their roles in the story. Althogh in case of any inconvenience they’re slaughtered by the warrior-beings without second thought.

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With regret I have to say that Richard Morgan is most probably not the Gibson of 21-st century. “Woken Furies”, the third book of Takeshi Kovacs series is following the downhill from “Altered Carbon” to “Broken Angels“. This time the ex-super soldier returns to his homeworld and tries to resolve some horrible conflicts there.

The third time the same elaborate sex-scenes with all the female heroines in the book, the same envoy-conditioning fights (with all male heroes of the book), the same science-fiction discoveries. Doesn’t work as good as the first time. May be Richard is even “one book writer”. Anyway, I’m switching to Warhammer completely.

PS. Funny thing, the actor, who was narrating this audiobook didn’t read the first one at all. This is from “Altered Carbon”:

‘So much for training.’ It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually hangs around justice facilities. ‘What did they teach you in the Envoys anyway, Kovacs?’    That was when I had it. On Harlan’s World, Kovacs is quite a common name. Everyone knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn’t. He was speaking a stretched form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing for that he was mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with a hard ‘k’ instead of the slavic ‘ch’.

Apparently the narrator of the third book is obviously not from the Harlan’s world, because he doesn’t know, how to read “Kovacs” correctly.

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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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