Bernard Jan's Blog - Posts Tagged "review"

One of the best trilogies I've ever read. Scary, gripping, moving. Highly impressing.

Unlike some novels I have been reading with a serious effort like I was plowing through a field devastated by drought, The Wool Trilogy by Hugh Howey is exactly the opposite. A perfectly balanced deep fall through a silo, which forces the reader to keep falling and falling, unable to stop himself and put the the books down until he hits the end.

Science fiction? Maybe. But only for the reason of being set in a Dystopian future.

The scariest thing was looking at a daringly realistic portrait of our society today. What happened to humanity?!? Plausibly unintentionally (or maybe intentionally after all), upsetting parallels of the real world are screaming into our faces like a wake-up call. If we do not do something to light up the flames of humanity and share with our loved ones and the stranger on the street, we will all end up in our present-day versions of silos eventually to be suffocated and poisoned, reduced to mere things, numbers.

Howey gave us a masterpiece. But he has also shown us the safe path to our future. This is the gift we should cherish, even if we chose not to believe that silos could actually happen.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Ghost Flight by Bear Grylls

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ever heard of Bear Grylls? I truly hope so, because this former soldier in the British Special Forces, the youngest ever Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association and an honorary Colonel to the Royal Marine Commandos is also an adventurer, writer and television presenter. His Facebook bio says that “Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventure.”

I first heard about Bear Grylls seven years ago when I was on my vacation visiting my friends in Sweden and we watched his Ultimate Survival (also known as Born Survivor/Man vs. Wild) on the Discovery Channel. Needless to say that Bear Grylls captured my attention on the spot, that I wanted to see more of him, making me check for him online immediately after returning home to Croatia.

I loved the concept of his show in which he was left stranded with his crew in an unfamiliar wilderness – rainforests, glaciers, deserts, islands, to name just a few – with only one goal: to survive and find his way back to civilization.

The similar pattern follows his entertaining and exciting thriller Ghost Flight. Packed with action, adventure, beautiful landscapes of the remote Amazon jungle where lies hidden a mysterious WWII warplane, Ghost Flight guarantees to keep even the most demanding fans of this genre glued to its pages. It is so easy to picture Bear Grylls, an ex-soldier and a survivor, as an ex-soldier Will Jaeger, also a leader of a team of former elite warriors in their quest to uncover the mystery of the hidden warplane and the secret of Nazi evil forces (Wir sind die Zukunft) that lie buried in it.

I am a sucker for WWII novels and I am a sucker for Amazon rainforest. When those two are combined, you have an explosive reading before you. You are drinking up a cocktail made of ghosts from not so recent past, to majority of people almost forgotten, but the ghosts which are patiently waiting for their moment of the rise of the new Reich, and a pristine nature beaming with both beautiful and deadly life.

Ghost Flight is a successful debut novel with interesting and well-developed characters, full of action, twists and turns and gripping moments. It is also a very detailed novel which probably might not help us in a fight against the rise of a new Reich if it comes to it, but it could very well serve us as a survival guide in a primeval rainforest if we ever find ourselves in our personal mission under the canopy of magnificent trees where neither evil Nazis nor modern-day humans got to leave their destructive imprint.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Girl of Millennium

The girl with the dragon tattoo. The girl who played with fire. The girl who kicked the hornet's nest.

And the girl in the spider's web.

I love the Millennium series. I love this brutal, raw, dark and violent Swedish saga, cold and ruthless as the Swedish weather. And I love that this story continues.

Even though the first opening pages of The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz stroke me as slow and a bit lulling in building the plot, soon new pages are turned and stick to your fingers like frost sticks to the frozen windows in December Stockholm. The Girl in the Spider's Web sets with vigor and thrill into an action worthy of its literary predecessors, continuing Stieg Larsson's series with dignity and justified trust. Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander continue living, and that is what's most important.

I didn't pick this book by chance to read it during my vacation in Sweden, although I had a few more other books in store to chose from. I took The Girl in the Spider's Web on a flight with me and read it until I reached my final destination; as well as on my way back via Copenhagen and Frankfurt to Zagreb. However, while staying in Växjö I chose to live my own personal Swedish story, a story of hundreds of unwritten pages no one will be able to read but me.

As for Lisbeth and Mikael, they kept me company for ten more days upon my return, making that intoxicating feeling of Sweden linger linger linger and last throughout my whole conscious being.

I look forward to our reunion. We are alive and Sweden is ready and waiting for us.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Once in a while you come upon a book that throws you completely unguarded off your feet. When you buy a book you usually have an idea what to expect to find between the covers and you prepare yourself for a pleasurable journey into a new world unknown. But when you get a free copy of an e-book as a runner up for the review giveaway contest, you do not know much about it, or whom you are going to deal with and spend your Kindle-time with during the next few days or weeks.

Mara Winkle is the heroine of Eliot Peper's Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0. She is a strong female character caught in the bizarre love-business triangle between her boyfriend Craig and her best friend James. Craig and James are not too much fond of each other, which makes Mara's life even more colorful and exciting, pushing her every now and then to express her strong character in both decision-and-relationship making. Beside being strong headed and ready to cut off people seemingly without a second thought or regret, Mara is passionate about mountain biking and especially rock climbing. "Climbing was the most intellectually intense sport Mara had experienced. She had heard it described as physical chess. It was a kind of dynamic athletic geometry and there was a good reason bouldering routes were called problems. Every move was an exercise in balance, a special mixture of intuition and calculation." However, she is not so enthusiastic about studying at the University of Colorado, Boulder, especially when her best friend James asks her to partner with him to start a new software company Mozaik Industries.

This is a decision that changes both James' and Mara's lives. In their new partnership, James focuses himself on "what he does best, technical development to make Mozaik as awesome as it can possibly be" while Mara becomes "the buffer between him and all the rest of the random shit that needs doing" (Peper describes them as sales, investment, legal, and marketing). In short, they split their roles in doing what they are both best at: "programming for James, juggling for Mara." How this decision affects Craig we won't mention here, so as not to reveal too much and thus spoil the thrill of reading!

This is the moment when all the fun starts in Uncommon Stock, placing this novel among the ranks of fast-paced tech startup thrillers. For new entrepreneurs and enthusiasts Uncommon Stock may serve as a greatly informative and educational reading full of useful advice, but also as the warning on the cruel facts of starting your own business. "Founding a company is a fuck-ton of work. The sausage factory reality is far from the glitzy Silicon Valley mythology. It's a grinding slog that can be enormously satisfying and rewarding, but it's also painful, frustrating, and soul-crushing. If you're going to make it you'll have to sink blood, sweat, and tears into the process. And if you're going to make that kind of a commitment, you've got to truly believe in what you're doing. You've got to be such a zealot that other people are magnetically attracted to you and what you're working on. You've got to dream."

Eliot Peper masterfully leads us through a painful startup process, showing us all the traps and hardships we face along the way. No price is too high, every mistake is paid dearly. Before we realize it, we have already accumulated basic knowledge of the craft, ending up much smarter than we were before starting reading this exciting, adventurous, wise and gripping novel of a slightly unusual title.

In between twists and turns, Eliot Peper amazes us with beautifully intelligent descriptions and ingenious eye for a detail. "They people-watched along the way, relishing the familiar oddities of Boulder's unique human condition. Cyclists were out in force. Mara wondered why it was considered cool to wear jerseys plastered with tacky Fortune 500 branding. A shirtless homeless man was loudly touting the spiritual virtues of vegetarianism and handing out handwritten flyers on the evils of meat from a street corner." "The sky was mostly clear with a thin patina of smog and the sun shone down on an endless grid of concrete, steel, asphalt, and cars. An occasional palm tree or soccer field broke up the urban mélange." "Trees occupied a different dimension than humans. Movement was never an option. They were literally rooted in place and experienced the world through a permanently local lens. Seeds blew off in the wind to sprout new trees in places the parents would never see. And entire generations lived in one area."

Or, "The snakes in her stomach had distilled into a cocktail of righteous anger and frustration."

Beautiful!

I don't shun admitting: Eliot Peper bought me with his descriptions, if not only with his page-turning plot. Uncommon Stock is a high-quality intelligent and intriguing writing of a skillful and undoubtedly talented author whose success and a true value cannot be measured only by a number of sold copies, but also by a commitment and professionalism of this indie writer invested into creating the best end-product for his readers, the only ones that matter to him.

I wouldn't be surprised if it also helps a few startup businesses in the process with his motivational and inspirational dialogues, situations and advices, because, as the author himself says in the novel, "there is something ephemeral but infinitely satisfying about starting something yourself."

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

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Black Canyon by Jeremy Bates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am so glad that Black Canyon is the first work by Jeremy Bates I've read. To be honest, since I have so many books waiting in line to be read – quite a pile on my table and in my Kindle, I wasn't planning on reviewing it at first. I wanted to save time and move on onto another book as soon as possible. But already in the first ten pages of this 2015 dark novella I knew this won't be the case, even if I reflect on it with just a few words.

It is a rarity to have an opportunity to read about the pre-teen young monster, who will grow into a new American psycho and a serial killer, from his own perspective. When a child (12-year-old Brian Garrett) tells you about the weekend camping with his parents in the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, you don't expect anything but the idyllic trip to the amazing and wild nature. And this is what you get. But coated with a few gory moments of surprise, very well timed twists, murders and true horror. The freakiest thing is the lightness with which Brian accepts his dark nature already at this early age, his calculated, heartless and almost mathematically precise survival instinct.

This is a quick-paced read about the seemingly normal but in truth one bad-vibed family which can be easily spotted and recognized too often around us, told in a simple and capturing narrative voice.

Black Canyon, which I also like to fondly call The Mean Innocence and The Growing of American Psycho, lingers in my mind with the aftertaste mixture of a novella and the movie Stand by Me and The River Wild movie, which I both quite liked, while Jeremy Bates, as an author, seriously competes to become one of my new darlings.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies by Dario Cannizzaro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dario Cannizzaro is a 35-year-old writer from Naples who managed to mislead me with the title of his collected stories Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies and a completely black cover of his book outlined with red images of a syringe, stars, planet Saturn, a cross, a profile of a woman, a naked female body, a hand digging out its way through earth, a spaceship, a pierced heart, and a cloud dialogue with xxx in it. My mind was sidetracked into believing that I will be reading gory, horror stories of aliens, zombies, death celebrated and life taken, so I embraced myself for this dark and short journey.

I was so wrong. And I wouldn't put a blame for it on Dario Cannizzaro for choosing this title and Vico for “lending his design talent” for this book cover. Actually, now when I reflect on everything that I've read in nine stories on 104 pages (Preface, Thank you and Bio & Contacts pages included), they are rather logical and smartly chosen. Only my dark and twisted mind has been looking forward to the rivers of blood and aliens and zombies hunting down the remaining surviving specimens of mankind!

Cannizzaro's stories are indeed stories about life, death, alien and zombies. They are stories about everyday life as we know it, life as it could be if things went slightly different (e.g. zombies walking among us, Pope admitting that aliens are gods we have been worshiping since the dawn of mankind), life and death that continue its perpetual circle despite the fact that aliens are watching us and we don't care much about it after the first initial shock of finding the truth that is out there, or that zombies are our new neighbors even though we do not see or hear them so we carry on with our daily life, normal as it can be under the new circumstances.

Cannizzaro's stories are also stories about love, passion and sex. In some we can so vividly taste the smells, fragrances and the bloodstream of Italy, in others we are faced with our own basic instincts, aspirations, cravings, hopes, dreams and memories. Some of them are not even two pages long, while others are a more complex and maybe even more demanding reading. All of them, though, are carefully written with Cannizzaro's beautiful style and meticulously chosen words and sentences.

Three of my favorite stories are Yet Another Zombie Apocalypse, The Best Place to Plan a Mass Shooting and The Announcement. If that describes me as an aspiring and sometimes misunderstood author who is scared shitless of zombies and hopes for aliens to come to his rescue, so be it. This is who I am. But these stories carry the weight of a deeper truth and hypothetical and yet not-so-alien reality, if we only allow ourselves to think outside the box we have been put and locked into.

There is one particular story I wanted to mention at the end and I am sure there is a good reason why the author saved it to end his first book of collected stories with it as well. Impurita is the most complex and in-depth story of them all, but what truly separates it and places it on a special pedestal is the beauty and love with which it is written, a strong and deep emotion and the poetry in every sentence through which it speaks to us. Would calling it a literary masterpiece be an exaggeration? I hope you will be able to tell me that after you read it.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel by Lucas Carlson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel is a new ingenious creation by Lucas Carlson, a fiction and non-fiction author and entrepreneur, who already got my attention and won me over with his first thrilling startup novel The Term Sheet.

Big Data is a maddening ride through our near future where artificial intelligence is incorporated in our lives to the point that people rely on its services more than on their natural instincts, reasoning and decision making. It serves us, it helps us, it cures us, and then it kills us...

This is exactly what happens when Luna Valencia's most-advanced supercomputer in history Ancien starts to refine and improve on its own code which can “solve many problems in the world of artificial intelligence without human assistance, interpretation, or intervention.” It is the holy grail in the world of computers, but it also is the weapon for mass murder in the world of humans.

Luna Valencia's own baby becomes her executor when it falls into the hands of Doug Kensington and Thor Massino, two ill-intentioned ambitious and unscrupulous people. There is no safe place for her or anyone, because suddenly “people are dying. Everybody. Everywhere. People are dying faster all over—in every region of the world—at a higher rate.”

On her quest to uncover the truth about mysterious deaths, Luna not only faces losing her company but is hunted and chased into walking the path covered with bodies and smeared with blood, both of the innocent and guilty ones. Even losing her own life is something she has to deal with in order to stop computers from killing people. The whole world is in grave danger.

In “a weird mash-up” of computers and people, “nobody was deciding who would die. Nor was anyone determining how these people would die. The computer figured out those parts on its own. But (...) it was human beings who created the intention to kill. Not the computer. The one thing nobody seemed to be able to synthesize with computers was the creative intention. The spark of why. More and more, any discrete task could be better accomplished by computers than by humans. But the intention behind the task, the creative force. That was still as mysterious and intractable as the soul.”

Lucas Carlson in this extremely exciting novel also doesn't lose a poetic expression during this fast and crazy artificial intelligence ride for life and death. He barely gives us a moment or two to catch our breath before we are thrown into another life-threatening situation in which someone is programmed to die. The thin line between our near future and actual reality becomes even thinner when we come to realize that technology already today is infused in so many aspects of our lives. We submit ourselves to it, we reap its fruits and we think we control it. Do we, indeed?

Alarm bells are ringing through all 400 pages of Big Data with the warning. We better snap out of our indifference and, as the author says in his afterword, ask ourselves, “how do we prevent bad people from getting their hands on software that could potentially destroy us? The world’s next generation of mega-weapons will be software. Code in machines. Machines that drive our cars, fly our planes, control our homes, run our hospitals, and do something new for us every day. (…) It is time that we, as a global human race, invent and adopt systems of technological checks and balances. Software is infinitely easier to infiltrate and steal than atomic bombs. And if we sit back and do nothing—if we just throw our hands up and ignore the problem—we will have to live with the consequences. (…) And what’s at stake is the very survival of the human race.”

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Big Data: A Startup Thriller NovelLucas Carlson

Without An Angel by Mitchell Bogatz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Broken heart can cut like a knife, tear up your world and torture your body and mind as you drift between two realities. The old one you know, love and miss every minute of your life, and the new one in which you feel lost, abandoned and cannot accept it as your new life order.

Mitchell Bogatz wrote his poetry book titled Without An Angel during the hardest year of his young life, when he fell in love with an unavailable woman. His raw and beautiful poetry, devoid of any pathos, is filled with unrestrained lust and almost desperate yearning to be loved, cherished, needed and appreciated.

While going through his short, vivid poems and experiencing his emotional and somehow so familiar verses, we drink straight from the fountain of the author's personal, intimate life. We are reminded of our own passions, of our own struggle to get back on our feet and SURVIVE on the ruins of forbidden love, of our own longing to quit, just let go, disappear and be forgotten: Sometimes I wonder if I’d be happier on a beach somewhere, nothing in my pockets, with no one waiting for me to come home.

If you like poetry, it would be a shame to miss this powerful and honest collection of poems. Even if you are not too big a fan of the verse, do yourself a favor and spend some time with Bogatz's writing. His suffering and pain might surprise you with hope and strength it gives you when you are faced with going through life without your angel, or, even better, encourage you to swing your wings to go out and find it.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Without An Angel

Finders Keepers by Stephen King

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Upon reaching page 240 of Finders Keepers by Stephen King a thought stroke me. King cannot fail. What are the odds for that? Brilliant! This thought lingered and stayed with me until the very end of the book.

Finders Keepers, the second book in Bill Hodges Trilogy is a constant page-turner. A story about a vengeful reader obsessed with a retired writer spreads through 370 pages like fast and untamable fire. It burns its way to our hearts, brings us strong characters, lots of excitement and the fantastic plot! Again King has a surgically precise eye for the detail, which is a characteristic of his writing I probably like and admire most.

Brilliant! Five stars without much thinking!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Finders Keepers

Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It was love at the first read. It started with Watchers twenty-three years ago and lasted more than seventy books up to this date.

Dean Koontz, like very few authors, managed to keep me expectant, eager, thrilled and enthusiastic about his books. His latest novel Ashley Bell is no exception either. What's more and to be honest, despite being an author myself, I am now lacking words to describe how I really feel about Ashley Bell.

Ashley Bell is a complex novel of more than 700 pages about a remarkable young woman Bibi Blair who is determined to do the impossible and: 1) fight, beat, outsmart and escape death, and 2) find and save someone named Ashley Bell. Both seems rather impossible and destined to failure. But not for Dean Koontz and not for Bibi Blair.

Ashley Bell is a poetic, dark, psychological thriller in which the master of suspense and mystery creates a parallel world with the ease of The Maker. Koontz daringly plays the literary God and takes us into parallel worlds created by his incredible imagination, convincing us to believe and live the impossible. Dean Koontz has already taught as that nothing in his books is impossible, that “impossible” universes, creatures and situations are possible, we only have to imagine them.

His prose is a kaleidoscope of the most vivid colors and darkest shadows. It is a playground sanded with rarely seen scenes of violence and murders, chilled-to-the-bones moments and sentences poetically beautiful as sunsets. Our task is to imagine and bring them into life.

“If we were imagined into existence with a universe of wonders, then the power to form the future with our imagination must be in our bloodline.” – Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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