Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

I just turned the last page. Wow. I really enjoyed the book for all the great ideas it contains. Snow Crash was written between 1988 and 1992, when the Internet and the world wide web were nothing like what they have become. Computer viruses were already a fact of life on the net, even the first several worms had gone around. Only the most paranoid and poorly informed people thought that a computer virus could infect a human being and we, hackers who knew better, used to laugh at them. This book turns things around and creates an interesting framework to support the speculation that it could very well be possible that such viruses would exist. Drugs, hackers, virtual worlds, skateboards, linguistics, organized crime, organized religion, geeks, and bionic dogs all play some kind of part in Snow Crash and make it a fun, exciting read.

All that said, I tried to start reading this book about three or four times until it would finally take. The first several pages seemed too focused on the hip action "glitz" and "glamour" and that turned me off for quite a while. To be honest, I didn't care much about the Mafia controlling pizza delivery stuff, I wanted good sci-fi from the get go. Since the story wasn't throwing this grappling hook on me early enough, I ended up losing interest and putting down Snow Crash after a few starts. When I decided to be more perseverant, I finally found what I was looking for and got really into it. My problem with this book, which is admittedly small, was the alternation of crazy, leave-you-breathless action in the style of The Matrix, with the scientific, speculative material. It felt to me like the two aspects of the story couldn't co-exist in harmony, that they had to take mutually exclusive access to the reader's attention. There are points in the story where they do go hand in hand, but most often, that doesn't happen. From my perspective, the ending is also a weakness: it is a bit abrupt, as if the author had suddenly decided he'd had enough of the story.

I might still read this again someday to recap on all the ideas of the integration of reality and virtual worlds (the idea of the gargoyles is what people are trying to achieve with augmented reality today), of hacking in the Metaverse (which sounds very much like Second Life with better HCI than what we currently have), and of intersection of linguistics and cognition. This book is so rich in ideas that it deserves a "companion" kind of summary to remind you of all the good stuff it proposes when you're done learning about the fate of the characters. (In the absence of the real companion, Wikipedia's entry for Snow Crash is a very good alternative.)

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson

After I read Neuromancer, somewhere in the late 80s, I started stocking up on William Gibson books. The insanely complex, well-constructed world of Neuromancer and its fast paced geeky action had left a big impression on me, but, for some strange reason, I never got around to reading the books that I collected. In part, I think it was because Gibson's style is to hit the ground running and hope that you'll catch up with him somehow. He throws you into the story and it is up to you to figure out what his terminology means and what the context of the story is. It's a literary device that worked mysteriously well in Neuromancer, but one with which it took me a while to get comfortable. Even though I had enjoyed the ride immensely, it seemed that I was hesitant to do it again. Then again, there was also a strange feeling that I had read someone magnum opus and reading something else by the author smacked of a heresy of some king.

Pattern Recognition was plucked out of a bargain bin somewhere and sat in my shelf for several years until I decided to take the plunge. When I started to read it, I had a nearly physiological reaction to the writing style that I had enjoyed so much the first time. My heart would start racing as I felt excited to be reading Gibson again. Like the character in this story, who recited a mantra to get over moments of irrational reaction to something seemingly common place, I almost started saying "he took a duck in the face..." under my breath. I got head first into the story set in present day and couldn't wait to finish.

A mysterious series of short film segments, which is distributed on the web by a social network, is the heart of the story. Cayce Pollard, a woman with a talent to predict how products and logos are accepted by the market, is a enthusiast of these films, a "footage head". Spurred by her money hungry magnate, Hubertus Bigend, Cayce sets out to investigate who creates the footage and why. In the process, she visits London, Tokyo, and Moskow, attempting to unveil a sequence of small mysteries that leave the reader guessing at the turn of every page. The action is fast and rife with intrigue. The writing is peppered with socio-cultural evaluation and criticism. Ultimately, this is a fun book that sometimes feel like thrill ride and sometimes slows down to let you breathe and to reason out the pieces of the puzzle you are fed. Gibson is still the man.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John Le Carré

I had first tried to read this when I was about 15, at the height of my infatuation with James Bond stories. I tried and failed never getting past page 50. Even though I was reading Ian Fleming at the time, Le Carré was too different to seem good. As time went on, I watched a few movies based on his books and slowly I started to come to terms with the fact that I didn't have what it took to appreciate his stories earlier in my life.

After watching the first four MI-5 series (not to mention putting another 25+ years of age on), I thought it was time to retry this book, which is heralded as one of the best spy stories ever. This time, I did manage to appreciate the book very much and to enjoy the story.

It's all cold war, U.S.A., Soviet Union, East and West Germany. The context seems very real, very historic, and perhaps for this reason, exciting. The spies are human beings, flawed and mortal. The intrigue is deep. The plot twists and turns, but doesn't leave you behind.

The premise revolves around Alec Leamas, a British spy who runs an information network in East Germany and who lost one of his most important assets. Alec gets involved in a mission to assassinate the man who would have killed his informant. Just as he is assigned this task, though, his life seems to collapse all around him. He becomes destitute and takes to drinking. Things seems not ready to go anywhere in the story, but that façade crumbles page by page and the reader learns that the plot continues to evolve toward an exciting sequence of events. I enjoyed this a lot and will be reading more from Le Carré soon.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling

What else could I say that someone else would not have said at this point? It is Potter, it is good, and it is final. I am sad that it ends here, but I'm raising my glass to this brilliant author: To your great accomplishments, to the many hours of bewilderment and emotion you gave the world, and to your future works. I do hope you continue to write, by the way, even if it is not in the same universe anymore!

Into a Dark Realm, by Raymond E. Feist

Would it be fair to say: more of the same? You can always rely on Feist to put together a fun story, but there's a feeling of repetition here. For Pug fans like me, this is a bit of treat, but it is nothing like Magician. Characters get trained (get experience points?), go on a quest, get in trouble, get out of trouble, save someone. What is a bit interesting is the use of different "realms" of reality superimposed on each other in the story. Some of the characters band together to investigate a different realm to discover what lies behind a message that Pug from the future sent to Pug of the present. I'll keep on reading this "saga" because, as fluff goes, it is hard to get much better than this, but I don't have great expectations at this point.

Porno Politica: paixoes e taras na vida brasileira, by Arnaldo Jabor

Flight of the Nighthawks, by Raymond E. Feist

Cosm, by Gregory Benford

I very much wanted to like this book, but it really fell short of my expectations. In a way it is similar to the author's "Timescape", in which you find a central character who is an academic about to stumble upon some major breakthrough in physics. In Cosm, this character is a female black physicist - she runs an experiment in a particle accelerator and discovers that as a result an artifact was created. It could be either an entire universe contained in a basketball size sphere or it may be a window, a wormhole connection to this other universe. (You'll have to read the book to find out which.)

My main expectation was that the book was going to be hard science fiction, as "Timescape". There some of it in there, but not enough to keep me excited. Benford spent a great effort exploring the hardships the main character would face which would have been motivated by race and gender issues. His effort is laudable, but not his results. The voice he found for this character rings very plastic, very cookie cutter, and somewhat untrue. His character's search for love, for style, for professional recognition takes center stage and dominates the text rather than create a human background for a story of scientific speculation.

Treason, by Orson Scott Card

A true gem. This was the second novel published by Card, apparently under the title "A Planet Called Treason" in 1979. Although categorized as science fiction, the novel barely touches on science, but uses some science as the backdrop for the discussion of ethical and sociological issues. In that sense, it reminded me much of Asimov's writings from the original "Foundation Trilogy" time period, but with even softer science. If I were forced to pigeonhole this, I might call it space-opera, but of the highest caliber.

The story is told in first person by Lanik Mueller, heir of the Family's estate, in a feudal society in planet Treason. The Mueller, together with a number of other clans, were exiled by the Republic to this iron-poor planet, where a bitter competition takes place to build the first spaceship and receive untold riches as reward. The clans fight for survival and try to outdo each other in producing goods that can be sold to the Republic's Ambassadors in exchange for iron.

The Mueller are known for their super-human healing powers, but Lanik takes it a step beyond being a "radical regenerative". The individuals afflicted with this malady grow excess organs and body parts and are condemned to live isolated from their community in "pens". Surgeons harvest these excess limbs and organs to sell to their Ambassador. Being cast out of his clan, Lanik roams planet Treason, learning about life in the other clan's provinces and about their particular talents. The journey serves to teach Lanik much more than just what his world is like and exposes to self-discovery opportunities.

The story is incredibly well paced and rife with interesting philosophical questions. It's an engrossing book that is hard to put down and which has immediately surfaced to my top list of the best works of sci-fi ever. Although it can be said that this novel only begins to explore themes that have reappeared in depth in Card's most well-known novels, it is fresh, honest, and good hearted. Card's latest novels seem quite out of line with respect to how he started to the point where I think he's losing his touch. I particularly dislike his lack of effort in getting things right when he writes about subjects he doesn't know well. He shows that research is either not one of his talents or something he doesn't care about and ends up sounding nearly offensive. My favorite of his blunders appears in Shadow of the Giant: "Es tu feliz em ter irminha?", a sentence in Portuguese that would have been better constructed by any automatic translator found on the world wide web.

Fuggedaboudit, we're talking about Treason here, and this novel really rocks (an unintentional pun that can only be understood in the context of the story).

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, by Brian Wansink

This is more of a scientific book than a diet book, although for marketing purposes it seems to try to sell itself as the latter. I really enjoyed the descriptions of all the studies and experiments the author has done on how we determine that we have had enough to eat, our perception of the caloric content of our food, etc. It's fascinating to see evidence that indicates that we are not equipped to stop ourselves before we overeat. The message is a bit grim, in that sense, but on the positive side, it seems that knowing how we mindlessly consume more than we need can help us reverse the trend and apply to lose extra weight. Science geeks in the readership would probably rather read Wansink's scientific papers instead of this book, but in any case, this is a great starting point for one not well-versed in this area of expertise.

Equus, by Peter Shaffer

It's been quite a few years since I saw this in the theater, as a student production at William and Mary. At that point in time, theater didn't really mean much to me. It was never the kind of experience that did anything more than simply entertain me. Equus changed all that - it was a powerful script with the kind of production that leaves a lot for the viewer's imagination to fill in. I found the play extremely moving and to some extent it shocked me out of my wits by the depth of the ideas it discussed.

In the last 10 years, I often thought about this play. The production I saw was so well staged that the scenes continue to haunt me to this day. I can close my eyes and see the sequence of events unfolding; I can hear the ominous humming of the horses that announces something big is about to happen. Then, Equus came back to newspaper headlines when Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor who plays Harry Potter in the movies, signed on to appear in a new production. What everyone was talking about was the fact that the character he plays appears stark naked. (Take that, Dumbledore!) There was little mention to how powerful this play is.

So, in order to revisit this amazing text, I picked up a paperback and read it as fast as I could manage. I discovered that most of what I saw in the theater was guided by careful instructions in the text. What I saw was very much like what it was meant to be: a shocking peek into the mind of a disturbed young man, who had just pierced the eyes of a number of horses, through a series of psychoanalysis sessions. The story discusses how misguided religious practices can affect the upbringing of children, how we often engage in hypocrisy when we define what normal is, how close minded we can be and how this hurts the development of our children. Powerful stuff. Read it and think about it; it's worth every second you spend with it. Best of all, though, is see it on stage first!

El Principe de la Niebla, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

As I traveled around Europe in 2006, I kept finding this 1992 book in Spanish in bookstores inside and outside airports. It was displayed prominently in Spain, as it was to be expected, but also in Italy and in Germany. I remember holding it in my hands at the Munich airport and thinking whether I could read it in its original language or if I should look for a translation. As soon as I managed to get an Internet connection, I hit Amazon.com to check if there was a translation to English available. No luck. I really wanted to read more by the author of the incredible The Shadow of the Wind (TSOTW), but I thought that if I could only find these books in Spanish, I wouldn't be able to read them. I am a native Portuguese speaker who manages to have conversation with Spanish speakers efforlessly without ever having formally studied their language. With a little bit of effort, I can understand 95% of written Spanish, but could I read a full novel? What if the audience for this novel was the young-adult public? Back at home in the US, I decided it was worth a try, so I bought the new edition from Amazon.com and threw myself into it, while keeping a little dictionary always at arms length.

The effort was highly rewarded. To give you an idea of how engrossing I found the book, last night I was within about 100 pages of the end, just about where mysteries are unfolding and the reader is being thrown into the climax. I put it down after 20 pages and went to sleep, but 5 hours later, I came to and couldn't stop thinking about the story. So, I just had to give up trying to go back to sleep and get up at 3:30am to finish it.

The storytelling is true to Zafon's skills even if this was his first published novel. That means, it is magical, exciting, and inherently lyric. It's marketed for the young-adult audience, but I believe that its appeal goes far beyond this group.

The story talks about the Carver family, who in the midst of WWII, relocates from the big city to a beach town. The reader is never told in which country this all happens, but all the character names are in English, so perhaps one can draw conclusions from this fact, even if these conclusions don't really matter for the understanding or the appreciation of the plot. The Carvers end up in a mysterious house, which was previously inhabited by a trajedy stricken family. Max, the 13-year old son, and his two sisters, are quickly engulfed by a stream of supernatural events. Voices come out of the closet to haunt his little sister Irina, who had brought home a sinister cat found wandering the train station. Strange dreams get his older sister Alicia uttely spooked. And Max, in his turn, finds a bizarre garden of statues behind the house, where its stone inhabitants seem to change shape and appear rearranged as time goes on. Behind all this, a Faustian tale awaits to shake up the family and to catapult Max and Alicia in a struggle for their lives. I highly recommend this book and hope that it will end up being translated to different languages as was TSOTW.

Reading this book, one can't fail to see parallels that link it to TSOTW. The mysterious doctor Cain and the burned man in TSOTW seem to have in common their aura of supernatural. I imagine that this has served as a warm-up of sorts where Zafon learned to flex the muscles he put to use to create his masterpiece.

Les Halles Cookbook, by Anthony Bourdain

Some people like Julia Child and enjoy reading her cookbooks or watching recording of her shows. I do. As much as I appreciate the informative aspect of her material, though, it has no rock'n'roll appeal. And I love rock'n'roll. And punk rock, too. So, needless to say, with this personality type I am much more inclined to like Anthony Bourdain much, much better than Julia.

Even though he says this is not a cookbook, I think you can cook very successfully from it. Take the recipe (or rather, the method) for making stock and demi-glace, for instance. Even though it doesn't give you that classic breakdown of ingredients and quantities in excruciating detail, it tells you precisely what you have to do. In any case, who really follows all the details in recipes religiously to the last pinch of salt? If you know people who do, make sure to ask them how much salt there should be in a pinch! Can they tell you how many grams so that we can all measure what we add in our attempts to recreate their recipes? Come on, you know you're going to fudge recipes to give them your personal imprint, so why stress?

With that said, I should also state that there are "proper" recipes in the book to satisfy the readers who want minutiae and step-by-step directions (kind of). But best of all, this is was written by Tony, so you get to read about his perspective on cooking, to learn something new, and above all you have the sarcasm, the wit, the intelligence that are characteristic of his writings. I'll be making many of these recipes, but I'll also read the book cover to cover because Tony is funny as hell and he knows his stuff inside and out.

What Einstein Told His Cook, by Robert Wolke

Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain

Redemption, by Carol Berg

# Revelation, by Carol Berg

Transformation, by Carol Berg

Lyra's Oxford, by Philip Pullman

Sweet little book, or rather, short story. It happens in the alternate Oxford universe, which we see in His Dark Materials, and features Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon. There are a few "goodies" in the book, such as a map of Lyra's Oxford, a postcard, and other little oddities. As Philip Pullman says in the preface, they may be connected to the story. Or they may not. Who is to know? Not me... This specific story talks about Lyra finding a witch's daemon flying around on its own. That starts a little quest where she tries to find out why this daemon is alone, so far away from the owner. There's some running around Oxford in the dark, what lays out a mysterious backdrop for a small story that whets the appetite. It's interesting and sweet, but I'm not sure I can say it is satisfying because it left me wanting more.

I have no idea what Pullman has been brewing, if anything, but I wouldn't mind a return to the HDM universe. In any case, a movie of The Golden Compass is in the works and is scheduled for release December 2007. I'm really looking forward to it! The movie's web site (http://goldencompassmovie.com) has some beautiful shots, but nothing that displays daemons.

Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card

To Reign in Hell, by Steven Brust

I thought this book had a lot of potential when I first looked at it. It is a fictionalized form of what Judeo-Christian scripture says about the creation of the world, of angels, and of mankind. Since this kind of material is thrown around after having been removed from canonical texts, it has an aura of myth that I thought would be interesting to explore in a work of fiction. Well, this book wasn't exactly a good opportunity for that.

The cast of characters is large and it became very hard to deal with all the names of angels and archangels after 30 pages. Michael, Samael, Raphkiel, Raziel, Belial, Beelzebub, Yaveh, Lilith, and a dozen others. I couldn't really say that characters were well developed. With so many similar names and little more than a few sentences to create a background for each character, it was hard to assimilate who they were individually and it was hard to develop any connection to them. For the short book this is, it was surprisingly hard to wade through and I attribute this to the fact that I never really cared much about what happened. This doesn't mean the story is uninteresting. It is creative (even if blasphemous) and it could have been a good read, perhaps even a great read, if the writing had been more careful.

How to Travel with a Salmon, by Umberto Eco

This is a great collection of essays that connects the amazing author of "Foulcault's Pendulum" with a more human persona. Well, by more human I mean that it shows his great sense of humour (sarcastic, sardonic, cynic), not that it sheds the high level thoughtfulness and intellectual point of view that defines Eco as a person. The first essay, the one about the salmon is killer. The last line, however, really suffered in the translation from Italian to English: "I asked for a lawyer and they brought me an avocado." Most of the essays, with the exception of "Stars and Stripes" are short, sweet, and carry a depth that must be explored by the reader according to mood and taste. I'm sold; I'll be reading his other collections in the future.

Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, by J. K. Rowling

A barrel of fun. Although I found the first three books a bit formulaic, Rowling's style evolved in as the series went on, as the subject matter and the characters got more mature. I find it fascinating that if a young reader starts the series at Harry's age in the first book and reads one volume per year, he or she will find that each successive book will grow alongside the reader's level of maturity. The end is chaotic, fast, breath-taking and, heart-rending. I'm nervously and anxiously waiting for The Deathly Hallows, which I pre-ordered as soon as Amazon allowed me to.

Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown

Ah... why do I do this to myself? Oh, wait, I wanted something to read in the hustle and bustle of airplanes and airports during a long trip. Something that wouldn't require more than an infinitesimal amount of neurons to get through. It served that purpose, but not without considerable amount of pain. I had already had a taste of Brown in The Da Vinci Code, that nonsensical, plainly stupid fast action page-turner that hopes to incite "oohs" and "aahs" with every sentence. This is similar drivel. It's not fantasy, it's not sci-fi, it's not a thriller, it's not a mystery, it's not a feel-good love story, and it's aeons away from being literature. It's not even a book. It's more like a collection of used sheets of toilet paper tainted with half-lies, misconceptions, half-baked, and nonsensical and ideas. It is real garbage and assumes that the reader cannot reason enough to see its deep flaws.

The only ability that Brown has is the talent to confuse fact and fiction for the minds of the less knowledgeable or the incurious reader. Mr. Controversy scores big in this abysmally nonsensical extrapolation of a few facts fished out from other novels (perhaps The Illuminati Trilogy) and third-rate science fiction movies. Read it and weep; you've been warned. Mr. Langdon is more bullet proof than Indiana Jones, but without any charm and much less credibility. The "anti-matter" stuff is silly in a childlike way. Brown is like Marylin Manson in the intent to shock and to horrify. Manson at least scored one with me when he recorded Mechanical Animals (not to mention a few select songs from other albums). Brown, on the other hand... well, never again.

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge

This was a fun space-opera. The beginning was a bit unsettling and hard to read for me. The author leaves plenty of room for the reader to figure things out instead of explaining everything. As a consequence, you go through many,many pages not quite understanding things, but in the end the prize for your persistence and effort is worth it. There are some really great ideas such as the galaxy being divided into "zones of thought" each one with different laws of physics. The "lupine" race of aliens mentioned in the back cover of the paperback edition is brilliant. The ideas on the evolution of sentient species is also very interesting. I nearly put this down after about 30 pages or so, but as I went on reading, more and more of Vinge's universe made sense and I could appreciate it better. In scope, this is comparable to the great works of science fiction, even though it doesn't even qualify as soft sci-fi.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Cool story told in the first person perspective of an autistic 15 year old boy who discovers that a neighbor's dog has been killed with a garden fork. It's a fast and light read that amuses and entertains, while at the same time giving an insight into how an autistic person thinks. The style reminded me a little of Nick Hornby's, but I mean that as a big compliment. Both authors are British, so perhaps this is not a fact and just my perception.

While the story starts out with the boy trying to investigate the dog's murder, it later on becomes an investigation of the shortcomings and screw ups of the human race. I enjoyed this read quite a bit, but thought that it didn't live up to the hype that was created around it. I particularly enjoyed the boy's penchant for mathematics, which comes through in the story in a number of fun way (for a geek, that is). For instance, the chapters are numbered as a sequence of primes and the text contains the solutions to more than one interesting discrete math problem. I think, though, that this would appeal very much to those not mathematically inclined and feel safe to recommend it.

Pursuit, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

The comments in this review relate more directly to the original in Portuguese, which is entitled "Perseguido". It could have been a great book, but it's a major flop. The book is divided into three "stories", which really are subdivisions of one same plot. The first one is fantastic. It sets up the story of Jonas, or Isidoro, a man who shows up at a psychiatric clinic in Rio de Janeiro. There is seen by Dr. Artur Nesse, who seems much more troubled than his patient. In their first meeting, a "preliminary" session, the doctor builds the patient's case around the fact that while his legal name is Isidoro, he wants to be called Jonas. In the two following sessions, rather than trying to allow the patient to state the reason that drove him to seek medical help, the doctor insists on the identity issue. Little by little this strange pattern develops into something scary. The doctor starts feeling that the patient is trying to invade his life for some dark motive. Jonas/Isidoro starts out as a very mysterious character, the one who sparks the reader's excitement for the whole story.

In the second "story", Espinosa, the police chief investigator who headlines a series of Garcia-Roza's books, is brought by Dr. Nesse into the plot. The plot develops well enough along this story, but it is brought to an aggravating and disappointing sort of conclusion in the third story. It looks as if the author simply couldn't conceive of a good way to wrap up the book and just allowed it to come to an end where nothing is explained and where nothing seems to make much sense. The conclusion is heavy handed and is bound to anger the most generous reader. I recommend you avoid this book at all costs.

Exile's Return, by Raymond Feist

Awesome turn of the tide. This was by far the best book in the Conclave of Shadows trilogy and signals the reader that good old Feist can still deliver stories with the flair and the excitement of the original Riftwar Saga. What threw me off in the beginning was to discover that the point of view in this book belongs not to Tal, the protagonist of the first two volumes, but to Kaspar of Olasko. I really wasn't ready for that and in spite of a small feeling of disorientation in the beginning, this turned out to be an incredible read which further developed the storyline in a very clever and interesting way.

Kaspar starts out somewhere in the desert, in the continent of Novindus. After being abandoned there for his crimes, he undergoes some change of spirits as he lives for the day among ordinary, struggling peasants. He soon becomes a survivor, fighting for his subsistence. Until he comes in contact with a small bunch of brigands carrying a magical artifact. In the course of dealing with this finding, he crosses the continent visiting temples and seeking help from divinities. Eventually, the plot spreads out and puts him in the context of earlier, loved characters from Feist's universe. The artifact is the precursor of a greater evil to come to Midkemia and warrior and magic-users must team up to understand this threat and fight it.

The book ends without really ending and links directly into Feist's new Darkwar Saga. If there was any flaw with the Conclave of Shadows, I would say that it was its organization for the obvious sake of marketing. It seems that fantasy readers are used to trilogies and expect books to be packaged as such. The Conclave of Shadows appears to have been written in this volume for this reason alone. In all honesty, this is not a self-contained story and I understand that not every author aspires to be a Robert Jordan writing a story that spans a dozen volumes. As much as I enjoyed reading it, I would have enjoyed finding some kind of resolution when I turned the last page of Exile's Return. What I discovered was that the beat goes on and if I want to see what happens, I must go on reading. Fine by me, I enjoy Feist anyway, but a trilogy, this Conclave of Shadows really was not.

The King of Foxes, by Raymond Feist

Another really fun volume in the Conclave of Shadows trilogy. The narrative continues exactly where Talon of the Silver Hawk ends and the plot is a natural extension of what was started in the first volume. Court politics, swashbuckling, spying and sneaking, and a tiny bit of magic. Talon becomes Talwin Hawkins, agent of the Conclave within the court of the Duke of Olasko. His task, as much as his personal mission to seek revenge for the obliteration of the Orosini, his people, is to keep an eye on the Duke and on his ally Leso Varen, the necromancer. In the course of this mission, Tal confronts deep personal, ethical dilemmas of his own when following orders given by a scrupulous master. Quite a lot happens in this book which is impossible to mention without spoiling the reading, but this is a tale of one overcoming numerous hardships, of reaching the sky and then sinking to the depths of hell. It ends with a certain feeling of resolution, but also with the promise of much more excitement to come.

Talon of the Silver Hawk, by Raymond Feist

I'm still trying to come to terms with my thoughts on this book. First of all, even though this story is set in the same universe as Magician, it couldn't be more different. While one could say that different is good because it means the author is not repeating itself, I really wanted him to repeat himself. Why? Because what draws me to fantasy is magic, and Magician and the other books in the Riftwar Saga are hard to beat in that department. Some of Feist's great characters, like Pug and Nakor, are less than sidekicks in this story, what was somewhat hard to get over. (They make very few short appearances.)

Although the plots are very different, a subtle parallel exists between Magician and Talon: both are coming of age tales. While Magician talks about a boy who turns into a great wizard, Talon talks about a boy who turns into a great warrior.

Putting aside all my feeling of nostalgia for Feist's magic and looking at this book for what it is, it is hard to deny that it is fluff. Fun, yes definitely, but just fluff. (Unless the tide turns on the last two volumes in this trilogy.) The element of revenge in the story and the personal development of the main character smell a bit like Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, but only slightly. The story progresses nicely in the style you can expect of Feist: a good investment in character development and then good, fast-paced action. A lot of sword fighting and some military strategy in the end, but hardly any magic. And to end this review, I must ask: "What's up with realism in fantasy? I want MAGIC!"

Great Sky River, by Gregory Benford

To start this rant, what upset me the most in this Galactic Center series is the abrupt change in gears between volumes 2 and 3. What starts out as an interesting story about first contact (vols. 1 & 2) becomes a Mad Max kind of story of survival of the fittest in a hostile environment. The first half of the book, although mildly entertaining, is just that. There's is barely anything in the way of the science fiction that I came to appreciate Benford for writing. (Then again, I've heard somewhere that the Galactic Center Series is his space opera.)

The story progresses well, meaning that is has something in the way of good pace, but it is really a scenario that has been explored countless times in bad science fiction. (It smells a bit like movies in the vein of Damnation Alley and Mad Max, with the difference that it doesn't happen on Earth.) Even though the setting has aged and been overused, there are a few interesting ideas there, though only a few.

Humanity has scattered around the galaxy in order to survive the confrontation with the mechs, a mechano-electronical, artificially intelligent race. In the planet Snowglade, the survivors had settled in citadels where they did nothing but reuse known technology for all kinds of purposes. That lasted a while until the mechs destroyed most of the citadels putting humans on a constant race of evasion and survival. Humans incorporated technology to extend their senses, to communicate with one another, and even to move faster. There's a little bit of discussion about these technologies, and that kept me interested for a while. I liked the notion of implant-extended brains that store dead personalities recovered from flesh and blood humans before they physically die. I liked the notion of "intelligence" scattered around the components of a mechanical being in some kind of distributed processor or memory. These bits, however, are tiny nuggets of ingenuity in a vast expanse of cliches.

In spite of all this potential, though, the book is not at all what I hoped it would be. It is borderline silly at times (the barking manmech being the apex of bad taste) and has not even a smell of good science fiction. I may continue to read the series due to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies not to leave a story before it's concluded and only when I need brain dead reading material. Besides, from this rock bottom low, it can only get better. Or can it?

Robot Visions, by Isaac Asimov

This book is equal to I, Robot minus the "Susan Calvin framework" plus additional short stories plus some of Asimov's essays on robotics. You could infer from the previous statement that I volunteered an accurate equation, but it is only, at best, a rough approximation. The story "Catch That Rabbit" featured in I, Robot cannot be found in this volume. Sure, you can argue that this was all due to an editorial conspiracy to make you buy both books, but then again, remember that Robot Visions has also the essays!

It is definitely worthwhile to get your hands on this book at least for the stories that complement I, Robot, some of which include or are centered around the robopsychologist Susan Calvin. (I enjoyed very much "Feminine Intuition" and "Galley Slave".) "Someday" is a computer fable, not at all involving robotics, but still it's a sweet and interesting story. "The Bicentennial Man", which has been turned into a movie with Robin Williams that I have yet to watch, is just plainly wonderful and worth the entire book on its own. And have I mentioned the non-fiction essays yet? It's always nice to be able to read the Good Doctor's thoughts outside his science fiction.

I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov

This was probably very first sci-fi book I ever read, back when I was 13 or thereabouts. The time was ripe for a re-read and although I was not as wowed as I was back then, it still a really interesting and satisfying book. This is a collection of stories about the three law robots conceptualized by Asimov, how they were integrated in society, how they evolved, and how the three laws constrained their behavior. In absolute terms, this is great science fiction and only gets better in the Robot novels. If you want to read these short stories, read them in "I, Robot" and not in "Robot Visions" or in "Robot Dreams". Here they are part of the story of Susan Calvin, the first robopsychologist. In other books, you will miss this background thread that gives an interesting context to all short stories.

I, Lucifer, by Glen Duncan

If you're offended by blasphemy, stay away from this book. If your religious views are more open minded and you feel like a good challenge (even if infinitely more humorous than serious) to your beliefs is healthy, then have fun with this read. The storyline is not complex, but the tone is just insanely funny and ultimately, this is what made the book enjoyable to me.

The basic idea is that Lucifer is offered a second chance before the apocalypse hits us: if he can manage to live the last days in the body of a mortal with a semblance of virtue, then he will be redeemed. The book is narrated in first person by the prince of lies himself. The language is so foul and the subject matter often so profane that even the most derelict reader will at times feel blood rush to the cheeks. Still, I found this book worthwhile for the riotous fun and for the philosophical and the religious themes that permeate the story. Of course, I had to put aside all my religious sensitivities for a few days, while I read it or else I would probably have felt like I was condemning myself to an eternity of suffering in Hades.

Turing, by Christos H. Papadimitriou

Oh, well... this one didn't meet half the expectations that I had upon discovering it in the Supercomputing 2005 conference. It's a novel, yes, about computation, yes, but it fails miserably at telling a cohesive, engrossing, and entertaining story. The best I can say about it is that it's a novel for the computer science geek, like me, that may motivate one to go hit the books on computability and theory of computation again.

The plot is simple. A romance starts in the Greek isles between a cyberwizard woman and an archaeologist. She leaves Greece all of a sudden abandoning her lover Alexandros, who is compelled to seek her out later on the global internet. In this search, he stumbles upon Turing, who is purportedly, some type of AI program (perhaps one which can pass Turing's test). Turing would have been constructed as some kind of teaching tool to educate people on computation. As the character Alexandros and Turing interact, the reader is presented with many a lecture on computer technology and computation, which fail to advance the plot in any way, shape, or form. The tutorials are very interesting and present concepts in Math and Computer Science with considerable clarity, but then again, I failed to see how they fit in the story. (I find it extremely hard to believe, however, that anyone without a solid background in Computer Science could muster enough interest to get through these lessons.) In the meantime, the other two legs of the love triangle meet, fall in love, and develop a relationship, a plot element that was as exciting to me as watching an egg cook in boiling water.

Arguably, this "novel" would want to fit in the cyberpunk genre and reach a different kind of height than the works of William Gibson, but it doesn't. It seems to me it was only a vehicle for teaching scientific concepts poorly disguised as literature. The romance which develops into a love triangle is insipid, the characters thin, and the resolution of the story anti-climatic.

On the other hand... I enjoyed the discussions on Cantor's diagonalization proof, on Turing machines and the halting problem, and other Math/CS topics. They made me want to go back to my old books and refresh all that beautiful theory.

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman

The only bad thing I could possibly say about this book is that it's not American Gods. That aside, though, there are many, I mean many, good things I can say about this engaging, imaginative, well-written, and ultimately fun read.

This is the story of Charles Nancy, an ordinary bloke living in London, engaged to the woman he loves, despised by his mother-in-law to be, and competent at his job, but thoroughly dissatisfied with it. Charles, aka. Fat Charlie, has a father who live across the pond, in Florida, who is quite the insufferable character, according to him. Fat Charlie's memories of his dad are not exactly the best, the worst arguably being a prank he pulled on Charlie on Presidents' Day, when he told Charlie that on that holiday all kids go to school dressed up as their favorite American president. When Fat Charlie's dad passes away, he is summoned to the States for the services and it is so that Pandora's box gets opened. It turns out that Fat Charlie descends from a divinity and that his brother Spider is the one who got to inherit all the supernatural powers. It turns out later that what remains of his family reunites and that really bumpy times follow. The story is written with great sense of humor and with the imaginative force that only Gaiman is capable of wielding today. Oh, yeah, there is one other bad thing I can say about this book: it ends. To make matters worse, it will probably take Gaiman a while to release another book, but I'll be waiting.

Across the Sea of Suns, by Gregory Benford

This was a really interesting and fun read. As a sequel to the first installment of the Galactic Center Series, this book really hit the spot: it was better written in that the focus became clearer and the story was very gripping. The disappointment I had was not with this book, which ended is a suspenseful and exciting cliff-hanger, but in the volume that follows it in the series. I rushed to buy the next installment hoping for continuity and what I found was a big leap in time starting off at a completely different place in the story, far ahead in the future. I got so annoyed at this reinventing of the whole storyline that I decided to put aside the third volume for a time. When I have managed to dissociate myself for where book 2 ended, I'll be in good shape for reading the rest of the series for what it is and not for what I wanted it to be.

How to be Good, by Nick Hornby

Very enjoyable book. Differently from About a Boy and High Fidelity, this book is centered on a female character showing that the author can be quite convincing at portraying the outlook on life from a woman's perspective.

The story revolves around Dr. Katie Carr, mother of two (Tom and Molly), married to David, a professional cynic who writes a newspaper column entitled "The Angriest Man in Holloway." When Katie's marriage is hanging by a thread and it seemed that life couldn't get any more unsatisfying, she indulges in an affair and contemplates divorce. Neither of these options turn out to be an easy way out for her. Given some time to think and talk things out with David, Katie sets in motion a chain reaction of transformations in her family. Things get laughing out loud crazy for the reader's enjoyment and to the poor character's nightmare. David does a complete about face in life and embarks on a spiritual quest to be good followed on his heels by daughter Molly. Katie's dilemma only worsens as almost everyone around her suddenly decides to do good for the rest of mankind, apparently forgetting to be good to Katie herself.

All this messy story of personal drama is brought to you by Hornby's talent to find the funny side in every tragedy without losing sight of the underlying ethical or philosophical discussion. Ultimately, while this is a hilarious read, it invites you to (re)visit what it means for one to attempt to be good while facing the worst of hers or his personal demons. It doesn't ever get corny in the process (at least as far as I'm concerned) and it was a rewarding read for me. Perhaps what really made me love this book was the story's conclusion, that is, how Katie finds a way to cope with the hardest challenges in her life. Her solution validates mine and makes me feel that, after all, the road on which I'm going down may not be all wrong...

Into the Ocean of Night, by Gregory Benford

This is one of Benford's earliest novels and it reads very much as such. For a writer that has become known for writing hard sci-fi, this one seems almost on the soft side of things. The book tells a story of first contact with an alien civilization and in that it walks on the same ground as Carl Sagan's Contact and Greg Bear's The Forge of God. Whereas Contact is self-contained and ultimately satisfying, this book (the first in the Galactic Center series) is arguably only a prelude and at that one that didn't feel very satisfying to me.

The story is centered on an Englishman astronaut, Nigel Walmsley, a crusty, maverick of a character who becomes the center player in the first contact with one or more alien visitors. I like the character in that he's not your ordinary "Tom Cruise" all around nice guy. The story starts with Nigel being sent on a mission to investigate an asteroid which turns out to be some kind of alien space probe. Years later, a second ship enters our solar system and Nigel establishes communication with it. He's again put in charge of investigating and studying this ship. What develops from there is very interesting, but not terribly deep in its scientific speculations. You get the feeling that you're only eating the appetizer and the main course will only be served if you pay the additional fee. What disappointed me was the way the book ends: the writing alternates between reality and what is going on in Nigel's head. The latter is a long series of thoughts strung together which don't seem to add substance to the story and yet you have to read it all just because. I will eventually continue the series because I like Benford's work and have some hope that this will develop into something more solid and satisfying.

The Golden Apple, by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea

I like this book, which is the first in the Illuminatus! trilogy. For some reason, however, after reading it, my interest for the trilogy dies. This has happened twice in the space of 10 years... This is not to say that it is uninteresting or not a worthwhile read. What I think it means is that although the subject matter is a lot of fun for me (otherwise I wouldn't have tried to read the trilogy a second time), the style gets to me after a while.

The story is centered around the bombing of a magazine devoted to the discussions of various delirious and paranoid conspiracy theories. As the investigators study the disappearance of the owner of the controversial rag, a series of memos on the Illuminati, a secret society that purportedly aims to control the world, is uncovered and scrutinized. As this is happening, the narrative jumps around, and perhaps too much so for me. Paragraphs in different plot lines are presented in rapid succession making it hard for the reader to concentrate on any of them. It may well have been the authors' intent to lay out all the pseudo-facts (?) in this scattered manner to give the reader the sense of loss which would result from the contemplation of all those possibilities.

Other than being a bit hard to read for the lack of a sense of direct continuity (sometimes a linear plot goes a long way to keep the readers' interest), this is a funny book which is fun to read. The conspiracies go from JFK's assassination, to Dillinger's mystical powers, to George Washington vs. Adam Weishaupt, the arcane symbols in the one-dollar bill and well beyond. Perhaps some day soon I'll come back to read the two remaining books, but I needed a break to read something that I could sense was clearly going somewhere. I insist in saying that no other book about conspiracy theories can ever hope to be better than Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", which is on my bookshelf begging for a third read.

The Physiognomy, by Jeffrey Ford

Thanks are owed to my student Derek, for recommending this fun read. This is a very interesting and twisted fantasy set in a universe without dragons, elves, and dwarves, for a great, big, welcome change. In this universe, the center of attention is a place known as the Well-Built City, which is governed by a totalitarian regime. The law in this place is enforced pro actively (as in "Minority Report") as well as reactively. The investigations of violations are carried out by physiognomists, who determine one's propensity to commit crime with great degree of accuracy. Just by taking measurements of one's body parts, the physiognomist can determine one's shortcomings, and even past and future deeds. Physiognomist First Class Cley is sent to an investigation outside the city and his findings set in motion a bizarre story that is hard to put down until the last page is turned. The story has elements of Kafka in its dark humour and stifling nightmarish settings. The story talks about the search of a paradise kind of place, but I feel that the setting is just an excuse to show the transformation in the soul of a man much used to nearly limitless power. This is the first installment in a series which continues with "Memoranda" and "The Beyond".

The Watchman, by John Littman

Interesting non-fiction about Kevin Poulsen, a phone phreak turned hacker, who just could not stop himself from messing with the phone companies. It's a fast paced read, but at times it seems a bit cluttered with technical jargon that only a select few can hope to understand. Other than that, it feels quite journalistic in the sense that it follows the style of your average news publication. I find that at times it relies too much on hyperboles (as perhaps does your evening news) to keep you interested. The book paints Kevin Poulsen as a unidimensional character, too much of a cardboard personification of evil someone who is actually flesh and bone. It is probably true that his personal flaws are perhaps more exaggerated than in the average person and that his behavior shows evidence of some kind of addictive tendency that pays no regard for his self-preservation. What I didn't like very much, however, was the fact that the portrait of Poulsen painted by Littman looked too much like characters from works of fiction that are completely devoid of morals or even concern for the consequences of their actions (notes of Mr. Ripley, from Patricia Highsmith's fiction). The Poulsen in this book hardly ever wanders into ethical quandaries and acts mostly on self-centered uncontrollable whims. I question whether he really was like that and believe that, as a journalist, Littman could have made a more balanced account by discussing *what* Poulsen did together with *why* did it. Was he obsessive compulsive? Was he devoid of moral programming? Was he just a deviant personality in search of power? Why did he exposed himself so blatantly in the events that lead to his capture? I would have liked to get a better glimpse into the psyche of a hacker, but this book was quite shallow in this respect.

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Warning: I'm going to rave about this book; proceed with caution.

I'm not quite sure why I picked this up. Maybe it was because someone likened the writing to Dickens', Eco's, or Garcia-Marquez'. Maybe it was because someone said it had elements in common with the movie "Angel Heart". Maybe it was because it spent a long, long time in the best sellers list in Spain. In any case, what matters is that I did read this fantastic book, which I enjoyed more than any other in the last year.

The plot is very intriguing and I won't tell you much about it other than this: A boy finds a book in this mysterious "Cemetery of Forgotten Books". He wants to read more by the same author and discovers that those titles are being systematically hunted down and burned by this mysterious man, who takes the name given to the devil himself in one of these novels. The search for the books and for information on their author is the magical spark that leads to the development of the entire book. I enjoyed the plot (that's all I can say without presenting spoilers), but what I liked the best was how the story was told. Zafon writes beautiful prose that casts a fog of romance about the most inconsequential facts. A screenplay from this book could hardly turn out to be a more vivid, graphic experience.

It's not been three weeks since I finished this book and all I can think about it how much I wish I could read it again for the first time. I found it extremely moving, surprising, and poetic. This kept me reading very late into the night, yearning to know what followed but heart-broken that my drive would only propel me faster toward the inevitable end. The characters stayed with my for several days - I was reluctant to start another book for fear of losing the sweet aftertaste this story left me. I recommend this to anyone who would enjoys a very human coming of age tale, with deep explorations into the human soul, with strong elements of mystery, history, romance, and political intrigue.

By the time I finished this book, 2005 was only barely half-way through, but I'm confident that I won't be able to read anything that will top it this year. I found this book to be one of those gems that can only rarely be produced and feel sorry for Zafon in that anything else he writes in the rest of his career as a writer might be unfavorably compared to this wonderful book.

Utopia, by Roger MacBride Allen

This is the last installment in a trilogy set in Isaac Asimov's Robots universe. The good old Asimovian robots are governed by three fundamental laws of behavior which ultimately determine their roles in society. The laws state that a robot can never by action or inaction harm a human being, that a robot must always obey orders given by human beings unless they contradict the first law, and finally that a robot must protect its own existence, unless this creates a contradiction to first two laws.

Allen's work has expanded this universe by introducing two other variations of robots. The first is the No-Law robot, which is unconstrained by design, emulating a human being's freedom of will. Only one of these is ever built, Caliban, who is the protagonist of the first novel in the series. The second is the New-Laws robot, which is granted a calculated measure of freedom, but still is designed to never take any direct action that can result in any harm to a human being. The new laws virtually freed the robots from the tyranny of mankind, but still manage to create beings that are bound to collaborate with humans.

The potential for the construction for interesting and exciting stories in this setting is enormous. There are opportunities to explore topics in the impact of technology in society, in what it means to be human, and in what course our species might take in the future. In summary, the setting is excellent in that it is Asimovian to its core.

The first two novels mined this ore with relative success and managed to almost continue the tradition of the Elijah Bailey novel, which was a mixture of whodunit and sci-fi explorations. This third installment, though, fell quite short of the conclusive climax that it could have been. It was by sheer power of will that I managed to finish reading Utopia, which I really wanted to like, but couldn't.

The premises are that the terraformed world of Inferno is doomed to revert back to its original inhospitality. In order to attempt to stabilize the situation, a scientist posits that a controlled comet crash can be used to dig a massive canal on the surface of the planet. The canal would connect two large bodies of water and create a self-regulating mechanism for temperature and moisture on the surface of Inferno. The operation is far from risk-free and requires the collaboration from the robotic contingent of society. The substantial risk, however, interferes directly with the laws that govern robot behavior creating a certain level of tension that carries through to the end of the novel.

I felt that although the plot had certain interesting elements, I never managed to care for anything that happened. I attribute this mainly to the fact that characters are so poorly developed that the reader feels little or no empathy for any of them. The story felt somewhat like a cold collection of conjectures that, although interesting, never spark any passion in the reader.

A Window in Copacabana, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Author binge, yes, I'm guilty. This is the fourth book in the "Inspector Espinosa" mystery series. Of all the books I've read in the series, so far, this was the first one that I couldn't crack on my own and I'm happy for that surprise. Espinosa is a great character who develops more and more with every additional book. Garcia-Roza's writing clearly shows a lot of love for the city of Rio de Janeiro and more than being post-cards, his books read like personal invitations to the sensual, seductive city.

An expatriate like me will either find sheer delight in traversing the city with the characters or be struck with sharp pangs of homesickness. Actually, for me the two feelings alternate with even and odd pages.

The story follows a serial killer who wipes out member of the police force and their extramarital affairs. There comes "Inspector" Espinosa to investigate the murders. I'm not sure inspector is the best translation to English of the word delegado from Portuguese, which refers to the head of a precinct, but so be it. I found the end surprising and somewhat satisfying, though a bit rushed. Still, it was a very enjoyable read which I recommend to mystery buffs.

Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

When I first read this, about 15 years ago, I saw something much greater and impressive in the first Foundation trilogy. Although I enjoyed the reread and still saw a lot of interesting themes well-explored in this third volume, I feel that I've changed too much to see this with the same eyes of a 25-year old. This is not to say that I think this isn't top notch material, but put in the light of other books I've read in the meantime, Foundation has lost some of its impact on me.

I find it interesting that Foundation starts of as a series of short stories in the first volume, then develops into novellas in the second and third volumes, and starts to coalesce into full-length novels later on. I think this is perhaps an indication that Asimov's vision and ideas for where the story was going matured as he wrote on. I enjoyed the longer books better perhaps because the character became progressively more complex and more interesting. This process of trying to understand how my tastes have changed indicates to me that even more than the clever scientific speculations, I enjoy a story centered in the human element - our conflicts, struggles, and intellectual and emotional developments became more important to me.

With all that said, Second Foundation is still pretty darn good. Of the two novellas in this volume, the second one, in which the search for the Second Foundation finally concludes, is definitely my favorite. The theme of political manipulations of a vast number of worlds under the reign of the Mule in the first novella is interesting enough, but not terribly gripping. In the second one, Arcadia Darell, a fourteen-year old girl becomes the central piece in the unveiling of where in the universe lies the world of the mental manipulators to were prepared to carry through with Hari Seldon's plan. This character, in my opinion, shows that by the time Asimov got to this point in the story, he was confident enough in his writing to entrust the backbone of the story to a human being, a flesh and blood person, who ultimately can be as interesting and exciting as any bit of science. For me, the series only gets better as it goes on.

A Case of Curiosities, by Allen Kurzweil

If Kurzweil writes more, I'll eagerly read it, that's a promise. This was the second novel by him that I picked up and I enjoyed it just as much as The Grand Complication. The book tells the story of Claude Page, a talented young man born to a healing woman in the French countryside in the 18th century.

Southwesterly Wind, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Fun, lots of fun. I'm a fan of Garcia-Roza's and got five of his books as a gift in one shot. Since then I've been reading them one by one and discovering that the quality of the writing and the imaginative plots don't waver. This book tells the story of a man who, according to a "prophecy" made on his previous birthday will commit murder within the year. The prophecy took a life of its own when finds the ears of an unsteady, impressionable subject and gravitates slowly towards the inevitable. Before any crime is committed, the would be murdered approaches the police and warns Inspector Espinosa of what may come to happen. What follows then is an excursion in the weaknesses of man in the face of fate with side trips into Freudian theories and religious fanaticism visiting some of my old haunts in the wonderful city of Rio de Janeiro. Even though I, once again, spotted some of the elements of the ending from far away, the details that come with the printed word came as a big surprise. I hope Garcia-Roza keeps writing more and more of these fun books.

Factoring Humanity, by Robert J. Sawyer

After my ups and downs with Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy and the enjoyment I found in reading his "Flashforward", I thought to read another one of his older books. As I expected, some of his earlier writings are substantially better than his latest and I ended up enjoying very much what he created in "Factoring Humanity".

This book is a story of first contact between humanity and extra-terrestrials, somewhat in the same vein of Carl Sagan's unbeatable Contact. Radiotelescopes on Earth suddenly start picking up signals from Alpha Centauri, which are initially decoded and understood. Further pieces of the message however remain shrouded in mystery for 10 years until a scientist is finally able to figure out its meaning. The decoding of the message changes humanity in a way that I had not seen proposed in any other work of science fiction, so I found this book quite creative and interesting.

A concurrent thread in the story explores the work of another scientist whose research in artificial intelligence and quantum computing run the risk of coming together. Although I found this thread also very interesting, at times I found that it wasn't well integrated with the main plot of this book. In the end, the author does manage to pull the threads together, but I felt that the integration was not terribly smooth and could have been done better.

All in all, this was a fast and satisfying read, but definitely not a masterpieces in the genre. The science is understandable and fairly convincing, what is always a pleasure to find. What was really interesting for me as a faithful Sawyer reader was the recurrence of themes from the "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy. "Factoring Humanity" was written years earlier and exposes themes such as women in science, sexual abuse, and quantum computing, which featured prominently in the "Neanderthal Parallax". I'm curious to see if his future works will revisit these themes and how.

Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov

This is the second volume in the original Foundation Trilogy. Since it contains only two stories, or rather, novellas (where the first book had five), the overall flow is much less discontinuous.The first story, The General puts psychohistory and the Seldon Plan to the test when an individual attempts to counteract the work of the Foundation. We are told by psychohistory that individuals don't matter in the big scheme of things. Large populations and socio-historical forces have a much greater inertia than the actions of a single person, no matter how powerful that person may be. Bel Riose, a military loyal to the shrinking Empire initiates an offensive against the Foundation attempting to reclaim the worlds that had been lost to Cleo II. Good story with a good pace, but it almost serves only as an appetizer to the main course, The Mule, the second story in the book. The Mule is arguably one of Asimov's masterpieces and sets the stage for the long range development of the Foundation series. It's hard for sci-fi to get much better than this. The story puts in question, one more time, the Seldon plan. It is centered on another individual, a mutant nicknamed "The Mule", who unlike Bel Riose is not an Imperialist. "The Mule" is out to establish an empire of its own and in his campaign he starts to incorporate more and more of the Foundation worlds into his domain. This story has interesting twists and shows that perhaps there were variables unaccounted for in Seldon's psychohistorical plan which could undermine the course plotted in his plan. Also importantly, it brings back into the mix the Second Foundation, which Seldon would have established in a secret location in the galaxy. This story cemented my interest in the Foundation universe and gave me a momentum for going deeper into the series that lasted throughout all the Foundation, Robot, Galactic Empire, and Second Foundation series.

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

This is where it all begins: the first one in a long string of books connecting some of the very best works of science fiction ever published. Seeing that Bantam is reprinting them in hardcover, I couldn't resist the purchase and the inevitable re-read. Perhaps in the absence of anything else that compares to Asimov's writings, I'll just have to make my way through all the Foundation, Empire, and Robots novels again. And that would, I'm sure, be just as exhilarating as reading them all for the first time.

Foundation sets the universe for long-range explorations into a fictional science called psychohistory and into how the human race eventually would spread throughout the entire galaxy. The book is divided into five inter-connected stories: The Psychohistorians, The Encyclopedists, The Mayors, The Traders, and The Merchant Princes. The stories do form a whole evolving from the first to the next painting the picture of a sequence of events from the detection that humanity was about to revert to barbarism to the machinations of a group determined to not allow all the knowledge developed by the race end up lost for millenia.

The first story serves as a brief introduction to the science of psychohistory and its creator, Hari Seldon. We are told that this science evolved from the social psychology, the statistics, and the history of large populations. The framework allows one to plug into a mathematical model a socio-historical context and track (or forecast) its evolution through time. This story whets one's appetite for more details on Seldon, on Trantor (the planet at the center of the Galactic Empire), and psychohistory. It can be quite unsatisfying in that for as soon as the background for the Foundation universe is set up, the story ends and we're moved along to another set of characters, in a far off place, and in a very different predicament. The patient and faithful Asimov reader, however, should note that the story comes back full circle to this very point in Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, Asimov's final novels before his death.

The gist of the novel as a whole is that the psychohistorians are able to predict that the advanced Galactic Empire is about to come to an end. Sectors of the galaxy, or planetary systems alone, are about to break away from the Empire, starting a processes of constant fighting and of the decay of science and innovation. Eventually, the bulk of the knowledge produced at hard pains by the human race could be lost and a dark age encompassing many millenia would ensue. Psychohistory, however, can also foresee a set of actions, which carried out with precise timing, could potentially reduce the length of this dark period in history. The five stories carry the reader along the events in this "master plan" to put humanity back on track. Each story showcases the applicability of a different "force" to promote the evolution of the plan (political, religious, commercial, or diplomatic) well-tuned to the correct historical moment.

No honest enthusiast of good science fiction should pass up this book, or this series. This is really "creme de la creme".

Hybrids, by Robert J. Sawyer

Oh, boy. Why did I do this to myself? This series went through ups and downs (actually, downs mostly), but I had some faith that Sawyer would manage to redeem himself in the end. Well, it didn't really happen. I didn't find much science in this fiction. This book was the olive on the martini Sawyer had been stirring all along: a preachy book based on some interesting ideas that could have otherwise been developed into something really outstanding but didn't. In the end, the feeling I experienced somewhere along the earlier books of the Neaderthal Parallax trilogy hit me hard in the face: this read like a soap opera on scientific steroids. The material on human relationships was far too trite to be engaging and convincing.

You may want to read my comments on Hominids and Humans for more details on the series. Suffice it to say that this book evolves into an unfulfilling exploration of topics such as faith, sexuality, the societal development of Homo sapiens as a species, and "the evil that men do" (yup, reference to the old Iron Maiden song). The climax is quite pathetic and wraps up a muder mystery that the attentive reader can spot coming from miles away. The best about the way the book ends is that it ends. What disappoints me the most is that Sawyer seems to be taking a dangerous turn away from writing solid science fiction to writing pop-scifi in the style of Michael Crichton. This would have been ok for a summer, beach book, but no more. Where it will end, I hope not to find out. When I read Sawyer again, I'll make sure to look for titles from his back-catalogue.

The Wave, by Todd Strasser

Once upon a time, back when I was a teenager... there was this TV movie about an experiment carried out in a high school in California. During a discussion of WWII, a history teacher is confronted with his class' incredulity over the fact that the Nazi Party managed to convince an entire nation to participate, mostly unknowingly, in a movement that resulted in genocide. The teacher goes about to show his class that not only this was possible, but also that it could happen again. He carries out an experiment that almost spirals out of his control easily creating a fascist movement that grows to engulf almost the entire school.

This short novel is about the real event. I picked it up in hopes that it would explore the issues much more deeply than the movie and was very disppointed to discover that it doesn't. The writing style is easy, almost too easy. It seems to me that this was not written for a mature audience, but rather for young adults, that crowd between 12 and 16 years of age. An adult would soon discover that, although there are indeed important lessons to learn from the experiment in fascism, this book fails to explore them in deeper and significant ways. This book is no more than the movie and actually reads like the novelization of the screenplay. It's marginally an ok read, but in the end, it doesn't satisfy.

December Heat, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

This is a brilliant mystery. (Since Portuguese is my mother tongue, of course I had to read the original "Achados e Perdidos" and, therefore, this review does not refer to the English translation.)

In Rio de Janeiro, an ex-policeman gets overly drunk during an outing with his girlfriend, and loses his wallet on the way out of a restaurant. Next morning, he wakes up at home without any recollection of the past night's events; he can't remember driving home and he can't locate a couple of personal items like his belt or his wallet. In the meanwhile, his girlfriend, a prostitute, is found dead by asphixiation all tied up to her own bed, in her own apartment. A street urchin finds the lost wallet and, discovering that it belongs to a cop, throws it out again after lifting out the money inside. The wallet is picked up by a low-life man, who proceeds to pose as a policeman (using the identification encountered) to extort money from drug dealers and other criminals. Other murders follow and the lives of several people seem to become interlinked to the first murder and to the lost wallet, but the connections are tenuous and uncertain. In order to figure out all that really happened, the reader has to keep going all the way until the very last line, which wraps the novel masterfully with a bang.

Detective Espinosa, a "carioca" version of Hercule Poirot, sets out to investigate the crime and what follows is a twisty story through the underground of The Wonderful City, Rio de Janeiro. Garcia-Roza is a master at characterizing the locale and its ambience in the smallest details. His novels are a true delight for expatriates like me who can vizualize every street corner he mentions. I imagine that his writings may not have the same effect on those who are not as familiar with the city, but even if this picture is more vague in their minds' eyes, it is still mysterious, seductive, and downright alluring, and, in all that, it is faithful to Rio.

It can be said that after this book, I became a fan of this author.

Introducing Kafka, by David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb

I've been reading Kafka on and off for a few years and I've always felt intrigued, amused, and terrified, all at once, by his stories. Stumbling on this little book in a bookstore, I was first attracted by the illustrations by Robert Crumb, which by themselves, would have made this intellectual comic book very interesting. I had built up no expectations on the writing and I was delighted to find what a great job it does at putting Kafka's work in the context of his persona, his time, and the history of his country.

Those who already enjoy Kafka will find that this book sheds light into the dark, unexplained corners of his stories without aiming to explain his artwork. I felt that what Mairowitz and Crumb attempted to do was to motivate discussion and provoke the reader to find a meaning in Kafka's stories. It is hard, if not impossible, to go beyond the shock and the horror or perhaps to find any meaning in Kafka's work without an attempt to understand the conditions that motivated his writings. Those who have never read Kafka will enjoy this book for a terrific introduction to many fastastic and bizarre stories and hopefully will feel motivated to read them in their original format. Finally, those who simply enjoy brainy comics will not be disappointed by the terrific illustrations and carefully crafted text.

The High Lord, by Trudi Canavan

This is the final installment in The Black Magician's Trilogy, following The Magician's Guild and The Novice. Although it is somewhat entertaining, I found it disappointing, what didn't really surprise me after the first two installments in the series. There is definitely something good to be said about the author's creativity in the main argument for the plot, but the delivery seemed terribly weak to me. The universe that the author attempted to create would have been much more interesting in the hands of a more experienced writer. In her first work, Canavan didn't manage to make it come together and feel very real. Pieces of the geography of her world and the magic system are sometimes simply thrown together and don't coalesce into a very coherent whole. All in all, when I was done, I felt like what I gained from reading this series was nearly nothing. I would much have preferred to have re-read something like Raymond Feist's "Riftwar Saga" or maybe have read Guy Gavriel Kay, of whose writings I keep hearing raving reviews.

The central theme of the story is the idea of "black magic", a kind of magic that was written off the books by the Magician's Guild for it's unbounded potential and inherent danger. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" was the driving thought for the Guild and they thought it was best never to have their magician's learn these techniques. What they failed to consider was the possibility that not all magicians in their world would forsake this knowledge and in a far-off place it still thrives. The magicians from this nation, motivated by one with the need for a personal vendetta, then launch an all-out attack on the Guild.

The argument is interesting and I believe that it could have been turned into a terrific story in the hands of a more experienced writer. As The Black Magician's Trilogy turned out to be, however, the opportunity for an interesting discussion was lost and the result is so shallow that, at best, only the young-adult readership will find it satisfying. I was very annoyed also by the fact that the story ends abruptly, with a good measure of loose threads, which were certainly left unresolved so that sequels can be written. In my opinion, that is not the way to build up and captivate a readership and perhaps a good, experienced editor would have steered the author away from this marketing ploy. I guess Canavan was out of luck in that department.

The Novice, by Trudi Canavan

This book was much more enjoyable than the first one in the trilogy, The Magician's Guild. The story finally started to take shape and it left the underground tunnels that gave the first book a cheap RPG feel.

Although it may be an unfair comparison, the book seems to follow the well-established Harry Potter dynamics (or dare I say, formula?). The protagonist is a magician novice, in a larger-than-life school, in a universe of different magical disciplines, facing bullies lead by an arch-enemy that feels a lot like what's-his-face from Slitherin. It's not a whole lot less fun, but it doesn't smell very original.

All in all, there are many more qualities to this book than to the first in the trilogy. I've been actually scratching my head and wondering if the series was inflated by an entire additional volume just because fantasy series are most often trilogies... nuff speculation.

Even though I rate this book as an empty fun read, it was fun nonetheless. There's quite a bit of social critique in the discussion of how elitist the Magician's Guild is. There is also a seemingly gratuitous discussion of gender issues. Perhaps the concluding book explains how that discussion is relevant to the story; there is no denying, however, that in the context of this book alone, it feels like the author has taken the opportunity to climb on a soapbox.

Ok, so what is the spiel? Sonea, a poor slum dweller, discovers by accident that she has powerful magical talent. In the first book, the Magician's Guild, an organization that holds a tight monopoly on the training and use of magical talent, seeks her out and offers her entrance in their school. This second volume talks of her evolution as a magician novice, but more importantly, of her discovery that the head of Guild is a user of a forbidden form of magic, black magic.

As I said before, this volume reads much better than the first and is fairly enjoyable (no random acts of extreme violence as in Terry Goodkind's opus). Character development is decent enough to make you start caring for them. The one annoying matter of style is the author rubbing on the readers' faces all the "questions" that go through a character's mind. The author seems prone to frequently throw the reader's way several questions in a row in order to outline a character's thought process: "Would she really consider leaving the Guild? Well, she didn't want to join them in the first place. Then again, what will she do if she leaves? Will she simply accept to have her magical powers taken away? etc, etc, etc" I believe that the author overuses this technique, which at times is almost Hollywoodian in that it leaves nothing for the reader's intelligence to work out.

These gripes aside, though, I actually enjoyed this one enough to continue reading the series. Now, on to The High Lord.

The Magician's Guild, by Trudi Canavan

This was not a good book to read right after finishing Cryptonomicon, which is incredibly well-written. On absolute terms, the writing is sophomoric. The language and the prose are very humble and showcase the fact that this was the author's first novel. There are excellent first novels out there, but this is not one of them. What made me not give up on it was: (1) the fact that I had already bought the two sequels in the trilogy, (2) I wanted to read a "magic-centered" kind of fantasy story, (3) the cover of the British edition is way cool, and finally (4) I wanted so much for the author to succeed.

This book reads like it was written after a role-playing game campaign: a good part of the story happens in underground passages, where characters turn left and right, finding friends and foes, places to hide, and places to flee. You can almost hear the dungeon master asking: "What are you doing next?" It's not all like that, thankfully, but the main the argument is pretty beat up: poor girl living a life of many hardships is discovered to have great magic potential. The book is almost diposable. Almost. I plowed through at great pains and came to the end just when it was getting better: as the girl Sonea starts to learn magic, the writing takes a turn for the better, but then the book just ends and you feel spurred to read the sequel.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

Super cool read, with a very strong geek appeal. The book may seem a bit schizophrenic in that for a while at least three independent threads go on without much hint of when and where they intersect. It's a bit of a tome with over 1,000 pages, but it turned out to become one of my favorite reads.

One plot line is about WWII history: you get to learn a little bit about how code making and code breaking went. Just a little, but enough to get you excited about that mathematical cloak and dagger. Stephenson did his research well and explains certain mathematical concepts so clearly that I use a passages about Turing's bicycle when I talk about modulo arithmetic in my classes. The thread that discusses WWII intelligence gives you a glimpse of Ultra, Bletchey Park, Enigma codes, and even Alan Turing. How cool is that for a book? And that is only part of it. The other plot line talks about a geek duo in modern times wading through the cesspool of the corporate world and making big business in Asia. Their biggest idea is centered around the "Crypt", a big, secure, data repository.

All in all, I found this book to be a geek's dream come true. It gets a bit technical when the plot calls for it, but almost always in a cheeky, self-deprecating way. It celebrates geek sub-culture. It show that knowledge of science and technology buys one the admission fee into the uppermost stratum of an underground level of our social hierarchy. I don't know of any other work of fiction that has attempted to precisely model a man's horniness through the use of mathematical functions or to weave a lecture on modulo arithmetic into the story. Cryptonomicon does all that with enough elegance to impress the cognoscenti and, at the same time, with a simplicity of language to that does not turn off the uninitiated. Dan Brown, eat your heart out!

The best I can say to summarize what I think of this book is "wow". I enjoyed every page of it: I laughed at the geeky humor (because I'm a geek), I scratched my head at the conspiracies, I loved the fact that the technical content was well above average for a work of fiction, I appreciated the historical lessons, etc, etc, etc.

Eleven Minutes, by Paulo Coelho

Until I started on this, my knowledge of Paulo Coelho had been restricted to "The Alchemist" and "Diary of a Magus" (later renamed as "The Pilgrimage"), the first of which I liked a lot, though the second left me unimpressed and, actually, very disappointed. "Eleven Minutes" was, unfortunately, another disappointment for me. I found it preachy, commonplace, predictable, and contrived. If the author aimed to enlight the reader with any fundamental universal truth, he failed miserably.

The story is somewhat interesting when it starts out, but it loses its charm very fast. In the end, I felt that the time I spent on this book was completely wasted. The story speaks of a woman born in the poor countryside of northeastern Brazil. On a trip to see Rio de Janeiro, she is made a strange proposition to become a dancer in Switzerland and there she goes. Once she discovers that she had been conned into a indentured scam, she attempts to change her life around and become a model. Her first gig with the modeling agency puts her in touch with someone who proposes paying 1,000 Swiss francs for a night in bed with her.

Up to that point, I found the story somewhat engaging. Beyond that, however, it loses touch with reality and goes into the realm of heavy handed preaching platitudes that can be found in the cheapest self-help book. Maria, the protagonist, who had very little education, starts to conconct entries for her diary that sound far too intelectualized for her level of schooling. It only gets worse from there. The final pages put rotten icing on an already bad cake by legitimizing the story as a romantic fairy tale.

Don't get caught into reading this drivel. There's nothing revealing or enlightening in Coelho's discussion of love and sacred sex. There's nothing remotely interesing in this novel's forays into the dangers of S&M. There's nothing worse than spending time with a book that has such little value. I'm done ranting now.

The Silence of The Rain, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

One amazing murder mystery. I read in the original Portuguese "O Silencio da Chuva" and loved every bit of it. The one bit that disappointed me was that it didn't succeed as a "whodunit" it for me: I felt that the clues were a bit too revealing, which didn't leave me with a surprise at the end. Well, although there was no surprise as to "who did it", there were other elements in the end that made satisfying and surprising. This would be fantastic material for a film-noir screenplay and I hope someone will jump to turn into a good movie someday.

The story starts out with a suicide; the event is used to start the thread and to set up the stage for the main act. When the police arrives at the crime scene, there is no obvious indication that it was not a murder and an investigation begins. The main character is this detective with a passion for books, a character that is built up slowly until the reader develops enough empathy to feel right in his shoes, going through the motions the writer constructed for him.

Familiarity with the city of Rio de Janeiro surely helps one construct a mental image of the settings for this story. As a Carioca expatriate, I could picture every street corner, almost smell the fumes from the buses in the busy streets, almost taste the ripe mangoes from someone's backyard. I can't speak for what kind of experience someone not as familiar with Rio would have with this read, but I imagine it would be an interesting trip to one of the most intriguing, fun places on earth.

Flashforward, by Robert J. Sawyer

I enjoyed this one a lot more than the books in "The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy", by the same author. The premises are quite simple. An experiment is conducted at CERN attempting to recreate conditions which would have existed right after the Big Bang. Something doesn't go as predicted, however, and what happens is that the consciousness of each individual human being is transported to a point ahead in time, 30 years into the future, for nearly two minutes. In this foray, many see what their lives will be in 30 years, while others see nothing, what perhaps indicates that they will be dead.

This event sets the stage for a scientific investigation which attempts to explain the phenomenon, for the twisted mystery of a murder that has yet to be committed, for deep questions in philosophy and quantum theory, and hours worth of the greatest reading pleasure. The story meets its end in a very complex, surprising, and rewarding wrap up that is bound to make you want to reread the final chapters at least once.

If you have never read Sawyer and want a fantastic introduction to his work, this is the best title I can recommend. Calculating God may be another good option, but the books in the Parallax Trilogy ( Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids) are certainly not as solid as Flashfoward.

Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card

This is the sequel to Shadow of the Hegemon. The nature of the plot is very similar to that of the episode which precedes it in the "Bean series". The story is centered around Achilles, Bean's arch enemy, and his attempts to turn "the system" against Peter Wiggin, the Hegemon, and in his favor. Although many have said that the book is excruciatingly slow, I liked it a lot. The characters are interesting and well-fleshed out, even the worst villain.

I think that the flurry of action toward the end is an artifact that is starting to feel strange, repetitive, and even a bit obvious since it happened in the previous book almost exactly as it happened in this. Still, I'm a fan of the series and will continue reading if for nothing else at least to see how Card's creativity will develop it further.

Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card

A master of science fiction goes on with the alternate look into the fascinating story started long ago by "Ender's Game". This book continues where "Ender's Shadow" left off and discusses what happens to all the military kid geniuses after the war with the Formics ends. It is definitely an interesting read. Unlike the books in the Ender series, however, which are more skewed toward science fiction, the Bean series seem to focus on military and political developments in the same universe.

The story moves somewhat slowly, which is not to say that it is not engaging. The plot involves a lot of intrigue, betrayal, and political manipulation, so the narrative is not exactly action-based. At points, especially toward the end, there is quite a bit of action, but I daresay this is a more introspective book. This interesting book is a must for fans of the Ender Universe. I enjoyed it a lot.

The Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson

Time paradoxes galore made this an interesting read. I'm not sure I should say it is great, but I enjoyed it. After trying to read "The Light Fantastic" and getting nowhere for two weeks, I picked this one up and finished in three days without ever feeling I was making an effort to read it. The premises are that 20 years into the future, someone called Kuin conquers Thailand and sends back in time a monument to commemorate this feat. The old question of whether the future can be changed is explored here in an original and very thoughtful way. I found this to be a book to be read at least twice and I imagine that a second reading will make it even better.

The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett

The Sisters of Mercy, a band that I hold dear to my heart, did a tour a few years ago called "Trip the light fantastic". When I first discovered this book, I thought there might be a connection and for this reason alone I got interested. Well, not exactly for this reason alone: I read "Good Omens", which Pratchett co-wrote with Neil Gaiman, and enjoyed it a lot. In spite of these good motivations, I could bring myself to read past page 40 in this book. I tried and I tried, but for almost two weeks, every time I started on in I had the distinct feeling it was a waste of time. I know someone who will want to whack me in the head for saying this, but I felt there was not a whole lot to gain from this read. I put it down and I think I may just stay away from Discworld novels for good.

The Grand Complication, by Allen Kurzweil

This is a great read with special appeal to those interested in books. Well, why would you be here if not for your interest in books, anyway? The story starts in a library, where the main character, who works at the reference desk, first encounters a mysterious man dressed in anachronistic attire. This man's request for a book kickstarts the plot, which jumps around from missing antiques, to museum robberies, to discussions of catalog systems, to intrigues between co-workers, to backstabbing among friends, and to a romantic comedy, among possible other elements.

I found this an excellent book to the extent of wanting to read whatever else Kurzweil has written. "A Case of Curiosities", his debut novel, may have some kind of connection to "The Grand Complication" and for this reason I ran to buy it almost as soon as I finished this book.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris

Consider what the world would have been like should the Nazi's not have been defeated. Imagine what Germany, or the mighty Third Reich, would have become and how the political lines that divide today's nations would have consolidated. In this exercise, we could imagine that the Reich would have taken most of Eastern Europe, that 12 European nations would have remained political units on their own (though somewhat friendly to the Reich), that the Cold War would have happened not between the USA and the USSR, but instead between the USA and the Reich. As it happened throughout most of the WWII, imagine that the citizens of the Reich never quite got to know the complete truth about the National Socialist Party's ideology and actions and that today it is 1964.

Now, in this scary universe, consider an officer of the SS who's not so keen on climbing up the socio-political ladder, who doesn't quite care about The Party, who's a free-thinking individual. Imagine that he is charged with investigating the deaths of prominent political figures and that this investigation risks uncovering a terrifying truth that, although widely-known in our reality, remains just a suspicion in the minds that inhabit this alternate universe. These are the premises of "Fatherland".

At the same time that this book reads like a thriller, it is an interesting exploration of "what could have been" if history had taken a different turn. As a thriller, it is very effective, intelligent, and enjoyable. Given what we know today about the holocaust, we know exactly where the plot is leading, but that doesn't matter much. What matters is the trip through this alternate history, and it's a heck of a trip.

Humans, by Robert J. Sawyer

This is the second installment in Sawyer's "The Parallax Trilogy", a story centered on the premises that two parallel universes are suddenly linked by a portal after a quantum computing experiment. One of the universes is ours, in which Homo Sapiens flourished while Homo Neaderthalensis faced extinction. The other universe is exactly the opposite.

Whereas the first book, "Hominids", was plagued by an insipid love story delivered like the worst of the American soap-operas, this book looks into what is really interesting: the why's and how's of the development of two different societies. We get to learn a lot more about the Neanderthal's version of Earth, the rules that govern their society, and, at the same time, confront their values with ours. There are interesting explorations into notions of personal privacy, theology, ethics, and government. I found it very enjoyable and feel that in this book Sawyer went back to the style that lead me to believe, after reading "Calculating God", that he is one of the few sci-fi authors who tread the terrain that Isaac Asimov has paved.

Enigma, by Robert Harris

This is a fictional story set in the universe of Bletchley Park, site of the Ultra project that lead to the breaking of several ciphers, including that of the Nazi's Enigma machine. The focal character of the story is a top-notch mathematician who had been instrumental in breaking the German Navy's Enigma-based "Shark" code, whose life is in shambles after a nervous breakdown brought on by an unsuccessful love affair. The story evolves around his re-recruitment at a point when suddenly "Shark" messages could not be cracked anymore and he's brought back to Bletchley Park. There he reaches out for his old love only to discover that she has mysteriously disappeared. The story is very tense, exciting, and somewhat didactic in that it takes place in a setting that has close ties with read history. It's a clever read that will leave amateur enthusiasts of cryptography scratching their heads and lovers of a good mystery flipping pages all the way to the end. Never mind the few historical inaccuracies, especially in what regards the fictional character Tom Jericho taking credit for Alan Turing's accomplishments: this is still a good read.