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.