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.