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).