Originally Posted by Stephanie B
If you're going to call the tune, you'd better be able to pay the band.
When someone tries to write a book with the main character someone else originated, it almost always seems off. Like an instrument out of tune.
The Second Murderer: a Philip Marlowe Mystery is just such a book. I closed it at 80 pages in.
If you're going to call the tune, you'd better be able to pay the band.
On that note, just finish Code Red, the latest Mitch Rapp. I thought the previous one was ridiculous with Mitch bringing down the President because Mitch is so scary, the crooked President quits. This one isn't bad, readable and moves along. Not as good as the originals, sadly.
Reading a book on the Boer War, didn't no much about it. Interesting but you really can't root for either side of imperialists or racists.
Cloud Yeller of the Boomer Age
Sometimes, you want both sides to lose. Or at least a pyrrhic victory for the winner.
If you're going to call the tune, you'd better be able to pay the band.
4 stars:
Going Infinite
Michael Lewis
A very sympathetic look at the rise and fall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, written by the skilled story teller behind Blindside, Moneyball, and The Big Short. It dispels a lot of myths, but it is also hard to say how much of the book is just Michael Lewis subconsciously justifying his having recommended that friends invest in SBF.
As an example, you may have heard that the executives lived in one giant penthouse in the Bahamas and engaged in orgies. It turns out the penthouse had individual "pods" which were all equal in size reflecting sort of a communal goal/worth. Those living in that penthouse were all nerds who subscribed to "effective altruism" - the belief that they could do the most good in the world by accumulating as much money as possible and spending it on worthy causes. If they were a doctor, they believed they might save hundreds of lives in their lifetime... But if they weren't a doctor, someone else would be and save those lives anyway. If they were investment bankers, they could amass fortunes which could save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives. If they weren't investment bankers, someone else still would be and would just spend that money on sports cars and houses. Thus they had turned to finance and ultimately, cryptocurrencies.
Most of these EA adherents also embraced utilitarianism, which did not value monogamy. So while they embraced the philosophy of polyamory, there were no wolf of wall street orgies. Instead there was a lot of multiplayer online video gaming...
Nearly $9 billion was missing when FTX collapsed and ultimately Michael Lewis explains it as SBF being a mavericky eccentric who didn't follow normal procedures and just didn't track where money went because he assumed it'll turn up sooner or later (as missing funds had in the past). At the time of the writing, bankruptcy trustees found over $7 billion in various poorly documented accounts and identified another $1 billion that had been lost in various overseas hacks & exploits unconnected to SBF.
Last edited by 0ddl0t; 10-05-2023 at 12:15 AM.
Reading the Last Politician about Biden. Like to read legit books that have a modicum of fair analyses of politics.
Waiting for a book about Commander. My story on why I bite everyone around me. I feel sorry for the dog.
Cloud Yeller of the Boomer Age
I’m currently reading Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever by Jason Cordoba and Larry Corriea. It’s set in 1970 in LA as a new MHI team sets up shop in CA. I’d highly recommend it. It’s currently the #1 seller in urban fantasy.
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever
Chloe Mendoza and her team from Monster Hunter International must seek out and destroy an ancient evil threatening Los Angeles at the height of Disco Fever.
Los Angeles: the 1970s.
Disco is king, and the nightclubs are full of young, beautiful people with Saturday night fever. From the Sunset Strip to Hollywood Boulevard, a new era is dawning. But below the glitz and glamor, a darkness lurks.
Chloe Mendoza knows darkness. She is a nagualii, a half-demon created by the gods of Central and South America, a daughter of the Court of Feathers, a group of demigods who ruled Mesoamerica before the Spanish arrived.
Now, she is a member of Monster Hunter International’s latest team, based in the LA Basin. Business is good in the City of Angels, but soon Chloe gets a message from the Court of Feathers, warning her of a Dark Master who is building up its power in the region. Whatever it is, it brings death and carnage with it.
Just a dog chauffeur that used to hold the dumb end of the leash.
Walter Jon Williams, 1987.
Cyberpunk murder mystery thriller.
Several hundred years from now people with moderately high disposable income can have themselves cloned and kept available in storage as "clone insurance" by having their memories downloaded and updated frequently.
A "beta" clone, Steward, wakes up and finds out his memories haven't been updated in 15 years and his "Alpha" original self had been murdered.
He tries to reconstruct both why he was murdered and (even more importantly) why the Alpha never updated his memories. In his former life he'd been an elite mercenary fighting for one of the multi-planetary corporations that acted like nations.
His investigation takes the reader on an exploration of this murky future world of interstellar travel, posthumans, savagely amoral corporations and the memory of a hideously brutal war to the knife on an alien planet.
The implications and consequences of cloning are interesting, Steward is now 15 years younger in body, mind and soul than his contemporaries that include a(now) ex-wife with whom he's still in love, a new wife and child he's never met, a fellow veteran who fought with him in the War, and grudge holding people and organizations that he literally hasn't met yet.
This, along with the Neuromancer trilogy and Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers is one of my favorite Cyberpunk novels from the 1980s.
Although not a book, Breaker Morant is not only a great movie about the Boer War, but one of the best movies of all time. The acting is beyond superb.
D'Accord...
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