EyeBeam

Asimov's Breeds There a Man ...?

A suicidal genius figures out the relationship between his brilliance and his mental health.

Recently finished Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan.

It starts off by confusingly introducing a large number of characters at the narrator's funeral, but gets good once 12 of them arrive in China for the Burma Road trip she organized for them. She joins them in spirit, but can only observe cultural misunderstandings she would have saved them from had she been alive, culminating in 11 of them going missing without explanation when their lake excursion never returned.

It's surprisingly funny given the subject matter involving oppressive regimes and human rights abuses. It's also entertaining and informative and gets a positive recommendation.

I scored it under Minority Author for bingo as she is Chinese-American. However, I think Amy Tan's more interesting affiliation is as vocalist with the Rock Bottom Remainders, who I learned about after reading a good book by their guitarist.

Recently finished The Housemaid. It felt more like chick-lit than what I'd normally go for, but someone said I should read it and lent me a copy. The main plot premise was solid. The reveals were less surprising than perhaps the author intended, but well written regardless. I've scored it under film adaptation which is cheating, but I'm told Sydney Sweeny will make it valid before the bingo closes.

Up next I think is going to be Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan. Not far enough into it to recommend yet, but looks as if it could be interesting, and set in a part of the world I'm underinformed about.

The Ballad of Frankie Silver by Sharon McCrumb.

The sheriff of a fictional rural county in East Tennessee is invited to witness the execution of a local man he arrested 20 years ago for a double murder on the Appalachian Trail. He remembers what the then sheriff told him at the trial:

There's only two murder cases in these mountains I'm not happy with. One is the fellow you're about to put on death row, and the other is Frankie Silver.

So he ruminates over both of these cases, wondering if justice was served, or if something was missed. The Frankie Silver case is told through Burgess Gaither, clerk of the court that tried and executed her.

I think I'll count this for folklore (3A) bingo square. The author did significant historical research into Frankie's case which after 200 years is probably more legend than fact. Other of McCrumb's novels might also be good recommendations for this category, or just in general.

Stephen Hunter is on my list of authors where I expect an unfamiliar book to be worth reading. I've read about 6 of his, and will continue until one of them disappoints me.

Just finished 47th Samauri by Stephen Hunter. Atypically for an author who usually writes about firearms, this is about swords. The protagonist's father fought on Iwo Jima and took a sword from a Japanese officer who committed seppuku with it. Now 60? years later, his kid asks for it back. He doesn't have it, but finds out who does, agrees that returning it is the right thing to do, and brings it back to Japan and the guy's family. Then things get very violent because some bad guys discover the sword's very famous past. So naturally, Bob Lee Swagger has to quickly learn swordfighting and basically re-enact the 47 Ronin event to avenge his new friend's honor.

It's not the author's best work (for that I still recommend Black Light), but is interesting enough. The books in this series are self-contained, but do have an order. I had already read the book that immediately follows this one and knew how Bob Lee won the climactic swordfight, and what he brings home from Japan.

According to their online catalog, there in fact is a copy in my local public library. According to the statewide database, there's another library copy next county over (in the author's hometown).

It does appear to be self-published, by a local author. He should have known of and approved what boilerplate he was attaching to his text.

1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates -- Sellar, Yeatman, and Reynolds.

Worth all of its 116 pages. (Also valid for 1A, but I have other plans for that square.)

Row 1 is also still in play since I'm currently in progress on one of the books from your card, Relic.

Roger Ackroyd and Gone Girl were both recommended by someone who thought I'd like them. She's often right about things, and was this time too. Scent of Death most exceeded my expectations and also gets a favorable review. The first-person narrator and detailed descriptions of colonial NYC made for a very immersive setting. No particular order among them, but that's my top 3.

There's probably a way to engineer a bingo here by reclassifying things that fit multiple boxes. I just put things in the better fitting or more interesting category.

• 1A: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd -- Agatha Christie. Missed Hard mode by 2 years. Old enough to read via wikisource. Everything else here was read in dead tree format.
• 1C: The Quantum Spy -- David Ignatius. Quantum computing, espionage thereof, and USA-China relations. Very Macguffin.
• 1D: Secrets to the Grave -- Tami Hoag. A single mother is brutally murdered. Her young daughter witnesses and survives the attack. Investigators wonder who the father is.
• 2C: Hannibal Fogg and The Supreme Secret of Man -- Tahir Shah. Hard Mode Published by and available free at http://secretum-mundi.com/
• 2D: The Cartographers -- Peng Shepherd. Hard Mode. About the 1930 General Drafting highway map of New York state, with the Agloe copyright trap. Additionally, includes a discreet, but significant shout-out to Ursula LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven.
• 2E: Boar Island -- Nevada Barr. A main character suffered a severe spinal injury (in a previous book, while mountain climbing with Anna Pigeon). She can walk with technological assistance. Boar Island was not designed for the mobility impaired; they move there for her teenage daughter's comfort, not her own.
• 3B: The Scent of Death -- Andrew Taylor. Hard Mode The narrator is a English clerk, assigned to New York City for the duration of the book, during the American Revolution. (I didn't look up the hard mode criteria, but assume it isn't this.)
• 3D: A Column of Fire -- Ken Follett. Follows Pillars of the Earth and World Without End in the Kingsbridge series.
• 4A: Gone Girl -- Gillian Flynn. I haven't seen the movie, but am told they made one.
• 5E: The Illustrated Man -- Ray Bradbury. Short stories, the majority of which involve extraplanetary travel, interstellar in some cases.
• AltA: Fatal Error -- F. Paul Wilson. I read Implant some years ago, but nothing of his recently or from this series. Order matters in this series; don't start here.
• AltB: Bones to Ashes -- Kathy Reichs. The author is a well-credentialed and academically respected forensic anthropologist who cares about getting the science right in her novels.
• AltC: Demon Crown -- James Rollins, ne James Czajkowski
• AltD: Inferno -- Dante Alighieri tr. Allen Mandelbaum. Hard Mode. I couldn't read it in the original Italian.

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. It's about a near-future maverick geo-engineering operation that hopes to protect Netherlands and other low countries from flooding and rising sea levels. It might also affect global weather systems. The organizers aren't very concerned about that, but India and China might get upset if it screws up their monsoon seasons.

It probably won't even get me a bingo square, but I'll read and recommend it anyway.