House of the Red Fish

Tomi live in Hawaii during the WW2 bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan. He lives with his dad, mom, little sister, and grandfather. Once America becomes suspicious of any Japanese, things go bad in Tomi's world. His father is shot and failed. His father's work partner is killed. His grandfather is jailed. They lose their house.

To make due, Tomi's mom works for a wealthy man, cleaning the house. Tomi, his mom, and little sister live in a guest house on his mom's employer's property. Tomi and all other Japanese is chased by a young vigilante group. Tomi's dad's fishing boat is sunk based on suspicious of it being used to assist the enemy.

Tomi has a white friend Billy. Their family is not prejudice against Japanese. Together they make plans and enlist help to lift his dad's sunken boat. Tomi's grandfather has a stroke, and is let out of jail under care of Billy's mom, who happens to be a nurse who works at the hospital.

Tomi's dad gets a girlfriend who does tattoos for $15 each. Tomi plans to use air in tire tubes to float the boat up from the water. He also dives down with friends to pull heavy pieces off the boat. Eventually he gets the grand idea to use two huge pontoons to help lift the boat.

The son of Tomi's mom's employer is part of the vigilante group. He continues to come after Tomi. He steals Tomi's prized family sword, which Tomi had hidden. When this evil son brings some thugs to stop the boat operation, they encounter people they know on Tomi's team. Eventually Tomi calls out the bully, and beats him on a 1-vs-1 fight. The thugs back down.

Some MPs come. Tomi provides a cover story that his dad's boat sunk. And he is trying to raise it back up. Another aside is that they find the key to the truck of Tomi's dad's partner who was killed. They sell the truck for cash and give the money to his widow.

Jacob Have I Loved

Sara Louise, nicknamed Wheezie, lives on an island with her mom, dad, grandma, and twin sister. Her dad is a fisherman of sorts. He works a lot, going out to get crabs and other seafood. Louise would like to accompany him. But they don't let females on the island do that type of work. Instead, she uses a small boat with her friend Call. They also go out searching for seafood to sell. She gives all her proceeds to her parents.

Louise's sister Caroline is the golden child. She is pretty and sings very well. Initially Louise and Call try to investigate whether a captain who recently returned to the island is a spy. They befriend the man. Caroline also joins them when they visit the captain. The captain somehow cajoles Louise and Call to help repair his house. Louise tries to return a stray cat to Miss Trudy, who she finds unresponsive. Trudy is sent to the mainland for medical help. The captain, Louise, and Call then try to clean up Trudy's house.

Call is a loner. He is also fat. As we are in a war, he heads off and becomes a man at war. Meanwhile, Trudy and the captain marry. However Trudy is sick and dies. She leaves a considerable amount of wealth to the captain. The captain then uses his money to fund Caroline's musical schooling abroad. When Call returns from the war, he has become a strapping man. He asks Caroline to marry him. This infuriates Louise. Just another case of where Caroline gets everything.

When the men were away for war, Caroline dropped out of school and was able to help her father with his seafood business. Eventually she complains to the captain and her mom how unfair life is for her. The captain encourages Louise to go live her dreams. That includes leaving the island to try to go to med school. In that time, women generally did not become doctors. So she became a nurse instead. She achieves another part of her dream by moving aboard to the mountains.

Louise meets Joseph in the mountains. He is surprised about her background, and wonders why she would come out to nowhere and live there. They eventually marry and have kids. 

A Wind in the Door

This book is the direct sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. Main character is Meg. Her little brother is Charles Wallace. He is bullied badly at school for being smart and weird. Their parents are doctors Murray. They meet Progo the Cherubim who Meg must pass a test with. Mr. Jenkins has some clones. Meg needs to discern the true principal, love him, and name him.

We also meet Blajeny the teacher. He is the one who set out the tests. He does not seem to be a main character. The enemy the Echthoi want to X everyone I think that means murder. Meg meets Sporos the faradolae. She need to convince him to join them in healing Charles and fighting the Echthoi. 

There are a number of other characters such as Calvin, who is Meg's boyfriend. There is also Louise the snake, he we find out is also a teacher. In the end, Progo gets X'd by the bad guys. But Charles is saved. The majority of the story was Meg learning to kythe (communicate telepathically) with assorted people. There were also other faradolae to convince and rally. 

Then Again, Maybe I Won't

Tony is 12 years old. He lives in Jersey with his mom, dad, grandmother, brother, and sister in law. Grandma cannot speak. But she cooks all meals. Tony's brother gets his wife pregnant. The family is worried about money. Tony's dad invents some electrical device. He sells it to some big wig, then gets hired to head up the plant that will manufacture them. They get rich due to this arrangement.

Tony and his immediate family move to Long Island. His brother and sister in law also move to New York. They now have a nice house. They hire a maid who takes over cooking, to grandma's dismay. There is a rich kid who lives next door. He is a thief. It causes Tony pain when the kid steals from stores. Lisa also lives next door. She is the big sister. Tony spies on her at night in her bedroom.

There is a tall skinny girl nicknamed Corky at school that has the hots for Tony. But he thinks he is in love with Lisa. Eventually the boy next door gets caught stealing by store security. They have him on tape. By then, Tony has had sessions with a shrink who helps him cope with troubling situations. Two years later, the thief kid is sent away to a military boarding school. And Tony think about warming up to Corky, seemingly giving up on his dreams about Lisa.

This book is by Judy Blume. It was published back in 1971. I must have read it before. I only recognized a scene when Tony and his pals hide a tip for a diner waitress in a milk jugs. The waitress screams at them that the tip pays for her loaf of bread. They stop sitting at her tables in the diner.

Damned, Volume 1, Three Days Dead

This is a graphic novel. Eddie is a man who worked for a demon. Apparently he was dead for three days. But he awoke. He was summoned by his demon boss. The boss and another clan were trying to broker a peace deal. The mediator went missing. The boss sent Eddie to investigate.

Eddie is searching for his ex-girlfriend's brother, who is in hiding. Eddie runs into assorted members of the gangs. He eventually finds out that there is something going down bigger than some gang truce. A book has been found that has an accounting of deals humans made with demons. And it lists demon names. Those names can be used to obtain power over those demons.

Eddie confronts the mastermind behind trying to translate the demon names from the books. He has a gun to this human's head. But then his ex-girlfriend shoots Eddie from behind. Luckily Eddie has the power to come back from the dead. The mastermind is apprehended. Eddie takes back the book. His demon boss gives Eddie a club to run. Eddie hands the book over to his boss.

Eddie creates a new rule for the club. No demons. During the ruckus he learns his ex-girlfriend also made a deal with the devil. He does not use his new found luck and power to save her.

Be a Work in Progress

This is a book by WWE wrestling star John Cena. It is actually a collection of quotes. These seem to be from his Twitter. Here are some example sayings:

• Do things for the reward of doing them
• Crisis can breed opportunity
• Be who you say you are
  

Sharknife

Sharknife is a boy who works in a factory. A nemesis has placed monsters in the walls. When the monsters come out, the boy turns in the Sharknife defender. He needs to eat a fortune cookie to make the transformation.  He works with a girl that he seems to like. The latest monster from the wall was very powerful. The boy needed assistance to defeat it.

The bad guy boss was disappointed that his latest monster could not defeat Sharknife. His minion was optimistic that Sharknife had to draw his blade to defeat the monster. The big boss seems to think his own sword is better than Sharknife's dagger. I guess it will be tested in the sequel.

This was a black and white graphic novel. Dialog was written in small font. Many pages were dedicated to the battles. The author seems to have been drawing for over 10 years. His Instagram is filled with tons of drawings.

IBM - The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon

This book covers the history of International Business Machines, the company. Also know as IBM. It initially started as three companies. I was surprised to find that the early CEO was Watson. I only know about the AI product named Watson from IBM.

I was hoping this book would cover the IBM PC. Unfortunately, this book dedicated just one chapter to the PC. The earlier IBM was more about mainframe computers. They were very successful at that.

The company sold to German Nazis. The Nazis even presented IBM's CEO with a medal. He later had to return it due to bad PR associated with it. 

Recent CEOs from the 2010 to 2017 era were more interested in stock value. They would lay off employees, sell off parts of the business, and buy back stock to prop up earnings per share. They stopped trying to grow the business. Trouble ensued.

Game Changer

This book is about Alpha Zero, a computer program to play chess. The program was just given the rules of chess. Then it learned how to win by playing tons of games against itself. It kept getting smarter until it could crush the other chess computer programs out there. Namely, it took over Stockfish as being the best.

There are some themes for this program. It is aggressive in attacking the opponents king. It does not seem to have a known opening playbook like other programs and humans use.It uses sacrifices liberally. There were a lot of games shown explaining details about how Alpha Zero acts in assorted scenarios.

There were also comparisons of like chess games between grand masters of chess.

Cherub: Mission Two - The Dealer

James has been in the CHERUB program for almost a year. They are a set of young orphans who are recruited to do undercover work. James is chosen for a mission infiltrating kids of a drug dealer. His friend Kyle is chosen for the team too. James' friend Kerry begs to be included on the mission as she is green.

James finds it easy to befriend Junior, the son of the main drug dealer. They skip school and do all kinds of hooligans. Junior asks James to come by the boxing gym. James is a shoe in, as CHERUB members are taught martial arts and are fit from training.

Kerry wants to prove herself and gets info from a boy whose father is aligned with this drug trade. Kerry has James and his little sister Lauren come and help break into a warehouse where she thinks there are drugs. It is a grand success. But the cops just monitor the place now for info.

James accepts an invite from Junior and his dad to fly to Miami. Apparently some cartel broke ties with Junior's father, and they come in strong to try to beat info on his hidden money. James and Junior come upon the scene. James runs. A gunman follows. James uses a broken piece of plaster to stab the perpetrator, steal his gun, and fire one bullet to kill him. James later drives a Range Rover out of the compound.

The DEA in the USA arrest Junior's father. He gets sent back to Britain after cutting a plea bargain. The British court system was not as lenient. He got 18 years in prison. No parole until at least 10 years served. James is benched because he was on two big missions this year. Plus his school work has fallen behind.

Unsettlers

This book chronicles the author meeting three families who wanted to escape. They were against many things including government, taxes, and the grid.

One family set up some sort of community. They worked to grow food they could eat. They had a hard time attracting anybody to join the community long term. There was a rule that the community voted on things together. However the wife seemed to think she could overrule the votes. They had a neighbor who ran a cow farm that helped them out when they needed things like an emergency ride in a car to the hospital.

Another family focused on the young daughter. She was in a bad part of Detroit. She was not allowed to walk outside alone due to crime. She loved agriculture. She went to school for it. But she could only find a minimum wage job at a government place that was doomed to go out of business.

The third was about a family that strove to make money from their farming. It was rough. They lucked out when they could get businesses to buy from them. They also sold they produce at a market. Even though they had some sales, it was hard to make ends meet. They needed to adapt to sell the items that made the most profit.

Violin

This was an Anne Rice book I picked up for $3 from a second hand store. It starts with the death of Triann's husband. She hides in her house with the dead body. She spots a tall lanky man outside who plays the violin like a master. Trianna used to live with her little sister Faye in the house. But Faye left and had gone missing.

We find out the man with the violin is named Stefan, and is a ghost. Trianna steals his violin. The ghost is too weak to take it back. The ghost pulls Trianna into scenes from his memories. They include his death. Trianna finds that she can play this ghostly violin, and she is a master at it.

Trianna goes on your. Her deceased husband was rich. Her concerts makes her even richer than her husband was. The ghost keeps trying to reclaim the violin. The ghost eventually talks Trianna into going to Rio. It is there that an old friend said Trianna's deceased daughter was reborn.

Trianna and Stefan see a light from heaven. Trianna talks Stefan into going towards the light. The violin disappears with him. Back home, they get word from Trianna's lawyer that Faye called. The whole family rushes home to find Faye. Trianna finds that she has the ability to play grand music with other violins too.

Epic

This is a tiny book I got as a gift. The author talks about our lives being a story. He compares it to the great stories in books and TV like Lord of the Rings, The Titanic, and the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe series. Likewise, the author compares the life of Jesus as a story. He identifies Satan as the villain. He warns us to make sure we end up on the right side of the spiritual story.

The Last Interview

This was a small book. I thought it was literally the last interview with her before she died. The book does contain a chapter on that. But it also has a lot of other interviews with her. Toni wrote The Bluest Eye. It is the only book I have read from her. She wrote it when she was 39 years old.

Toni was a college professor for a number of colleges including her alma mater Howard. She spent almost 20 years being a book editor herself. She published 8 books. The interviews in the middle of her career felt very academic.

Toni grew up in Ohio. Her family fled there from the south, where there was trouble. Toni divorced after having a few kids. Originally she would wake up before dawn and write before her kids woke up. She said her first book was a printing run of 1500 books. She thought it initially only sold 100 copies. It got picked up by a college as required reading, causing it to be a success.

New Kid

Jordan lives with his mom and dad in New York. His mom i wowed by a school they enroll Jordan into. She says it looks like Harvard. Jordan's old school is a single building. The new school is a whole complicated campus. Some other kid is assigned to show Jordan around. This other kid's dad drives them to the first day of class.

Jordan is an aspiring artist. He wants to go to an art academy. His mom wants him to go to this other new school. Dad says they can revisit the art academy in a year or two. Jordan does not know anybody at this new school. He meets another black kid who has became quarterback for the football team. Jordan and everyone else is required to do a sport. He tries soccer. Although he gets put on the lowest team, he scores a goal in the first game. That was the first time anybody in the low team ever scored a goal.

Some weird girl seems to like talking to Jordan. She wears a puppet on the hand. Jordan eventually finds out she saved her little brother from a boiling pot of water, injuring her hand in the process. A nasty kid at school wants to fight the quarterback. Right before a fight breaks out between the two, the nasty guy slips on a banana peel. The teachers try to punish the quarterback for punching the nasty kid. Jordan starts a rally where they tell the truth and defend the quarterback.

Initially, art class was about some strange impressionist drawings. Later Jordan finds out the teacher can draw all kinds of realistic paintings too. So he gives the impressionism a try. His result becomes the cover of the yearbook. Jordan does get back with a friend he used to go to school with. He also finds out the kid who originally showed Jordan around is filthy rich.

Crisis on the Border

This is the story of Matt Pinsker. He was an attorney who answered the call to help prosecute illegal aliens in Laredo, TX. He spent six months working there. There were tons of cases being held on a daily basis. The legal system could barely keep up.

Most illegals would plead guilty. They were normally sentenced to time served (the jail time already spent awaiting trial), plus deportation. Pinsker said the people who were deported would most likely just try again. They might even get caught again later that week.

Pinsker said a lot of immigrants wanted to get jobs and meet up with family already in the USA. They mostly paid drug cartels in Mexico a lot of money to smuggle them in. Normally around $6k to $8k. People in the cartel that assisted with the smuggling made a lot of money. The cartel would also force immigrants to smuggle drugs in or weapons out of the country.

Pinsker said that up to a third of the immigrants had a criminal record, not including minor offenses like parking tickets. He said some of them were not from Mexico, Central America, or South America. He thought we needed more border patrol. He complained that congress was of no help in understanding the problem and providing more resources.

The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan

Enola Holmes is the main character. She is the little sister of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock and his brother want Enola to become a proper young woman ready to wed. She has escaped and formed a detective agency. But at this time in England, no woman runs such an agency. So she pretend to work for a fictitious detective.

Enola is in a public bathroom. She spots two older women restraining a young girl named Cecily that she had met before. Cecily leaves behind a pink fan. Enola tracks this down to a pink party held by some rich woman. Enola eventually determines that Cecily was kidnapped to force her into a marriage.

Initially Enola thinks Cecilly is being held at the home of the groom. However she figures out she is actually being held at an orphanage. Enola sneaks in, disguised as an orphan. She sneaks around and finds the room where the wedding dress is. She switches outfits with Cecilly. She sends word to Sherlock to pick up Cecilly, who is able to escape.

Chaos Monkeys

Little Kat purchased this book for me. It follows a guy who initially started out working on Wall Street. He left to work at a company in the online advertising space. Eventually he figured that company was destined to failure. He talked two other coworkers there to leave and start a small company named AdGrok.

This startup company lasted for 10 months. By then, one of the programmers had stop contributing. The other one was burned out. The author decided they needed to sell the company. Twitter offered them $5M total. Their investors did not like that one bit. Neither did the author.

Twitter later upped the price to $10M. But the author decided he did not want to work there. They attempted to get FaceBook to buy the company. But FaceBook only wanted to hire the author, not his two fellow company members.

In the end, the company was sold to Twitter. But the author did not go with them. Twitter was mad but still paid $5M. The investors were even madder. The two guys who did go to Twitter lasted the full 4 years until their stock options vested.

The author went on to work at FaceBook, eventually running a small team called FBX. The powers that be decided to go with another small team to take FaceBook advertising forward. After that, the author planned to resign. FaceBook fired him before he could quit. The author went to work at a partner company of FaceBook. He also consulted for Twitter, who had just purchased a company to do what the author was trying to do back at FaceBook.

Rotten Movies We Love

This book catalogs movies that critics may not have liked, but that people enjoyed. It is written from the perspective of the website Rotten Tomatoes. I was surprised how many of the movies I recognized and saw. There were a few before my time. There was a ton of commentary which I skimmed.

I was hoping for some deeper insight. Like finding a list of B-movies that I needed to watch. Unfortunately I had already seen all the B-movies this book lists. So the value was not strong in this book. Luckily I did not spend a lot of time on this one.

As Fast As Her

This book is the autobiography of Kendall Coyne. Growing up, she played a number of sports. But she saw her older brother playing ice hockey. So at a young age, she talked her parents into letting her play too.

Kendall often tried to play on boys teams. There was a lot of resistance to that. When that did not work, she would play against girls older than her. This was to push her limits and increase her skills.

One of the highlights of the book was when Kendall was recruited by a number of colleges. She decided on Boston College, who promised a full scholarship. She declined all other colleges. But when she called Boston College to indicate her acceptance, her guy would not answer the call. Eventually he called her mom and said due to circumstances, they were not able to offer her a scholarship.

Kendall regrouped with a counselor, who talked her into taking a fifth year of high school. Then she applied again for college a year later. She almost had deja vu. When she called a year later to accept at another college, she also had trouble getting in contact with her guy at the college. Luckily it was just a mishap, and she got a 5 year scholarship. She decided to use that money to get a bachelors and masters degree at the same time.

Kendall eventually met and married an NFL football player. She has fought for the right of girls to play hockey, and to get the same financial backing that boys do.

The Year of Living Biblically

A.J. Jacobs decides to spend 12 months following the rules dictated in the Bible. He is Jewish. So naturally he starts with the new testament. He is overwhelmed with all the rules. He seems to live in New York with his wife and young son. His wife is pregnant during this journey.

One specific aspect of the journey is that the guy let's his beard grow out. He travels to meet people of different Bible-based religions. He even goes to Israel to meet up with Uncle Gil, an outcast of his family. He also travels to Tennessee to meet the pastor of the snake handling church. The assistant pastor is tasked with warming up the tiny congregation. But he spends 1.5 hours speaking, thereby being the entire service.

The author's reclusive neighbor dies near the end of this experiment. She was working on writing a book herself. The guy and his wife ended up having twin boys at the end of the year. There did not seem to be any real conclusion. The author shaves his beard, and starts reverting back to life before following the Biblical rules.

Taylor Swift

This book was a picture book of sorts. It tracks Taylor through her various albums and tours. I tried to savor the book by only reading two pages a day. That way I could read the thing for a couple months. The book delved into why Taylor writes the songs she does. It showed her many outfit changes in her later large shows. We also saw how Taylor dressed when attending award and fashion shows.

Taylor moved when she was young for her music career. She did not seem to keep hardly any friends from before she was famous. She was very close to her mom. The book mentions how Taylor was not able to purchase her song catalog, which was sold to somebody she did not like. Therefore Taylor rerecorded her songs so she could own the newly recorded versions.

Grinding it Out

This is the autobiography of Ray Kroc. He did not invent McDonalds. But he took it from a single store in CA to the global conglomerate it is today. Ray started out selling paper cups. While doing that, he had a side job of playing the piano. Not sure how he got any sleep.

Later Ray was amazed at something called a multimixer. It made milk shakes. He started a company selling them. He had to pay off his prior paper company to get the rights to it. Then he visited the McDonalds brothers' hamburger store. He talked them into expanding nationally.

Ray's first wife refused to go into business with him at his multimixer startup. He fell in love with another woman, but she was married. So he married someone else as his second wife. Eventually he talked this other woman to divorce her husband. He divorced his second wife to marry his third wife. WTF?

PaRappa the Rapper

This book details PaRappa the Rapper, a 1990s PlayStation 1 video game. The game is sort of like Guitar Hero. But you need to press PlayStation controller buttons to match the beat of the music playing. You start in Master Onion's dogo. There are 4 or 5 other situations where you must match the beat.

The game was developed in Japan. It was released well before any similar genre like Dance Dance Revolution. The book does not go into how the characters in the game appear like they are made of paper and are super thin.

Apparently there was at least one sequel with a similar name. There was also another follow up game with the same character, but had a different name.

Losing the Signal

This book chronicles the story of Research in Motion (RIMM). That is the company that invented the BlackBerry communication device. Mike was the tech guy. He was interested in physics. He figured out how to send small text messages in the low bandwidth communications spectrum of yesteryear. Jim was the business guy who negotiated with tech giants.

Initially the BlackBerry was marked to business folks. It was a fast and reliable way to send messages. The company made money by charging fees to the communication companies that carried its traffic. It also made money selling the BlackBerry devices.

The most interesting and tragic part of the book is the fall of RIMM. The Apple iPhone came in with its capabilities and marketing blitz. This made RIMM falter on whether to continue using a physical keyboard or go like Apple with an on scree one. The final nail on the coffin was the release of the iPad. RIMM could not execute on its similar PlayBook tablet.

Eventually Mike and Jim, who were co-CEOs and co-chairmen of the board, had to step down from the top positions. They unanimously appointed a successor. But that guy then went in different directions and limited what these past CEOs could do in the company. Jim quit immediately. Mike quit a while later. This new CEO was fired in two years.

10 PRINT

The actual title of this book is 10 PRINT CHR$(205, 5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

This book revolves around a one line BASIC program written to run on the Commodore 64 computer. It produces a maze on the screen. The book is highly academic. A lot of tangent ideas are covered in the book.

There are variants of the program. There are implementations on other computers. And there are related mazes coded. There is even code for the computer to traverse the maze. And then there is a game where the user tries to move through the maze.

The book itself is too academic for me. But it takes me back to the 1980s, where I programmed in BASIC on the TRS-80 Color Computer from Tandy/Radio Shack.

Parker : Apocalyse Survivor

I downloaded an eBook from 10 years ago to my Kindle. Read one third the way though before I realized I had read this book before. Parker is a survivor of a zombie apocalypse. He was a school janitor. Somehow he left his female companion behind.

Parker knew the gun store owner. He got a pistol and boxes of bullets from him for free. Parker went into a clothing store. He killed the zombie clerk. But the zombie manager bit him. Parker stumbled to a hospital for drugs. He had to shoot one zombie there. He barricaded himself into a room to hide from a horde of zombies.

Parker previously followed a woman into a grocery store. The woman lured him in there. She was going to shoot him. Parker talked his way out of it. The woman led Parker to her home. She had two kids and a husband who were zombies. They were chained to chair around the table. Parker had to punch the woman to get free.

A gang spotted Parker. He tried to get to the roof top. He shot the lock off a shed door. Pulled out the ladder and climbed to a ceiling hatch. The gang climbed an adjacent building. They also followed up through the hatch. Parker made a run for it, shooting a couple gang members.

The gang wanted to burn the building that Parker jumped onto. He went down the stairs and discovered an apartment with weaponry. He tossed two grenades to disorient the gang. Then he used a machine gun to destroy their fleeing motorcycles and cars. He finished the job at the crashed cars site with his final grenade.

Parker was lured into a fenced building by a security guard. The guard cooked Parker a steak dinner. But the guard had three zombie sex salves. Parker tricked the guard to let his guard down. The zombie slaves got the guard. Then Parker fled. This is where I realized I definitely read this book before.