The Last Cabin

Jo's husband dies. She decides to take her daughters and move up on the mountain. She becomes self sufficient in her cabin. Jo needs to heal from the trauma, and finds reverting back to a simpler life is the best way.

Jo's oldest daughter goes into the city for college. Then the EMP blast hits. All power and electronics are wiped out. To make matters much worse, terrorists and out to kill as many Americans as possible. Jo must head onto campus to retrieve her daughter.

Mom and daughter are reunited just in time. They make the trip back to the cabin. Jo goes out to help the locals townspeople defend against the terrorists. This gives the terrorists an opportunity to snatch Jo's youngest daughter.

Jo and her oldest daughter need to do a rescue mission to retrieve the youngest daughter. The terrorists have realized that Jo is a worthy opponent. So they have called in reinforcements. There are other ideas going on in this book, like Jo slowly being interested in the local sheriff. Also Jo has a good relationship with Mags, who runs the local grocery store.

Overall a good book from a great author. Combination of preppers dealing with the end of the world scenarios.

The Owl Thief

A woman named Utah is an artist. She makes large scale sculptures. She also sells intricate masks online. There is a worldwide bank hack that closes down banking and any electronic transactions. Right after this, a real estate agent is murdered. They find one of Utah's masks on his dead face.

Utah tries to visit the sheriff to answer any questions. The sheriff is gone and his force is following to help keep order in a nearby big city. Utah then proceeds to clear her name. She is running for the office of mayor in a tiny town. Her competition is spreading lies that Utah killed the real estate agent, and put her mask on him.

During her investigation, Utah finds that the dead real estate agent's widow was trying to sell a large plot of land she bought in town. She and her deceased husband were blackmailing men on the town council to try to swing the vote on whether the city would buy their land.

There are a large host of characters in this novel. We learn about a lot of people in this town, including the city council members/spouses, Utah's mom and step dad, the new owner of the local diner, as well as Utah's pets. It is hard to keep all the people straight. Maybe if this is a continuing series, there would be time to get to known the residents a little better.

'89 Walls

Seth is a high school student. He has had a crush on Quinn since entering high school. In his senior year, he decides to pass her a note declaring his love. At the time, Quinn has a rich boyfriend. Eventually she break ups with said boyfriend and dates Seth.

Quinn herself is from a relatively wealthy family. She and Seth share a history class together. Then have a cool teacher who engages them with current political events. This drives Quinn to debate her own father, something getting into heated arguments with him.

Seth is poor. His dad died at war when Seth was young. His mom has multiple sclerosis. As a result, Seth must work a job and figures he needs to forget about college to take care of his mom. His history teacher talks him into applying for college. When Seth tells him mom about this, she eventually kills herself.

Quinn goes away to college in Washington DC. Seth moves in with his aunt. But he plans to apply for financial aid and go to college himself a semester later. Is there a sequel in the works here?

Broken Lines

An EMP blast has killed all power and electronics. People devolve in Mike's neighborhood. Many demand that he share the food he has stored away for such an event. Luckily, he has an old Jeep that survived the EMP blast. He also has a cabin in the woods that should be safe from the neighborhood.

Unfortunately there is a biker gang set up in a town close to Mike's cabin. And the gang members are really bad people. Mike and his family will have to wage war against the gang. The battle begins when Mike's daughter sneaks out and tries to take on the gang herself.

Mike finds a farmer close to his cabin. The farmer has gone crazy like the people from Mike's old neighborhood. The farmer wants to kill everybody in Mike's cabin, and steal Mike's stash of ammo. Luckily, the farmer's son Billy, who initially shot at Mike to scare him off, decides that it would be wrong to wipe out good people like Mike.

Eventually Mike and his family travel to a big city that allegedly has regained some power. Wouldn't you know it? The city is run by the troops that work for an evil guy who wants to essentially take over the USA. They just enlisted Mike because he is a survivor and a warrior.

Limited Wish

This book is the second in the Impossible Time series. I confess that I did not read the first book. Nick is the main character. He is a math prodigy whose father passed away. Nick also has cancer. He previously met a man who went by the name Demus, who claims to be Nick from a future time.

Nick finds a professor who is brilliant. Nick stages a sit in on one of the professor's classes. He alerts the professor to an error in some of his calculations. Then Nick proceeds to correct them and add insight of his own. The grand thing about this is that Nick is in middle school. He immediately gets admitted to college under tutelage of this professor.

Previous Nick was dating the beautiful Mia. It seems Mia has a new boyfriend who is an actor. Nick gets into trouble with some of the big college boys. Another girl, Helen, appears and saves Nick. These are the two girls Nick is attracted to. He wants to get back with Mia. He is also interested in Helen, who has a perfect boyfriend in college.

Nick sees somebody else who looks like Helen. She is chased by phantoms that Nick blocks as she gets away. This starts a bad luck streak where it seems Nick is doomed to die. Turns out this girl is the future daughter of Nick and Helen, who has come into the past to right some wrongs related to time travel.

The books starts out with a lot of British slang which I had a hard time following. I got past it though. There were a lot of interesting ideas in this book, like being able to see a lot of possible futures happening at once. It also touches on how going back in time and changing things can affect things which seem to have already happened.

Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox

Artemis Fowl's mom is deathly sick. He tries to use some magic to heal her. Too bad he fails. And he loses the magic ability he gained as well. The disease is identified. Only some fluid from a certain type of lemur can cure his mom. But they have been extinct for many years.

Artemis enlists the help of his pixie friend Holly. Together they travel back in time. It just so happens that a younger Artemis had sold the last lemur of its kinds a long time ago. Artemis and Holly need to go back, steal that lemur from Artemis' younger self, and return to the present.

They run into some trouble. Another evil pixie has determined that if she gets the lemur, she can obtain ultimate power. They also need to deal with an evil man who wants to kill the lemur to end its race. We meet 10 year old Artemis in the past. He is just as crafty as the Artemis of today. This makes the theft extremely difficult.

Caching In: A Geocaching Love Story

Ally Cooper has dumped her cheating boyfriend. She wasted many years on him. She works with her best friend Chelsea at a bank. Chelsea has work luck in love, as she was dating a guy that recently got engaged to another woman. To make matters worse, Ally's friend Chelsea got pregnant.

Ally is into fitness. On one hike, she met some people who turned her on to geocaching. This is a game where you try to go find caches that people hide around the world. While on her first caching trip, she meets Seth, a good looking guy that works at a bed and breakfast.

Ally would like to get a promotion at work. However her boss seems to want her to have sex with him to get the promotion. Eventually Ally's friend Chelsea also tries to get the same promotion. And Chelsea is desperate due to the impending pregnancy.

The main love story revolves around Seth's past marriage, and we come to find out he had a daughter through that marriage that died. This makes it difficult for Seth to commit to any new relationship, as he continues to grieve the loss of his daughter. Strangely enough, Seth and his ex-wife are still good friends.

Bad Haircut

This is another set of stories by Tom Perrotta. I previously enjoyed his Nine Inches book. These stories almost seem autobiographical. The settings is the 1970s, where Buddy, our main character, is mostly going to high school.

Perrotta has the ability to quick bring you into the scene and feel like you are part of the action. There is nothing astounding about the main character. The beauty lies in the details that Perrotta decides to include in his stories.

You know Perrotta is the master when he can end the book with a funeral that keeps you on the edge of your seat. However, once again, there is no real unusual piece of the story. Just masterful storytelling here.

I know I said this before. But I got to get myself more books by this author.

Fail-Safe Investing

There are a couple premises in this book. One is that nobody can predict the future. Even advisors that have a stellar track record could fall flat tomorrow. Speculative investing should be avoided, or limited to money you are not afraid to lose. Instead, a four part investment technique can keep you gaining over the long haul with minimal risk.

Browne thinks you should split your investment into complementary areas such as gold, treasury bills, stocks, and bonds. Any one of those could be falling. But usually the complementary ones would be rising at that time. And vice versa. You can take advantage of occasional big gains from any one of those categories. These are holdings you can acquire and forget.

Browne also has some side notes. You should keep some funds in a foreign account. Don't make any money overseas so you don't have to report the earnings. Don't leave a trail or link that account to your other current accounts. And don't get any regular correspondence from the foreign bank holding your funds.

Lessons From a Third Grade Dropout

I saw a video of a college commencement ceremony. It was by Rick Rigsby. Previously I had never heard of this guy. But he was very inspirational. So I decided to buy his book. Rigsby explains the philosophy of his late father. While his dad only made it to the third grade, he had wisdom.

There were several useful ideas from Rigsby's dad. One of them was to always be an hour early. Another was to always do the very best job. A theme of his actions was to always be helping people. These are all signs of great integrity.

Rigsby needed the lessons from his dad as his wife died and left him with two young sons. His dad had little to say to him - "Just stand." Rigsby's father passed away shortly after his wife. I am not sure if I wholeheartedly recommend this book. You should definitely look up his commencement video on YoutTube.

Nine Inches

Nine Inches is a set of short stories told by one Tom Perrotta. It was kind of nice ready a lot of different unrelated tales. I will focus on one of the later ones. Dude is a high school student. He got a job illegally taking SAT tests for other students. He worked for a boss that set up the tests.

Normally this dude would be taking tests for strangers. But this time around, it was for a kid in his school. Obviously the kid came from money. The boss paid our guy $500 to pass the SAT test for his clients. Passing the test was easy. He also had to go to sleep early the prior night, not drink any alcohol, etc.

There was one other problem with the current dude he was taking the test for. The guy went to a party the night before, and hooked up with the girl our guy had the hots for. Oops. You know what that means? Even though our guy knew all the answers to the SAT test, he made sure the client failed the exam miserably.

Now there was a lot more to this story. But that was the crux. The true genius of the stories like this one in the book were the details. It is hard to convey these details in a summary book report. I know I will be looking for more books by Tom Perrotta. Hopefully they will be short story anthologies too.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

This book was subtitled "The Origins of the Internet". It was a tough read, as they covered a lot of detail. The origins trace back to the Arpanet. ARPA was a department of defense division that looked into future technologies. They initially set out to connect a few computer sites. The contract was won by a small company that did a lot of due diligence for their bid.


Once the few sites were connected across the USA, many others wanted to join. The hardware was expensive. And it took the contractor time to debug the hardware produced by the manufacturer. But they got computers networked. Programs such as email needed to be developed to work with the networked computers.


As more and more sites needed to be connected, and sometimes the sites had different computers and/or networks, there was a need to figure out how to connect disparate networks. That was researched performed by more scientists. And a little after that, local networks needed to be connected. This gave rise to Ethernet networking.


The original contractor for the first work arranged for an anniversary to celebrate everyone involved. They had to invite around 25 different people based on all the work done at different times. One of the principals had already passed away. Others were joining or creating companies to make money off the Internet. This is all prior to the invention of the world wide web. That is a story for a different book.

Emily the Strange - the Lost Days

In this story we meet Earwig. She seems to have lost her memory. She is in a strange town. When she gets hungry, she goes to a diner and ends up doing odd jobs for food. She sleeps in a makeshift box behind the café.


Earwig gets evidence that her real name is Molly. She goes back home in the middle of the book to meet her two parents. They have lot of documentation, including pictures and video, of Molly growing up with them. Somehow all this sounds wrong to Earwig. Eventually she figures she cannot be Molly.


Later Earwig gets in touch with the real Molly. She also returned to the town she woke up in with her memory gone. She then finds out she is related to the original owner of the diner, who is deceased. Things heat up when we find out that owner and some rich kids in town were from two different fighting clans.


Earwig needs to find a way to protect the ownership of the diner. One of the rich kids is trying to take possession of it by any means necessary. And it seems in this town, bribes help get things done. I need to read some more books about this Earwig, or as she is properly known, Emily the Strange.

Can You Ever Forgive Me

I saw the movie first in this instance. It starred Melissa McCarthy. It was based on an autobiographical book by Lee Isreal. I just read the book. While the content of the book is producing and selling forged letters by celebrities, it feels like that is just a backdrop to give you a peek into Israel's life.

Israel started out good as a New York Times bestseller. But them she came upon hard times. She used her research skills to figure out what type of letters celebrities may have written. Then she wrote then and passed them off as originals. She made sure to use old paper to make them look authentic.

After a while, people began to catch onto the fakes. So Israel started stealing actual letters. She would leave fake copies behind in the libraries. She would sometimes add content to the originals to make them more interesting (and more valuable).

The collectors got wise again. So Israel used a co-conspirator to pawn off the forgeries. Even that was discovered. The FBI got involved. Israel feared jail time. She destroyed all evidence, and obtained help from a lawyer. She did plead guilty and only received house arrest.

After this debacle, Israel got a job as a copyeditor for children's books. Her co-conspirator died before being sent to jail.

Hatching Twitter

This book chronicles the early days of Twitter. There were many founder and CEOs that came and went. Most departures were not voluntary. One early employee was Noah Glass. Apparently he got a bit crazy and was fired early on. Then Jack Dorsey became CEO. He would later go on to found Square, a mobile payments company.

Jack was not prepared to be a CEO. It became obvious, and he was moved out to a non-voting board member. He ceased being a Twitter employee and lost all influence initially. He did continue to do interviews, and self proclaimed himself inventor of Twitter.

Evan Williams was the money behind Twitter. He owned the company that initially developed Twitter. He succeeded Jack as the CEO of Twitter. He had some shortcomings, such as not being able to make decisions quickly and hiring his friends for top positions in the company. He was essentially fired when Jack returned to the company.

The book chronicled the earlier days of Twitter, when they had problems keeping the site up. It also covered many attempts at people trying to purchase the company. Stories of original employees, especially those in high positions at the company were discussed. In the end, the assorted CEOs got rich (billionaires) from the company.