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.