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.