A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

 by Hank Green

449 pgs  (The Carls series #2)

Hank Green's A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor picks up about six months after An Absolutely Remarkable Thing left off. April May, the young woman who skyrocketed to unprecedented fame overnight with her documentation of the first of the Carls (10-foot tall alien samurai robots that suddenly appeared scattered all over the world) died at the end of the latter, but her body was never discovered. At the time of her death, all the Carls disappeared as quickly and inexplicably as they had appeared, taking with them the common dreams they had implanted on people all over the world. Six months later, April's friends, along with most everyone else, are still grieving over the loss of both April and the Carls.

Peter Petrawicki, who was indirectly responsible for April's death, has built an offshore research company that uses technology tied to the Carls, and is now worth billions. But with his company's success come changes that threaten to forever change the world, and not for the better. His company, an amalgamation of Facebook, Second Life, and a Bitcoin-type data-mining company, has the potential to destroy the economies of the world and usher in a form of dystopia never contemplated before.

This book took me longer to get into than its predecessor, and for the first half of it I wasn't sure whether it would end up representing a sophomore slump for Hang Green. Thankfully, by the end, I remain a big fan of Green and his storytelling.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

 by Bill Bryson

450 pgs

Bill Bryson cut his literary teeth by writing entertaining, and oftentimes, hilarious travel memoirs through The United States, Great Britain, and Australia. More recently, his books have dealt with history and science. With The Body - A Guide for Occupants, Bryson takes us on an interesting and entertaining journey throughout the human body.

He covers every aspect of the body, from the cellular level, on up to the tissues, organs, and systems it's comprised of. He provides anecdotal and fascinating explanations of how doctors and scientists' understanding of how the body works has grown over time, and how they often gained their knowledge accidentally, or through the pain and suffering of patients and experimental subjects.

He covers what it takes to keep the body functioning at its best, as well as why it eventually wears out, succumbs to diseases, attacks itself through cancers, or simply quits.

I found the book both fascinating and enjoyable. I'm a big fan of Bryson's books, and would most likely read anything he ever decides to write, regardless of subject matter or critical reviews. The book didn't make me laugh as frequently as many of his others have, but that was okay with me. I still felt like I was being entertained while being educated.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

333 pgs  (The Saxon Chronicles series #1)

The Last Kingdom is the first book in Bernard Cromwell's The Saxon Chronicles series, and the inspiration for the Netflix series of the same name. It's set in the ninth century in what would eventually become England, but what was then the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia. Alfred, the son of Aethelwulf, King of Wessex, will soon become king and will be instrumental in laying the groundwork for a united England, but will spend most of his life defending Wessex against Viking attacks.

The book begins in the year 866 A.D. and centers on the life of a Saxon named Uhtred, son of Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg in Northumbria. At the age of nine, Uhtred is captured by the Danish Earl Ragnar the Fearless during a raid in which his father was killed. He's now the rightful heir of Bebbanburg, but instead, spends his formative years being raised as a Dane.

Eventually Uhtred finds favor with Ragnar, and as he grows up, is taught to become a skilled warrior. As a young man, he accompanies Ragnar during the conquests of Mercia and East Anglia, but during the battle for Wessex, Uhtred is once again taken captive, but this time, it's by the Saxons, bringing him back to where they believe he belongs.

The Last Kingdom is by itself a great story, but it also sets the stage for the rest of the series that follows. Uhtred, born a Saxon and raised a Dane, seems destined to play a pivotal role in the struggle to unite England and defend it from the conquering Danes.

Years ago, I watched the first season of the series when it originally aired on BBC America. I remember enjoying it but forgetting about it when it moved over to Netflix. Reading this first book in the series has piqued my interest in revisiting the series there, while continuing to read Cornwell's books.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The Drowned Cities

 by Paolo Bacigalupi

434 pgs  (Ship Breaker series #2)

Set in the same war-torn version of the world he created in Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities--while not a sequel--further builds on the dystopian reality now facing humanity, along with the genetically engineered monsters it has created.

The book begins in a dark prison cell, where Tool, a killing machine created from tiger, dog, hyena, and human genes, has been kept and tortured. The guards believe the creature has finally died, but when one of the unlocks the gate to enter, Tool escapes in a whirlwind of death and carnage that takes mere seconds to complete.

Mahlia is a teenage girl who was orphaned by the war several years ago. She now scrapes by an existence working as a medic, scavenging what little medicines remain and using them to treat freedom fighters in the ongoing war between the factions. Her life was once saved by a man she calls Mouse, and the two have looked out for one another ever since.

When together they come across Tool, unconscious again and near death from multiple wounds, Mahlia recognizes an opportunity to possibly escape The Drowned Cities and the war once and for all.

The Drowned Cities is a dystopian book written for slightly younger readers, but don't let that lead you to assume the dystopian elements of the story have been watered down to make them more palatable for teenagers. Bacigalupi's story is just as dark, violent, and hopeless as McCarthy's The Road, although I can't imagine McCarthy would have considered adding a tiger-dog-hyena-human hybrid as one of the main characters.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

I am Radar

by Reif Larsen
653 pgs

Several year ago, I read Reif Larsen's first book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, and thought it was a fantastic story, ingeniously told. So, my hopes were pretty high when I picked up I am Radar. It's a big book, and I thought "Great, plenty of pages to enjoy reading this time around." Unfortunately, the number of pages this time turned out to be a symptom of the overall problem I had with Larsen's sophomore novel.

The book begins on the night of Radar's birth. Moments before he emerged into the world, the hospital experienced an inexplicable loss of power, and for some reason, the emergency generators didn't kick in, so Radar was born in complete darkness. When the lights flickered back on, the doctor found himself holding a baby with skin darker than he had ever seen before. Even if Radar's parents had both been black, the darkness of his skin still have seemed unusual. The fact that they were both white, meant Radar's life would never be "normal."

At a very young age, Radar's mother took him to a group of Norwegian scientists, who promised their experimental methods--which used electricity--could cure him of his condition. Ultimately they were successful in lightening his skin tone significantly, but he would suffer from the negative side effects for decades to come.

The book then jups around to various times and places around the world, from Yugoslavia in the 1980s to Cambodia in the 1950s, and in each time and place, threads leading back to Radar and his life many years later are slowly revealed.

It wounds like a promising story, and at its core, it is. But unfortunately, it gets buried in Larsen's unnecessary literary sprawl. Larsen seemed to try too hard this time around, almost as if he sat down to write with the goal of writing something profound. It didn't work. Profundity just can't be forced. Case in point.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Leopard

by Jo Nesbø
517 pgs  (Hary Hole series #8)

Having been traumatized by the events of the recent Snowman case, Harry Hole has fled the Norwegian Crime Squad and is now in Hong Kong, racking up gambling debts and using heroine as a means to kick his drinking problem. But his former department are in desperate need of his help tracking down Oslo's latest serial killer. So far, two women's bodies have been discovered, both killed in disturbingly ingenious ways, and the Norwegian Crime Squad has no forensic evidence nor clues to go on. 

Bot not long after Hole begins investigating, a third woman is killed, and Hole discovers the connection the three women share, they all recently spent the same night in an isolated mountain hostel. It quickly becomes a race against time to track down and stop the killer before more guests of the hostel are killed.

The Leopard is the meatiest book in the series so far, coming in at over 500 pages, but it doesn't read like a particularly long book. From the first chapter, I was hooked, and as always with the series, found myself pulling for Nesbø's intensely flawed protagonist. It's a gritty and sometimes stomach churning story, but it's an excellent one.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

by Max Brooks
282 pgs

Fourteen years after publishing World War Z, in which he gives a brilliant account of the war between the human race and the zombies, Max Brooks releases another cautionary tale. This time, he uses interviews and the found journal of a survivor as his source materials to provide an account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre. That's right, this time around, it's Bigfoot. Need I say More?

Greenloop is a small affluent community near Mount Rainier consisting of wealthy and (not surprisingly) ill-prepared people, who have chosen the isolated, but comfortable lifestyle Greenloop provides. It's only 90 minutes away from Seattle, but its residents are far enough away from civilization that their weekly groceries arrive via drones. Kate Holland is the newest person to move to Greenloop, and it's her journal through which most of the story is told.

Within days of Kate's arrival, Mount Rainier erupts, and the eruption severs the few remaining ties Greenloop has with the rest of the world completely. But Kate and her new neighbors have little to no time to consider how they'll survive the weeks or potentially months before they're rescued before even bigger problems arrive. The eruption has also displaced the creatures, which for years have been rumored to be living in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and sent them right into Greenloop.

For anyone who has ever thought, "Enough with the vampires and zombies. Give us a new threat to humanity," Devolution is a welcome response. It's not without its flaws (halfway through the book you'll be asking yourself when Kate has the time to write in her journal when she's spending all of her time trying to avoid having her skull crushed in by a sasquatch), but it's still a very enjoyable book. Hopefully, it will get the same cinematic treatment World War Z did one day, and we'll finally have a Bigfoot movie that will help us forget Harry and the Hendersons.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆