Cottage weekend
Gallery: 2006 – June – Race weekend, birthday and Wakefield
Ottawa race weekend, meeting baby Laura, celebrating Paul’s birthday, and visiting Wakefield
Ottawa Race weekend
Ottawa Race weekend
Ottawa Race weekend
Laura
Laura
Paul’s birthday
Paul’s birthday
Paul’s birthday
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
Wakefield by steam train
VIDEO: Wakefield by Steam Train
Gallery: 2006 – May – Cottage weekend
The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders (1970) – BR00231 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
Plot or Premise
A robbery crew is planning to rip off an entire small apartment building of tenants in one night.
What I Liked
I had read a lot of Sanders’ novels before I got to this one, out of order. While it is the first of the Edward X. Delaney series, he is a relatively small part of the book near the end. Instead, it reads like the same structure of the movie, the Usual Suspects (which drew inspiration from the book). There are scenes in the present day, after the day of the robbery, with people being interviewed about what happened. But in addition to their witness statements, there are also numerous electronic surveillance tapes of the various criminals being surveilled by a bunch of different police groups, none of which are talking to each other.
What I Didn’t Like
I was on the fence for the rating between four stars or five. While the book is awesome, there is a niggling detail in the plot that bothers me. The “premise” of all the surveillance is that all of these crooks were being surveilled by separate law enforcement units (different precincts, different federal agencies, and so on), and so none of them had the “big picture” to prevent it. Which is fine, it’s a tale as old as time as they say, and a popular theme for crime sprees like serial killers. No one was looking at the cases as connected. Which is fine as a premise, except in each of the fictional tapes referred to as the premise for the book, it is very clear not only that a crime is about to happen, but in many of them, the actual day of the crime, at least one of the major players, and in some cases, the address of the building. Yet NONE of the law enforcement agencies portrayed as running the wiretaps bother to warn the precinct where it will happen, or when, or how? It’s not very realistic in plotting, as the tapes are made several months in advance, according to the text. If it was all in the week ahead, potentially the transcripts weren’t ready or nobody had listened to the tapes yet, sure. But months ahead, someone would have warned someone so the cops could be ready. In the end, I decided it wasn’t a big enough plot device to knock it down a full star.
The Bottom Line
The first book of a master storyteller
Agency by William Gibson (2021) – BR00230 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
Plot or Premise
People from the future are reaching back again into a version of their past.
What I Liked
When I read Peripheral, I had no idea it was part of a trilogy or that there were other books in the series. I just knew that I enjoyed Gibson’s writing and looked for other recent books by him. I found Agency, and initially thought it was a similar theme to the previous book, not that it was actually in the same universe. A young woman is hiding from the paparazzi because of a relationship she once had with a very famous guy and takes on a computer-related job to pay the bills. She is to interact with a virtual assistant / pseudo game-AI and see how lifelike it can appear, and whether it displays signs of self-agency. The company intends to monitor all of her interactions with the program, use it to improve it, etc. Except the program doesn’t like that, and becomes more self-aware. Everyone involved realizes the program is more than they thought, and the woman is now in danger from the people who hired her who want to shut everything down, others who want to access the program, etc. It’s a race to the end where no one but the program knows the finish line.
What I Didn’t Like
There is a nebulous connection between this reality and the previous book, but it seems to be further back in time. Yet some of the other characters from the slightly later past end up getting involved too, without much explanation if they are crossing old timelines or not. Plus, while the series is called Jackpot, you never find out really what the Jackpot is or why it’s named that…at some point in the future, a series of lines of societal degradation finally reach a tipping point, much of the world’s population gets eliminated, and you end up with a huge divide between the rich and poor — all after the “Jackpot”. Maybe it will be explained in Book 3, not yet announced. The socio-economic manipulations are not quite as prevalent, but some societal stuff happens in the background, far enough back that you are now in the recent timelines of our own society, yet way beyond what we can do even now.
The Bottom Line
More like books set in the same universe than a trilogy
