Over the weekend I read "Bad Blood," the story of the rise and fall of Theranos, a Silicon Valley startup who claimed to have invented a new device to analyze blood in small quantities -- from a finger prick, instead of a venous draw.
The only problem is, it never worked. The CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, deceived her investors and the FDA and her customers for about seven years before the whole thing collapsed. Fascinating story of greed, avarice, blind ambition, reality distortion fields and gullibility. Extremely well written.
Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg (1966- )
Published 2012
The Murder Pit, the second Arrowood-mystery novel by Mick Finlay. Arrowood is a detective who works in the shadow of Sherlock Holmes.... (read: while Sherlock and Watson help the rich people from London, Arrowood and Barnett must do it with the poor.)
Together with The Murder Pit ^^ (which goes in with me in the train to work) I started reading a massive thriller, called Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky.
I read that he's a famous film-director and wrote his first novel about 20 years ago, which was called The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
It starts nice and creepy, although a bit predictable, but maybe I've read to many Stephen Kings and Peter Straubs
The Soft Whisper of the Dead by Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)
Published 1982
Beware by Richard Laymon. True to form, the mayhem starts right away.
Lou
Looking forward to my day in court.
Clickers Forever - A Tribute to J F Gonzalez by Brian Keene and a score of others
Sadly, JF (Jesus) Gonzalez passed away from cancer not that long ago. A brilliant horror author, who might best be known for his "Clickers" series
of books. (with CGI as it is, these are screaming to be made into movies). Keene and a host of his peers pay tribute to Gonzalez with this book. Either
in regaling the reader with humorous anecdotes of their interaction with Gonzalez, or by offering up a Clicker short story of their own. It is apparent that Jesus
was quite revered in the community. He apparently was also an encyclopedia of all things horror as well. Fascinating read.
A Comfort Zone is not a Life Sentence
Vachel Lindsay: The Art of the Moving Picture. Written in 1915, updated in 1922 (if I'm remembering correctly), established a lot of the aesthetic values for movies (and some that ceased to be relevant with the advent of talkies).
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Statistics by Robert S. Witte and John S. Witte
Ursula K. Le Guin The Last Interview.
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Collapse by Jared Diamond a followup to Guns, Germs and Steel
Analysis ( and speculation ) as to the failure of human habitation in various places around the world at various points in history.
Tying together environmental, economic, political factors as well as human nature as causes for Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, the Maya to fail.
Published in 2007, it is interesting how some of the topics have held up, and some of the theories have become more accepted.
And how some concerns are not all that new.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
Nostalgia, you know, ain't what it used to be. Furthermore, they tells me, it never was.
“A Man Who Does Not Read Has No Appreciable Advantage Over the Man Who Cannot Read” - Mark Twain
I read Collapse a few years ago, and found it a most interesting read. Perhaps the most dramatic section is the comparison of Haiti to the Dominican Republic...and given what has happened on that border, it's some of the best evidence for his thesis.
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix
Published 2014
Reading Horrorstör for a horror discussion group. Several employees overnight in a haunted IKEA-esque store.
"Southern Gods" by John Hornor Jacobs (1971- )
Published 2011
Bookmarks