James

A very enjoyable thriller, but drags at points

Revisado: 01-26-25

A great continuation of the Terminal List series, great fights, and lots of intrigue and discovery.
I already started the next in the series.

Some of the characters are well-developed but some are caricatures. The good guys are over-the-top good and the bad guys completely bad.

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Entertaining but not believable

Revisado: 11-24-24

This was interesting and entertaining; a fun police drama with a full cast.
The mystery was interesting and moderately complex.

However, I didn't ultimately consider the 'resolution' believable or realistic, and

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I knew early on that the perpetrator was someone other than their main suspect.

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Interesting story with some good twists

Revisado: 11-24-24

This was an interesting and enjoyable mystery with some considerable twists and surprises.
If you like mysteries, it's well worth reading.
The characters were fairly interesting, though I found the 'bad guy' rather annoying.

Ultimately, the case(s) seemed to ignore numerous police as simply not doing anything, not using forensic evidence, etc. The police's only role was to give a few useful tips to our real investigators. They didn't really investigate any of the real, or false, perpetrators. Only our real protagonists were capable of doing that, and the police didn't investigate them either. So, I didn't ultimately find it truly believable.

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Not a normal Longmire but fun

Revisado: 11-24-24

This was a fun adventure/thriller with a few characters we love, and some new ones.

It's not strictly speaking a Longmire mystery or a police drama. There is a bit of mystery in there but it's more a story of man against nature.

It was enjoyable, but could have been longer and explored a bit more.

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Fun science fiction adventure

Revisado: 11-04-24

This was an enjoyable science fiction adventure. I enjoyed the snarky characters and the action.

Will definitely read more in the series.

One minor comment that I did find unbelievable was that they said that most peacekeeper armor was the same size, just with internal padding for smaller people. That's been tried with armor and spacesuits and simply doesn't work well.

The rescue at the beginning seemed like an unnecessarily extravagant way to find crew.

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Somewhat interesting but a stretch

Revisado: 10-25-24

This was a semi-interesting analysis of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Jekyll/Hyde. It did provide some insights and more detail as to what was going on in each. I certainly got pseudo-political and societal aspects from Dracula that I hadn't previously.

That being said, the author strains to find insights even where they don't exist. In particular, it seems that he felt it crucial to find feminist or misogynistic aspects to each, whether they're really there or not. Some of these were really a stretch. Then, to further stretch the point, he references various movie adaptations and vaguely related books to demonstrate. In these cases, he's not really bringing these 'big 3' books to light -- he's postulating on how MUCH later authors and moviemakers used similar characters or ideas.

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Interesting premise but kind of a misnomer.

Revisado: 10-23-24

The book is fairly interesting at times, and makes some good points.
However, the book seemed to be less about how to achieve greater things, and more about how to identify hidden potential in others. Again, some of this was interesting, but a lot of it seemed to be rationalizing how to select people based on ANYTHING except the current facts (grades, job history, etc.). He speculated on everything from grade trajectory (instead of GPA) to giving applicants 'credit' for having had a tough life.

He mentioned the Finnish education system and seemed to imply that we could do the same thing here, neglecting that we a) don't have a homogeneous population, b) that it assumes parental support that is often lacking here, and c) that trying to move to a similar system in the US would crush state and federal budgets.

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A good novel with emergency preparedness lessons

Revisado: 10-13-24

As fiction, this was pretty good. The characters are real and their dealings pretty intricate.
The culmination was quite touching.

That being said, at times it seemed to drag a bit and felt a bit like reading "Crime and Punishment" -- you're watching a train wreck (or truck wreck?) in slow motion, knowing that bad things are going to happen though the characters seem oblivious.

In any case, Lisa definitely gets additional credit for this being another good emergency preparedness book. The story helped drive home some good emergency preparedness tips.

Recommend as a novel, recommend again for preparedness.
Lisa is doing a great work with her books.

The narration was pretty good, though the husband's voice was a bit odd, making him seem strange.

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An interesting near-future war book

Revisado: 10-09-24

This was an interesting and fairly insight near-future military account.
It was some good battle sequences and an interesting overall campaign.

I liked the introduction of evolving technologies and military usage.
We switched between characters, but those characters were interesting and their perspectives useful.

There were some aspects that were hard to believe or disappointing:
1) That China could develop weapons as advanced as the beetles and us be blissfully unaware when then manufacture thousands of them. Similarly for us developing a whole fleet of new fighter-attack aircraft.
2) The simple preponderance of robots, UAVs, etc. was a bit hard to accept. In particular, while I could see the Chinese building a lot, I would think that they'd eventually default back to the 'human wave' approach when technology losses got expensive.
3) In the book, the Chinese bombard Honolulu but then the entire focus is on fighting in Taiwan. As Japan learned, if you bomb Hawaii (or mainland US), it's ON and we're not just going to focus on the regional fight -- we're going to find some way to destroy some Chinese ports or some such.
4) The discussion of broader events was very limited. In this kind of scenario, I think we and our allies would destroy all those man-made Chinese islands, China would lose most favored nation trading status, we'd shift some production back home, etc. Some of that could have been explored.

The narration was pretty good, but the narrator had odd/annoying pronunciations for a few words (adversary, etc.) and the book/narrator pronounced ranks/titles in unrealistic ways. It is extremely rare for anyone in the Air Force or Space Force to address someone as "Technical Sergeant" or even "Tech Sergeant." You might refer to them that way, but in directly addressing them, it would be "Sergeant ..."

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Fascinating look at the human brain.

Revisado: 08-13-24

This was a very fascinating book and gave some truly interesting insights into the human brain and a bit on corollary AI systems. The analysis of the history of intelligence was quite interesting, highlighting several key developments over millions of years.

Some of the discussions did occasionally get a little long but, on the whole, it's a very good book.

If you're interested in neuroscience, biology, human or artificial intelligence, I highly recommend this book.

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