The Diary of A Bookseller

This reference is cutely honest and hilarious 😂
In the midst for something light to make my day.

Accomplishment by the weekends

Paris By The Book by Liam Callanan was finished a few days ago.


This was a story of family. A broken family searching to piece itself back together. With a bookstore in Paris added as the backdrop, I simply couldn't resist but pick it up.

A missing person, a grieving family, a curious clue: a half-finished manuscript set in Paris. Heading off in search of its author, a mother and her daughters find themselves in France, rescuing a failing bookstore and drawing closer to unexpected truths.

Some passages I like :

Joking, sarcasm, anger was a way of pretending that I was fine, that I didn't miss him. And part of me, I confess, did not. But the reader in me, the makeshift muse, word-drunk and bereaved, she suffered. And, yes, the rest of me, my fingers and mouth and hair and stomach, I missed him like air, like water, like a second skin, like a book you love, you need, but is no longer on the shelf when you go to look because it turns out it was never written.

Reading him in double-spaced, 12-point Times Roman was an entirely different experience, and not just because he fussily preferred throwback typewriter fonts: the words here seemed jittery, loose, like a photograph in a tray of developer that refuses to fix.

I didn't love my job, but loved having a job. I was proud of having a job. I was proud of supporting our family - and supporting a fellow artist. And I did believe that, that Robert and I were fellow artists.

Madame does not believe in fairy tales, and nor, for that matter, does Eleanor: it's not a question of belief, I've heard Eleanor say more than once. But here is what I believe, Stories provide a frame, a form, a mold. And a good story, one that's retold for generations, demands you pour the messy contents of your own life into it to see what happens as it hardens and sets.

I don't get interviewed about writing, but if I did, I would say that what writers need fear most is not writer's block but writer's knifes, some hammered and sharpened against that selfsame block, able to cut through anything.

Raising my kids is about raising yourself as a grown-up, and I was enough of one now to know, unlike Robert, when to leave.

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Bought Saturday and finished reading today. A quick read indeed.

First of all, I do not want to compare it with the author's previous best-selling books decade ago - Hannibal Lecter and The Silence of the Lambs. Just read it as it is - not that bad I should say.

Cari Mora is the caretaker of an old mansion, notoriously known as previously belonging to drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Living in Miami Beach, Cari is trying to stay under the radar and out of trouble. Years ago, she fled to the United States to escape her life as a child soldier, and has had wobbly immigration status ever since. Hans-Peter Schneider does bad deeds for even worse people, including the kidnapping and selling of young women to the highest bidder. When he spots Cari Mora, he knows that she will be his next target and when he discovers the infamous house she is responsible for (and what possibly lies underneath it), he sees an oppourtunity he can’t turn down.

Radicalised

Radicalised by Cory Doctorow.

The book contains four thought provoking,  at times downright disheartening and yet entertaining self-contained short stories, each taking on a meaningful social issue we are facing now.

My favourites are "Radicalised" as well as the first story, "Unauthorised Bread".

"Radicalised" is the story of a desperate husband, a darkness forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system.

"Unauthorised Bread" is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman's perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster.

In short, it is a collection that touch bothering issues - refugees, racism, terrorism and organisations.



Some excerpts that are brutally honest :

"Look, Eagle, all I'm trying to say is that if your goal is to make sure that WR gets a fair trial, you're not achieving that goal. If your job is to muster public sentiment for police accountability, you're really not achieving the goal. I will stipulate that you're right about everything, but this isn't about right and wrong. You can be right, or you can be effective. Being effective means not reminding the entire human race that you are an unstoppable spaceman who only follows the rules when it suits you. As soon as you start reminding them of that fact, it will become the focus."

"Running headfirst into the system doesn't change the system, it just gives you a headache."

"Be realistic. This is the best we can hope for right now. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

Books Read

Brought this book - Begging To Die (Katie Maguire #10) by Graham Masterson - to Japan but didn't manage to finish it. Don't get me wrong, the thriller is fantastic, I was just too exhausted during the trip, and the mood was simply not for some nasty and horrific cases. Imagine someone gonna kill you by drilling a hole into your skull .....



A long Night In Paris by Dov Alfon was the second book I finished last week. A spy thriller full of insider knowledge on the bureaucracy of the Israeli Intelligence community. It all started when an Israeli was murdered in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, setting in motion with the main three parties involved : French, Israel and Macau (China), with some meddling from the US.  All things happened in little more than 24 hours. In the end, leaving you thinking who is spying on who? what is true and what is not?


A passage that I like and somehow resonate with what is happening :
The governing body was under the control of a fresh-eating virus that used the normal immune system - the law, media, military and intelligence agencies - to fool its own organs, to the extent that it had become impossible t distinguish between the healthy body and the virus.

VOX by Christina Dalcher is the latest.

Here is the book blurb :

Jean McClellan spends her time in almost complete silence, limited to just one hundred words a day. Any more, and a thousand volts of electricity will course through her veins. 

Now the new government is in power, everything has changed. But only if you're a woman. Almost overnight, bank accounts are frozen, passports are taken away and seventy million women lose their jobs. Even more terrifyingly, young girls are no longer taught to read or write. 

For herself, her daughter, and for every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice. This is only the beginning...

Never ever!!!

Book and Anime

Besides chasing down Godzilla:The Planet Eater and anime Hero Mask on Netflix, I also finished my reading of Love Like Blood by Mark Billingham.

Not bad.

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Shattered Mirror

Down one more thriller before year end.

Thrillers for August

Read these three during the month, even when travelling. I was definitely thrilled.

Carter Blake Triller Series

Presumed Dead by Mason Cross is the 5th and latest book of the series.

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THEN

Adeline Connor was the Devil Mountain Killer's final victim. After she was gunned down, the murderer disappeared and the killing spree ended.

NOW 

Carter Blake has been hired to do what he does best: to find someone. But this time he's hunting a dead girl - Adeline Connor's brother is convinced she's still alive.
But this town doesn't want an outsider digging up old business. And as Blake gets deeper into the case, it starts to become clear that the murders didn't just stop fifteen years ago.

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At first, it seems that Adeline Connor was the reason why the killer stopped killing 15 years ago but started killing again when she re-appeared.  only towards the end, you will find out that the real killer was someone else totally. Brilliant.

Z E R O

After Snowden's case in 2013 and the recent Facebook's data breaches related to the Cambridge Analtica scandal, reading this book by Marc Elsberg is startlingly thrilling if not alarming. It kept reminding me the first episode "Nosedive" of Black Mirror Season 3.

All about our so-called privacy, if there really is.

Here are some passages for pondering.

Kill The Father

First Kill The Angel and now Kill The Father by Sandrine Dozieri.  Absolutely thrilling.  Can't wait to read the next sequel though don't know when it will be out.

Here is the blurb.

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When a woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome and her six-year-old son goes missing, the police unit assigned to the case sees an easy solution: they arrest the woman’s husband and await his confession.

But the Chief of Rome’s Major Crimes unit doubts things are so simple. Secretly, he lures to the case two of Italy’s top analytical minds: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from having survived a bloody catastrophe, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo.

Fed through the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself “The Father,” Dante emerged from his ordeal with crippling claustrophobia but, also, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and hyper-observant capacities.

All evidence suggests that the Father is back and active after being dormant for decades. Indeed, he has left tell-tale signs that signal he’s looking forward to a reunion with Dante. But when Columba and Dante begin following the ever-more-bizarre trail of clues, they grasp that what’s really going on is darker than they ever imagined.

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With references likes  The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate", The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioural Sciences and Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness,  one can more or less guess what is it about.

Bone Ritual

Finished The Bone Ritual recently. This was after I'd read its sequel The Burnings last year November. A great read with the twists and turns that kept me guessing up to the very last minute.  The author definitely a food lover ..... many mouth-watering indonesia local delicacies was mentioned in the book.

Cotard Delusion

Kill The Angel by Sandrine Dazieri.

ABOUT
From the wildly inventive mind of thriller master Sandrone Dazieri, whose first novel featuring investigators Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, Kill the Father, was an international bestseller, comes the ingenious second novel in the series, Kill the Angel.

In Rome, a high-speed train hurtles into the city’s main station with a carriage full of dead bodies, the macabre discovery of which falls to Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli. Subsequently, the police receive a claim of responsibility and the threat of more murders to come. But neither Caselli nor her eccentrically brilliant ally, Dante Torre, are yet ready to buy the terrorist link.

As the two maverick investigators puncture the façade of what the perpetrator wants everyone to believe, they come close to dying several times.

Not for the first time, Dante’s bizarre childhood, during which he was kept confined for years in a concrete silo, enables him to see what others miss, and in this case, to connect with a kindred spirit of sorts, a woman named Giltine who experienced an equally bizarre childhood from which she emerged damaged, lethal, and full of murderous intent.

Adding to Giltine’s eerie fierceness is that, as the victim of a rare mental illness, she believes she’s already dead. She’s unacquainted with fear. And that makes her the most formidable foe Colomba and Dante have faced yet.

As the story climaxes, the duo finds themselves utterly on their own, on the outs with law enforcement and the only ones with a chance to make sure the waters of Venice don’t turn red with blood.

I was more interested in the state of the killer.

Giltine is the name of the goddess of death in ancient Lithuanian mythology. She has Cotard Delusion aka Walking Corpse Syndrome, a rare mental illness in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are already dead, do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. In her case, the decomposition of the largest organ of human - her skin. Thus she covers her body with bandages, or otherwise applies the orange-ish scented slimy foundations especially designed to slow the decay of the flesh which is used in the field of thanatocosmetics, to beautify the corpse and give it a pleasing appearance.

The wrappings came off the arm, taking with it all the remained of the skin, along with broad gobbets of necrotic flesh.  Giltine saw the exposed muscle fibers, the bone that was practically black with rot. The odor was so pungent that her eyes teared up. ~pg423

Can imagine it must be very painful.

My recent read

Bone Box by Faye Kellerman

The Water Knife (II)

Reading in progress ......

In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Angel Velasquez - leg-breaker, assassin, spy, and a Las Vegas water knife - "cuts" water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her luxurious developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet while the poor get dust. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in drought-ravaged Phoenix, it seems California is making a play to monopolize the life-giving flow of the river, and Angel is sent to investigate. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a drought-hardened journalist, and Maria Villarosa, a young refugee who survives by her wits in a city that despises everything she represents. For Angel, Lucy, and Maria, time is running out and their only hope for survival rests in each other’s hands. But when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only thing for certain is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.

The Water Knife

#thewaterknife #sweat #book

There were stories in sweat.
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about a person has ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day.

How could I resist but continue reading it into the wee hours with such interesting starting paragraphs?

Recent Read

The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius
The Burnings by Julian Lees

The Burnings is a crime series set in Jakarta, featuring inspektur Ruud Pujasmarta.

About
When Australian Jillian Parker's scorched remains are discovered in her burnt-out car Ruud Pujasumarta and his team are brought in to investigate what appears at first to be a routine homicide. But when Canadian citizen Anita Dalloway's charred body is found a few days later Ruud finds a banner unfurled by the corpse's feet. A verse from the Quran is scribbled across it, calling for unbelievers to be burned. The killer is targeting Christians. And the team's suspicions are confirmed when a third body, that of English backpacker Emily Grealish, turns up with the same M.O. But who is responsible? Is it the senior Australian diplomat from the embassy who was obsessed by the first victim? The Imam who preaches Sharia law? The Indonesian three-star military general taking backhanders and living a life of luxury in Jakarta? Or the local drug dealer with a score to settle? But Ruud is suspicious that the killer may be someone much closer to home, someone Ruud has trusted for many years. What unravels is a terrifying chain of events for Ruud. And what he discovers puts his and those around him lives in danger.

The story is thrilling, but I like it even more as the author also educates us about Jakarta, Indonesia especially the interesting street foods here and there.

After Dan brown's Origin, The Quantum Spy is another thriller relating to the hyper-fast Quantum Computing.

Since both books also mention D-Wave, it must be very impressive.  A leading edge cyber security firm has purchased the latest D-Wave 2000Q system and integrated with its own technology to solve critical and complex cyber security problems impacting governments and commercial enterprises. Hmmm ...... it does pique my curiosity.

The Gril Who Takes An Eye For An Eye

“First you find out the truth. then you take revenge.”

Salander Lisbeth is back.

This is my fifth book experience with her.  In this book, she has ended up in Flodberga Prison - sentenced to two months for refusing to cooperate with the police while protecting an endangered autistic boy. Salander being Salander, prison doesn't really bother her that much, but she is irate over the treatment of a beautiful Bangladeshi inmate named Faria. Faria--and soon Salander--are under threat of the prison's most evil prisoner, Benito, who frightens almost everyone - including fellow prisoners, guards, and even the warden.

In the Meanwhile, Salander's former guardian - elderly Holger Palmgren - comes into possession of confidential documents that detail cruel experiments Salander was subjected to as a child. With great difficulty, wheelchair-bound Palmgren makes his way to Flodberga Prison, and inform her about these new discoveries. Besides 'blackmailing' the warden into letting her use his computer to look into these decades-old events, Salander also asks journalist Mikael Blomkvist to gather information about a man named Leo Mannheimer.

As for Palmgren, he continues to pore over the documents, and finds the name of someone he's met - Professor Martin Steinberg. When Palmgren calls Steinberg to ask about the experiments, the professor freaks out and alerts his fellow perpetrator, Dr. Rakel Greitz, who's now an old woman suffering from cancer. Greitz isn't going to let her reputation be sullied, and will do anything to prevent this .....

By the way, this story is not all about Lisbeth Salander. Sure, it mentions her every now and then, but it's not that much about her.

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore | Origin

There were two big books inside my luggage from Singapore to Iran and back to Singapore.  Pity that I couldn't find time to finish a single book as was too exhausted after whole day touring places.

Anyway, I did finish both now.

The first book is Midnight At The Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan, a imaginative literary mystery novel set amidst the background of a bookstore, book lovers and books, in Colorado.  There were a murder case and a suicide case.

The story starts with one of Lydia's (the main narrator ) favourite book frogs, Joey, hangs himself in the history section.  A shocked Lydia is bewildered when she finds a photography of her birthday party when she was ten with her friends, Raj and Carol.  How is it possible that Joey has it?
Why Joey bequeaths his merger belongings to Lydia?  She finds books with cut out windows that can be linked with other books of the same size by the misplace stickers on them that providing cryptic clues. As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey's suicide, she also unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood.  Details from the one bloody night begin to circle back and force her to face it.

The second book is Origin by Dan Brown.  It may not be the best Robert Langdon book in my opinion but it's entertaining nevertheless.

With an unfamiliar world to him, the world of modern art and technology (E-Wave Quantum Computing), and on a quest to answer two of the most profound questions in human history.

Where do we come from?
Where are we going?

For thousands of years man has struggled with these questions and, in an attempt to fill the void where there is no definite answer, has created stories and gods to explain the inexplicable.

There is also a questioning of blind religious faith.

French artist Paul Gauguin's famous painting titled
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Though the answer to "Where are we going?" left me a little astonished, may be flabbergasted is a better word. It is definitely convincing, and in fact I can see that we are heading that direction, yet good or not I can't say.

I have the same question as Langdon :

The laws of physics alone can create life.

If the laws of physics are so powerful that they can create life ... who created the laws?!

I like this saying in the Epilogue :
"I don't believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect intended us to forgo their use."
Damn right.

Spy Thriller

My recent read.

This is the 3rd book in a series so there was some back story I was unfamiliar with.  Thus I wasn't sure about this one.

Sadly I didn't enjoy it that much.

The Story of My Life

This is the mysterious book given by National Library after signing up on the app during SG Coffee Festival last weekend.

Get a glimpse of the life of a few Singaporeans decades ago.