James’ Blog

Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

Warning there are some story details in this post.

This book was probably the hardest for me to read out of this series.  To mean right after the ending of The Girl Who Played with Fire the story really slowed down again and almost reverted back a scene setting as if it was the first book of the series.  Much to my disappointment this type of narration seemed to take up the majority of the book.

The whole book was building towards the trial of Salander.  Finally when the process meter on my Kindle show 80% the trial was about to get going and the story really started picking up.  At times I was asking myself why I was still reading this book if it was taking so long to get to something exciting.  Just as quickly as the excitement came it was gone.  Through out the whole book I expected the part about the trial would be full of lots of detail and finally culminating at the end.  Instead the trial part of the book seemed to be over almost as soon as it had started.  This was very confusing  especially when the last 8% of the book just seemed to be wasted space.

In the end I would recommend this book if nothing else to finish the story so that you know what finally happened with all of the character.  Although in my opinion this book seemed very much to be an after thought and was by far the worse one of the 3 in the series.

Next up Steve Jobs.

Taken a little bit of time to get this post up as I have had other things taking up my time in the evenings (so long in fact I am already 10% into my next book).

As much as I loved the first book of this series The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo this one was even better.  The first book was actually almost dull in comparison.

The story in this book takes place after some time as passed since the last book ended.  Since most of the character from The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo are back in this story there isn’t that part in the beginning where you just have the voice in the back of your head wondering when the hell the “real” story was going to star.  There is actually a lot more action in this one through out the book and not just in the beginning.

Definitively one that needs to be picked up if you have started or plan on reading the first one.  There ware way more things that I wish I could say but as Aramelle will probably be reading this I better stop where I am so that she doesn’t get mad at me for giving a way the story.

More to come after I finish The Girl who kicked the Hornets Nest.

Wow it has really been way too long for a blog post.  Couple of reasons for this.  Haven’t really had anything going on that I felt the need to write a blog post about, and the latest book that I have been reading, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, is a much longer book than the ones I have been reading lately.

I have to say, though, it was well worth it.  Well at least it was when you finally got into the story.  I had put off reading this book for quite a while because I had heard that it was one that is really hard to get into at the beginning but if you could get through that then it got really good.  That did turn out to true.  I I believe the progress bar on my Kindle read 25% or 30% before it seems like anything other than just “scene setting” was going on.

Even after the book started to pick up the beginning was still pretty frustrating because, at least in my opinion, I didn’t see it was so relevent that it had to be said or what it had to do with anything.  As you finally get to the end, it all really starts to make sense.

I am probably going to regret when I finally see it, but I am really looking forward to the moving coming out in December.  I know that most of the time to make the movie they really have to ruin the story to make it all work.  I just hope that they do a good enough job or by the time the move is realeased that I will have forgetten enough that it won’t be that much of a let down.

Next up is the second book of the trilogy The Girl who played with Fire.

Pirate Latitudes is the newest Michael Crichton book.  Found and published almost a year after his death this book is not your typical technical/medial adventure that all Crichton’s fans have come to know him by.

Pirate Latitudes takes place in the year 1665 in the Caribbean.  Charles Hunter is a privateer who is hired by the Governor of Port Royal of the English colony of Jamaica to attack a Spanish Fort and steal from it a galleon filled with treasure.  Although it wasn’t the typical story this book made me remember how much of a fan I had become of Crichton’s work after reading Jurassic Park and Congo in high school.

For a book that is 320 pages it almost read like it was only a 100 pages long.  This is one that I would hight recommend to anyone that is a Michael Crichton fan or a fan of pirate stories in general.

After doing a couple of searches for links for this post I found that there was another novel found on his computer after Crichton died that was only about a third of the way completed.  The book that was originally scheduled to be released in 2012, and there are reports that the publisher was going to pursue a co-author to finish it.  If this turns out to be true and the book is published I just hope who ever it is that finishes it does a good job as I plan on getting it.

Cyberdrome is a SciFi story set in the future after a nanobot plague has hit the United States hard and forced the government to setup Utah as a quarantine zone to keep the infection from spreading.  Most of the story takes place in a virtual world setup in the computers at Cyberdrome where they run simulates and tests to hoping to find a cure.

Cyberdrome came up as a recommendation from Amazon because for people who had bought Daemon.  When I say it was only $.99 on Amazon I thought what the heck lets give it a try.  When I first started reading it I really thought I understood why the book was only $.99.

I thought that the story was very hard to follow in the beginning.  There was a lot of references to a characters past that the author seemed to talk about as if they were common knowledge.  It was almost getting to the point I was thinking that I had picked up a book in the middle of the series.  As the story got going it got quite a bit better.  I am still not sure it would be worth much more then about $5 on the kindle but still a pretty good read for $.99.

Joseph and David Rhea

Preview Chapters

Been looking for something that we can get out and do as a family and I think I may have found it, Geocaching.  Nice thing is that it can get us out of the house a bit and explore places around the area.  Plus give me more of an excuse to buy/play with more gadgets!  It is a total win – win situation.

At first when I saw this trailer I thought the movie looked pretty cool.  The more and more I see it now I am starting to think that maybe it may very much suck but has some really cool special effects.  May check it out when it makes it to Red Box.

To go along with the new Bookshelf page I thought it would be good to post about a book when I have finished reading it.  This time it will be two books since Freedom is the sequel to Daemon and well I started the Bookshelf page after I had started reading Freedom.

These are the first two books written by Daniel Suarez who actually is an independent systems consultant to Fortune 1000 companies.  After reading them it is safe to say that I will probably be buying any of his future books at first site.

The story is about a video game designer that develops a computer program that spreads itself over the internet in attempt to take over the world.  This book is full of all sorts of twists and turns in it that at times it was hard for me to believe that Daniel was actually a computer consultant during his day job.  That did help to put some good technical detail in the story that only help to enhance the depth and intrigue of the whole plot line.

I would recommend if you decide you are going to give Daemon a try go a head and get both books at the same time.  After getting just a quarter of the way through the Daemon I knew that I was going to have to get Freedom to make sure I could just dive right into it once I had finished the first one.

Daemon Sample Chapters

Freedom Sample Chapters

From Daniel Suarez’s webiste

Also check out his Author News RSS Feed

Been so excited every since I saw this article come across Gossip Gamers.  I remember playing Worms 2 for hours.  Sine that game was out over 10 years ago you just can’t get it to work on today’s computers.  Well now I will have a chance to play it once again.