Finished reading: fiction!
Two weeks, two business trips, it was time for light reading. Trolling the fiction shelves found me these:
Dale Brown has managed to crank out 21 books in the Patrick McLanahan series over the past 30 years. I’ve read far too many of them. They crossed the line into ridiculousness several books back… and this one is no different. This one reads more like the script for a direct-to-video action movie (a genre, I fear, that has been killed off by Netflix!) than a proper novel.
Tom Clancy - Point of Contact by Mike Maden
Tom Clancy is long dead and buried but his name and book series lives on. According to Amazon, this book is “Jack Ryan Universe book #23”, which is roughly the same output as Dale Brown’s series in roughly the same timeframe. This one was thin enough that, writing this post a couple weeks after finishing the book, I have exactly zero recollection of what this one was about.
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
Now this one was worth my time. While it starts out seeming to be about ‘the return of magic’, it’s much more an adventure in time travel combined with some humorous observations about how bureaucracy can take over and ruin even the best ideas. I had a lot of fun here.