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by Ivan Idso, 2007 ish.

A disclaimer, to begin - the author is my new-to-me brother in law, so I got a copy at cost, inscribed ’soft aardvarks’ (I think), and a few weeks later got a once-in-a-lifetime experience of being taken on a balloon ride by the man himself. So the write-up is going to be a glowing one.

Fortunately, I don’t have to stretch the truth at all in order to do so. It’s a short and lightweight read, which does explain the mechanics and practicalities of hot-air ballooning. However, the focus of the book is on the social aspects, and the effect it has had on the life and disposition of Ivan, his family and friends. As a result, it’s a thoroughly personal and heart-warming read, engrossing and explanatory and fulfilling throughout, that left me feeling closer to the author, and with more of an understanding of him and his lifestyle.

by Jerome D. Salinger, 1951

“Of course, people make such a fuss over it, they really do. You ask anyone. It’s that Salinger’s fault. He never listens to anyone. Sometimes I think he only writes it because he knows it gets on peoples goat. Writing about some crazy kid. I mean, I say he’s crazy because that’s what everyone says, but he’s no crazier than the rest of us if you want to know the truth. Smoking and swearing getting laid, if he got half a chance. But it’s only what anyone would have done, well, anyone with any sense, that is.

There’s one thing about it though, it made me remember a time when I was very young, no joke, and I started reading this very book, I don’t know where I got it, I think my Father gave it to me. But I don’t think I got very far. It must have been beyond me, to tell you the truth. Well, you’ve got to give the old Pater his due, for trying to stretch you and all that. That’s just like him, it really is.

Anyway, the story doesn’t really go anywhere, at least not anywhere I could fathom. Well, things happen, but it’s just everyday things over the few days after being expelled from school. The usual stuff. You could write a whole essay, I suppose, about whether or not Caulfield changes or learns anything by the novel’s end, or simply remains an adolescent. But I don’t think that would amount to very much. So it’s a stylistic experience, at any rate. Very ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man‘ I’m sure, and you’ve got to give him his due.

Rating: 7/10 - Bloody Salinger, he never listens to anyone, him.

by Kurt Vonnegut, 1973.

I’ve always loved Vonnegut (who doesn’t?) but I’d avoided this since seeing the painful 1999 movie made of it, proof if ever it were needed that some books are simply unfilmable.

The novel, however, is everything we love about Vonnegut. His clarity, wit, grumpiness and simplicity. The story of ordinary people in a small midwestern town reads like a playful Hemmingway, but forms a therapeutic rumination on the nature of sanity, and the author’s own relationship with it, in the insane world we find ourselves in.

Rating: 7/10 - and so on.

by Paul Graham, 2004.

I’d already stumbled across many of the individual essays that this is comprised of, but it was still hugely entertaining and educational to discover some of Graham’s essays that I hadn’t read yet. He covers a wide variety of topics, and inevitably for such a collection, the components vary in quality, but generally they are extremely engaging. I only regret having to grab them in dead-tree format since I lost my iPhone. Ohdeary.

Rating: 8/10 - a brilliant read

by Charles Stross, 2007.

It’s a tale of corporate shenanigans, online virtual reality computer gaming, scams, police on the beat, software contractors, and political intrigue, set in the midst of a near-future Scotland. It’s told in first person, by a rotating set of a half-dozen characters, which I found distracting.

The Scottish vernacular and the boozed-up Brit attitudes in a mildly science-fictional setting come across as parochial rather than grungy, and projected technologies such as self-driving cars and virtual realities all seem too intrusive and out of place.

The premise oscillates between nauseating and preposterous, as an in-game robbery of virtual items gradually tips off its investigators that  someone, somewhere, has got their hands on some heavy-duty decryption keys with which far more sinister acts are being perpetrated. Before it’s done, there is a scene where the software engineer caught in the middle of it all has to play a swords-and-sorcery online computer game, upon the outcome of which hangs the safety of the free world. Oh deary.

I really, really, really, loved Stross’ Accelerando, so maybe my expectations were just set too high. Can this really be from the same author, and written a scant 12 months afterwards?

Rating: 3/10. Letdown.

by David Leavitt, 2006.

An impulse buy, and it was good but not great. The barbaric treatment Turing received over being gay seems to be the thing that initially attracted the author’s interest in Turing’s life, and while that is a worthwhile and thought-provoking topic, it is a little over-played here. While Turing’s mathematical contributions are covered quite commendably, I’d pretty much read all of it before, and it somehow seemed to be lacking a tiny sparkle of passion that made me suspect the author had done his absolute damnedest to cover the mathematical side of Turing, because no book about him would be complete without it, but without really ever wanting to.

Rating: 5/10. Solid but not much that is new.

Me and the missus slung 200 feet in the air in a spherical 10 foot roll cage, on board the ‘Slingshot’ on the opening night of the Steel County Fair, Minnesota.