The Black Box by Michael Connelly

Like all the other books in Bosch series I've read, The Black Box is a nice quick read that doesn't require too much thinking and delivers a fairly straightforward police procedural. This time Harry Bosch is working a cold case from the 1992 Los Angeles riots. My main qualm with the book is that in comparison to the other books the stakes here are pretty low... and most of the personal trouble for Harry involves a rather tame Internal Affairs investigation. Connelly's/Bosch's style doesn't quite suit what is needed to make a cold case investigation that compelling. Overall it was totally lacking in action up until the last fifty pages or so. It isn't a bad book but I'd recommend any other book in the series I've read over it. C+

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

There's this belief I have that each book has its own specific time frame that a reader should spend consuming a book. Something like War and Peace is meant to be slowly read over months, while The Old Man and the Sea should be read in one sitting. So reading a book either too quickly or too slowly can have a definite impact on the reading experience. We is a book that should probably be read in two or three sittings... but this last week was crazy busy and I stretched out the reading experience to about ten days. So maybe some of the power of the book was diluted for me since I mostly read it in little bits here and there. That being said, I still enjoyed it but maybe not as much as I could have...

The book We is set in a dystopian future and heavily influenced George Orwell when he wrote 1984. Actually he took quite a bit from We it seems. Both are about a guy living in a world run by an oppressive government that controls everything who then meets a new strange woman, starts a secret diary, finds out about some secret rebels and ends up being tortured. It does get points for being original... but it isn't quite as thrilling as 1984. I'll give it an A-.

Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

While reading Heretics of Dune (which I had previously read maybe 15 years ago) I had three reoccurring thoughts. First - I don't recall any of this plot. Second - I do sorta remember thinking that the growing usage and importance of Duncan Idaho gholas throughout the series is just stupid. And third... I remembered why I stopped reading the Dune series back then with this book. But since the point of rereading the books this time was to get to the end of the series I'll have to soldier on. C+

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

I had been meaning to read Mother Night for the past fifteen years or so ever since I saw the film version. Eventually I was able to pick up a dirt cheap copy at a used book sale maybe five years ago. And just now I got around to actually reading it. So between purchasing it and reading it I probably read some 200 other books... and that seems weird even to me since it is such a short book and is by one of my favorite all time authors, Kurt Vonnegut. But it was worth the wait because I think current political events colored how I read it.

In the introduction Vonnegut says "This is the only story of mine whose moral I know ... We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." The book then proceeds to be the "confession" of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American living in Germany during WWII that helped spread Nazi propaganda with his radio program. What only a handful of people really know is that Howard is actually using his program to send out coded messages back to the Allies. But of course he can never tell anyone this and after the war he has to live in seclusion and deal with being a white power icon and being hated by most everyone else that knows his history. He continually sees the power his words had on influencing some disturbed people even though he was trying to help his country. So maybe if you have a political voice that can be heard by millions of people and you use it to spread hatred and fear of other racial groups that kind of makes you a racist.

Also, it mentions Don Quixote.  I'll give it an A.