Let’s talk about anything about books:
- Your favorite book(s)
- Your favorite author(s)
- Your book you wrote
- What book you still remember 20 years later (or 10 or 5 or 1)
- What book astounded you and why
Stuff like that.
First up, Lets Talk BOOKS 📚 will be going on hiatus for a few weeks.
August 25th I will be out of town on vacation with my sister.
The following 3 weeks I will be undergoing my 2nd phase of Thyroid cancer treatment, including a dose of irradiated iodine.
So we’ll be back the for the Sunday, September 22 date.
Hope to see you all then!
This week, I’d like to cover books you haven’t read yet, by authors you already know, and love.
For me, the author is John Scalzi, known by most for his iconic novel Red Shirts (which, if you haven’t read it, is TERRIFIC).
John’s work has been nominated for a number of awards in the Science Fiction genre and he has won both a Hugo (3 times) and a Dragon (one time).
https://www.sfadb.com/John_Scalzi
Scalzi, John (HUGO: 13 nominations; 3 wins)2013:Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas — novel — winner2009:Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 — related book — winner2008:fan writer — winner (there isn’t any other information available on what sort of Fan Writing this win was for)
As a side note, that 2009 award is for John’s blog: Whatever
Whatever is an interesting read and still up and running today (https://whatever.scalzi.com/).
If you visit today? The splash page says: TIME TO REGISTER TO VOTE
and a bit further down the page you find this:
Get Your Vote On
If you are a United States citizen 18 years or older, 2024 will be an incredibly consequential election year. It's important for you to register to vote, and then vote, whenever you have the opportunity this year. Vote.gov can help you register to vote, check if your registration is still current, and give you other tools you need to vote and get your voice heard. Don't wait! Register now!
Who knew John Scalzi was a Voter Registration activist?
The book of John’s which I haven’t read yet, is the Kaiju Preservation Society, but that’s not factually accurate. I’ve borrowed it from the Kindle Unlimited program at Amazon, and as of today at 7:00 am PST I had not read it.
But I’m on page 47 as of 20 minutes ago when I started writing today’s story (which was around 9 am PST).
Like the rest of John’s work, which I have read, the story starts out innocuously enough.
Jamie Gray is working at a start-up in New York City during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It’s early in the plague but masks are being worn. He has a meeting with the Boss and expects to present his ideas for how the company (an APP for food delivery, started just before COVID) can corner the market on food deliver, just as the demand for that service is going to go wild. To his shock, he instead gets the boot, with the notice that he, can, of course, choose to stay with the company, just take a demotion from a high floor executive job to being a “Deliverator” (the term being the brainchild of his Boss).
Jaime does take that job, as it turns out, because there are no jobs to be had in the early STAY HOME part of the COVID pandemic.
Where the story takes an abrupt turn is the next page, where six months of Deliverator hell have passed, and Jamie delivers food to a guy whom it turns out, Jamie knew (slightly) back when he was still working at a college, before he (foolishly) decided to leave the hallowed halls of Education for a Start Up.
page 10:
I nodded, and turned again to go.“Wait,” the dude said. “Jamie … Gray?”Oh my God, my brain said. Just walk away. Walk away and never admit that someone knows your deliverationing shame. But even as my brain was saying that, my body was turning back, because like puppies we are enculturated to turn when our name is called. “That’s me,” I said, the words popping out, with the last one sounding like my tongue was desperately trying to recall the whole sentence.The dude smiled, set down his bag, took a step back to get out of the immediate breath zone, and unhooked his mask for a second so I could see his face. Then it put it back on. “It’s Tom Stevens.”My brain raced around in the primordial LinkedIn of my memory, trying to figure out how I knew this dude. He wasn’t helping; he clearly expected to be so memorable that he would pop up in my head instantly . He wasn’t, and yet —“Tom Steven who dated Iris Banks who was best friends with my roommate Diego when I lived in that apartment on South Kimbark just above Fifty-third Street and used to come to our parties sometimes,” I said.That’s very exact,” Tom said.“You went to the business school.”“I did. Hope you don’t mind. Not super academic.”“I mean” — I motioned to the very nice condo in the brand-new building — “It turned out okay for you.”
After a bit of a chat, Tom offers Jamie a job. One that appears not to require anything in particular, excepting that Jaime should expect to be a guy who lifts things. A gofer, in other words, and maybe a bit of a laborer.
After a bit of a talk with his roommates, Jamie decides to take the job. Hell, it couldn’t be worse than working for the guy who stole his idea on how to corner the market in the Food Delivery industry and then the schmuck sold the company out to Uber Eats for $4 Billion.
I cannot wait to read the rest of that story! The entire setup was only 15 pages and 2 chapters long.
Have you run into a book recently, written by an author you know pretty well, and whose work you enjoy, but found the title or blurb sounds weird?
Let's talk about that…
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