Upgrade by Blake Crouch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve read two previous Blake Crouch books, so I should have known better than to read this one. He has intriguing ideas for a sci-fi fan and I get hooked on that, but the execution is poor. Here the main character is the son of an infamously brilliant but misguided genetic expert who tried to save the world from ecological disaster by engineering some genes affecting crop species, but that went haywire and she ended up killing millions of people due to unanticipated side effects. To carry on her work, she injects her two children without their consent or knowledge, giving them both genetic “upgrades” turning them into a modern-day Superman/woman pair. They become enemies and you have a pretty classic superhero vs. supervillain story. The writing is second-rate with various minor sloppinesses like saying his pulse shot to 114 bmp (bitmap?), but the worst aspect is how it is overladen with technobabble. The author obviously spent many hours on Wikipedia, Google, or his favorite AI chabot to get lists of gene names and acronyms, weapon brands and specifications, obscure species scientific names and capabilities, and other mumbo-jumbo to impress those who lap that stuff up. The plot is preposterous and the battle of the titans at the end is laughable. Still, I read it all the way through and it kept me occupied, if not entertained, so I can’t give it a 1.

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Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The disgraced investigator Arkady Renko (Gorky Park) has fled Moscow and found work on the Polar Star, a Soviet factory ship in the Gorbachev era. The US and USSR work jointly with American ships trawling the Bering Sea and the Soviet ship processing the catch. Then a woman’s body is hauled up in one of the nets along with tons of fish. It turns out to be one of the kitchen workers on the Star, a vamp who has been sleeping with several men. Why was she in the water and how did she die? It’s murder we find out, but then we have the questions of who, how, and why.

The author has penned another uplifting novel of the Soviet state. I say uplifting not because that is the tone of the story but because it is the exact opposite. The author has again captured the miasma of Soviet despair, cynicism, corruption, depression, greed and desperation that makes the American reader like me feel so lucky to have lived here and not there through that era. While the tone is mesmerizing at times, the plot becomes too hard to follow. There are too many characters, both Russian and American. The action scenes are well done, but too numerous and implausible. I was satisfied enough as I became immersed in the story, but in the end I can only give it a mediocre rating.

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Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This scholarly work is both a historical review (up to the present) and an opinion piece comparing and contrasting the PRC and US, primarily from an engineering, business, and economic perspective. Wang is a Canadian of Chinese origin and has lived and worked in Canada, China, and the United States, so he writes from personal experience. As a lawyer I largely agree with the author’s characterization of the U.S. as burdened by process, which is a small issue in the autocratic Chinese regime. His observations, while on point, at times overlook important societal factors. The takings clause of the U.S. Constitution (Fifth Amendment), for example: “…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” I skipped a little toward the end and may have missed something, but I don’t believe this was ever mentioned in the book. It is fundamental to his premise. America, and especially Americans, take personal rights seriously. I worked for a public agency in San Jose in the field of eminent domain takings of private property for transit purposes. The laws protecting owners and lessees are not only seriously unbalanced to the detriment of the government, but the process is even more onerous, i.e., expensive, than Wang describes. It’s amazing that any new infrastructure gets built anywhere in the U.S., especially in the Bay Area or other astronomically expensive areas.

He ridicules the transit failures of the Bay Area. While he’s not wrong, he fails to note the striking differences in the Bay Area from other big cities in the US or even China: a huge metro area with no central business district, only three major population centers distanced about 50 miles from each other with an enormous body of deep water in between. The high water table and active earthquake faults make subways nearly impossible in the South Bay, the heart of Silicon Valley. The high-speed rail project of the Central Valley is burdened by the same geographic and constitutional obstacles. In a way, the U.S. and especially California is a victim of its own success. It is so desirable to live here, for many reasons, that the land is very expensive which in turn, combined with the takings clause, make such projects nearly unobtainable. Wang himself admits that despite the impressive infrastructure achievements China has made, many Chinese, including he and his parents, have chosen the land of personal rights and crumbling bridges right here in North America to live. Some things are just not reconcilable. We all have to prioritize.

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Mating by Norman Rush
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The description of this book in Goodreads says it is a “splendidly expansive novel of high intellect….” The New York Times Book Review quoted on the cover says it is “Exhilarating … vigorous and luminous … evokes(s) so eloquently….” Baloney! This book is so overwritten and pretentious I thought it was a satire when I started reading it. The author never uses a two- or three-syllable word if he can find a four- or five-syllable one. Never an English one if there is a French one twice as long. Consider this passage where the female narrator is describing an older man, “He was still well-built but showing a little gynecomastia, which didn’t really go with his rectilinear, almost columnar midsection… (he) was just over the line into paterfamilias.”

I once had an English professor who liked that kind of writing. I was getting C’s on my essays until she read aloud another student’s she considered an A paper. Once I choked down my vomit reaction I copied that style for my remaining papers and got an A for the class, but I could hardly live with myself. I couldn’t stomach any more of this book and stopped about page 40. If you enjoy this sort of thing, I pity you.

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I’m continuing to enjoy my membership in SUNO.AI, the artificial intelligence music company. I’ve created over 70 songs so far. I’ll embed a couple of my recent ones just for something different from all the book reviews.

Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is vintage Carl Hiaasen, which is to say, it is excessively crude, insulting, and generally offensive while also being witty and amusing political commentary. Here a bunch of right-wing white supremacist losers, mostly rejects from the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, form a group called the Strokers for Liberty. Thin as it is, the plot revolves around the Strokers being funded by some rich white supremacists through their local bribed congressman to influence the upcoming election and, more importantly to the funders, create a fake charity along the lines of Habits for Humanity that is actually a plot to get a patch of land cleared and approved for development. Needless to say if you are familiar with Hiaasen, the book is a sort of stream of consciousness tale of crazy bungled idiocies. The Strokers get their tails whipped by a bunch of drag queens. Their leader, Dale Figgo, was at the January 6 insurrection but mistakenly smeared feces on the statue of a confederate general thinking it was a U.S. President. Figgo and his crew are mostly derailed by a rather unambitious trust fund baby named Twilly and his girlfriend Viva, who also happens to be Figgo’s tenant, both of whom are appalled at the politics and stupidity of the Strokers. Hiaasen can be funny at times, but I am so put off by his crudity and lack of any credible plot that I can’t give this a high rating. I only read it because it’s a choice of my book club.

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