Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Daniel Tammet
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From the back cover: “He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man.”
And he wrote a book about his life up until now, and how he deals with his syndrome.
Pretty amazing stuff. I found the early years of his life fascinating.
See him on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Read more info on Amazon.
 
I was born on January 31, 1979—a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday, because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the number 9 or the sound of loud voices arguing. I like my birth date, because of the way I'm able to visualize most of the numbers in it as smooth and round shapes, similar to pebbles on a beach. That's because they are prime numbers: 31, 19, 197, 97, 79, and 1979 are all divisible by themselves and 1. I can recognize every prime up to 9,973 by their “pebble-like” quality. It's just the way my brain works.
Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit
Matt McCarthy
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It's the story of Matt McCarthy's life as a minor leaguer with the 2002 Los Angeles Angels’ Class A farm team in Provo, Utah.
McCarthy washed out after only one season and then went on to better things.
A good story if you want to learn about what it's like inside the clubhouse of a farm team. McCarthy tells most of the stories you would expect; the long travels by bus to the games, the discrimination against the latino and hispanic players (all labeled as Dominicans no matter where they came from), and the hospitality and the feelings toward the Mormons that hosted players and the team.
Don't expect writing that will have you crying and grabbing for tissues.
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When I was twenty-one I could throw a baseball 92 miles an hour. This led to a strange courtship between my left arm and a series of pencil-mustached, overweight middle-aged men. I eventually gave up the game and later found myself as far away from the baseball diamond as one could possibly be—living in rural villages in Cameroon and later Malaysia, colorful places that still somehow paled in comparison to the alien environment of my first home in professional baseball: Provo, Utah.
Daemon
Daniel Suarez
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Daemon – a computer program that runs continuously in the background and performs specified operations at predefined times or in response to certain events. Condensed from “Disk and Execution MONitor.”
Brilliant computer programmer, Matthew Sobol, dies. His death sets into motion a bunch of computer scripts and actions that he wrote in preparation for his death.
The dude was a millionaire, and then wanted to mess with people after he died. So he goes to the trouble of making all these incredible plans, and has an amazing amount of events mapped out ready to go for the day he kicks the bucket. Including the building of these automated death machines (via cars and motorcycles) that do his bidding. Or the evil bidding of people that take his place.
I don't buy it.
It was a neat concept but needed a little more focus. The ending was lousy and pretty much amounted to a big fat “To be continued…”
Read more info on Amazon.
 
“Detective Sebeck. I was Matthew Sobol. Chief technology officer of CyberStorm Entertainment. I am dead.”
Sebeck leaned forward—his eyes fixed on the monitor.
“I see you have been assigned to the Joseph Pavlos and Chopra Singh murder cases. Let me save you some time; I killed both men. Soon you'll know why. But you have a problem: Because I'm dead, you can't arrest me. More importantly: You can't stop me.”
The Scarecrow
Michael Connelly
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I have no knowledge of FBI procedures or of what it's like to work as a journalist for a major newspaper.
So I loved the book.
After what I felt were a few less than stellar works, Connelly is back with a thriller that kept my attention.
He resurrects two of his former characters, FBI agent Rachel Walling, and newspaper reporter Jack McEvoy. Together again, they solve the murder of a young woman and uncover the horrendous acts of a serial killer.
Light and easy reading that was a fun ride.
Read more info on Amazon.
 
It was always amazing to Carver how trusting or naive young people were. They didn't believe that anybody could connect the dots. They believed that they could bare their souls on the Internet, post photos and information at will, and not expect any consequences. From her blog he was able to glean all the information he needed about Angela Cook. Her hometown, her college sorority, even her dog's name. He knew Death Cab for Cutie was her favorite band and pizza at a place called Mozza was her favorite food. In between the meaningless data, he learned her birthday and that she only had to walk two blocks from her apartment to get her favorite pizza at her favorite restaurant. He was circling her and she didn't even know it. But each time around he got closer.
A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument
Jasper Rees
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Bravo.
I loved this book, as well.
But that's probably because I also played the very same instrument, and identified with all of the humorous things that can happen to anyone who attempts to master the French horn.
At close to forty years of age, Rees goes through a mid-life crisis and decides to attempt to get reacquainted with the instrument he played in high school, and then forgot about for over 20 years.
It's a great narrative consisting of three stories that are nicely woven together; Rees' childhood and growing up in England, the history of the horn, and Rees' learning to play a Mozart horn concerto in a year with the hopes of playing it in front of a gathering of horn aficionados at the annual festival of the British Horn Society.
Anyone who ever tried to play a horn will love it. Anyone who played a horn for any significant amount of time will really appreciate it.
Read more info on Amazon.
 
It's a thing to behold, a massed horn ensemble. Horn players don't grow on trees, not like pianists or violinists or choristers. So assembling an ensemble is not like mobilizing a small volunteer army to sing the Messiah, the way they do each year at the Royal Albert Hall. Anyone can turn up and sing. Not anyone can play the horn. It pretty much says so in The Guinness Book of Records. The horn, it says, is the joint hardest instrument to learn. Or it certainly did when I last looked, in 1977. (The other is the oboe, though who knows how they measure these things?) All we initiates know is that it takes strapping lungs to play the horn, and muscle-bound lips. More than these, it takes nerves of reinforced tungsten, because the horn is treacherous. Mistakes, in the form of cracked notes—or clams, as they say in America—are not hard to come by.