Author: eboisen

The Stranger in the Lifeboat is an interesting work of fiction and a pretty easy read.  The story is mostly set in the present day with flashbacks to different points in the main character’s life.  For most of the book, the main character, Benji, is adrift on a lifeboat released from a sinking mega yacht that was loaded with leaders of industry and famous artists, actors, and politicians.  The yacht was on the final day of a week-long cruise intended on having the greatest minds meet and come up with world-changing ideas.  The raft contains both the elite former passengers of the ship as well as some of the staff.  Benji is one of the staff.  Shortly into their time adrift, the lifeboat picks up a passenger from the sea who does not appear to be from the sunken yacht.  This passenger claims to be the Lord.

As time on the raft passes, the passengers have differing views on the Lord.  Some see him with disdain.  If he is the almighty, why does he let us suffer so?  Others are grateful that he provides a short rainstorm as they run low on water.  Some see him as delusional and others see him as a con-man, but no one can explain how he arrived on their raft.  After drifting a short time, they also find a small, silent girl, Anna, and the owner of the mega-yacht Jason Lambert.  At one time, there are as many as ten people on the life raft.  As time passes, they begin to succumb to different ends.  When there are just four remaining, Jason Lambert loses his mind, slashes the Lord’s throat, tosses Anna overboard, and attempts to kill Benji.  Benji manages to eject Lambert from the boat and retrieve little Anna, who suddenly begins to speak, “I am the Lord.”  Benji spends his remaining days on the raft with no one else.

Later it is revealed that Benji had intended to blow up the boat and its passengers with a limpet mine.  He never actually set off the device, but he did bring it on board, so he assumed it had inadvertently triggered and caused the yacht’s sinking.  Anna, as the Lord, later reveals to Benji that the mine was not to blame and he can relieve himself of the guilt he was feeling.

The idea behind this story is fabulous, and the book is good, but it is not great.  A couple of things turned me off right away.  The yacht is filled with leaders of industry, including someone purported to be the inventor of the first electric car.  Presumably this is supposed to be an Elon Musk type character, but Elon Musk did not invent the electric car.  He is simply the first person to successfully bring it to market.  The first electric car predates this novel by more than 100 years.  A simple Google search would have revealed this.  The yacht is also said to be made of fiberglass.  The limpet mine is described in the book as a naval mine that attaches to a ship magnetically.  How was a limpet mine supposed to adhere to a fiberglass boat?  It turns out the boat was sunk by angry whales who rammed holes in the thin fiberglass hull.  These holes allowed water into the engine room which then caused an explosion.  I kind of doubt water in an engine room has ever caused a yacht to explode.  Mitch Albom is good at telling a story, but he really needs to be mindful of history and physics when he does so.  If this is going to be made into a movie, I hope they correct these portions of the story in some way, because it was too much for me to look past.

I recently finished reading How To Communicate.  Everyone’s life would probably made a little bit easier with the ability to communicate effectively, so I figured I would give this book a shot.  It was filled with very thoughtful insight and information into how people interact.  Despite this, it was not a very easy read.  I found it difficult to read much more than 20 pages at a time.  The book is written like a textbook with fill in the blank exercises near the end of most chapters.  I had intended to learn about communicating better in work and social settings.  This book does a great job over covering these situations and also delves into resolving conflict, communication with children, public speaking, interviewing, and sexual communication.  Despite not being an “easy read,” it does have plenty of useful information.

I would imagine that if ten people were to read this book, they might all declare different chapters as most interesting or relevant.  Everyone has his or her own methods of communicating and all have different strengths and weaknesses.  I found that reading this book helped me to identify exactly what my strengths and weaknesses are.  I tend to “beat around the bush” a little too much.  People are generally not mind readers, so by not saying exactly what I would like to do or accomplish leaves others sometimes mistaking my intentions.  I think many people have a weakness in this area.  If you are asking for something that another person might not want to give up or do, or you are, perhaps, giving some news that will not be well-received, you may try to sugar-coat or disguise it.   This will often lead to miscommunication.  We all walk around with our own perception of the world and it may differ greatly with the person we are communicating with.  Removing unpleasantries from a communication can sometimes turn that communication into a complete miscommunication because those unpleasantries are facts relevant to the communication.  Disguising these facts will ultimately lead to more unpleasantness and drag out a situation before a resolution can be achieved.

There was one chapter, that I feel might be universally received.  It discusses how culture and gender affects communication.  I noticed that I often like to spout solutions to problems people confide in me.  Males might appreciate this, but females often are going to be more satisfied by just having someone  listen to their problems and understand their feelings than have possible solutions thrown back at them.   Males and females also tend to interact differently in small work groups.  Recognizing behaviors that the opposite sex might find favorable or unfavorable will certainly help accomplish tasks in small groups.  With regard to culture, Latin Americans tend to prefer less personal space than Americans and may feel distanced and even alienated in spaces comfortable to Americans.  Japanese tend to value apologies as an expression  of goodwill, where Americans are more apt to see apologies as an admission of guilt.  Arabs may refuse something offered hoping that you will offer it again.  Unidentified differences in culture and gender will also often lead to miscommunication.  Being able to recognize what a person of another gender or culture may value is vital to strong communication.

I am going to apply what I have learned in this book and hopefully it will stick.  The ability to communicate your ideas and feelings is a very useful life skill.  Everyone should endeavor to improve his or her communication skills.  Your work, personal, and social life are sure to benefit.  It might make all the difference in the world.

I have played guitar for a while, but always struggled with music theory.  I play my guitar for fun and learning theory always seems the opposite of fun to me.  In an attempt to better understand scales, I made a little program in Java a couple of years ago that shows where the notes of a few scales are on a guitar fretboard.  Initially, it was just a program that let the user pick the scale and key and the program would plot the notes on the fretboard using color codes for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.  My dad looked at it and said, “where is the musical notation?”  Drawing a fretboard with colored dots and computing notes and locations was a bit of work.  Adding musical notation was not something I was keen on.  Years passed.  I was now working long hours at a pharma plant in New Jersey.  I would be at the plant 12-16 hours a day, but I would often have an hour or two here and there where I was waiting for approvals of prior work.  I decided to fill this time by adding musical notation to my program.  I thought there might be an existing Java package that would accomplish this.  There was something called JFugue, but I did not want to use a third party package to program.  I decided to just try to draw a simple note and a staff and take it from there.

Each note is simply a 10×15 oval with a line on one side pointing up or down.  I learned that any note below the third staff line goes up and any line above the third staff line goes down.  I found that I could plot the 𝄞 symbol as a font on my graphics window.  This was a relief.  Drawing this thing pixel by pixel did not sound like fun.  I then drew five evenly spaced horizontal lines through it.  It took a little fiddling to get the sizing and spacing of everything correct, but I got it.

My program exploits the intervals between notes to determine which notes belong to a particular scale and which do not.  I have an array that contains the notes of a chromatic scale.  This is a scale that has every possible note in order  A, A♯, B, C, C♯, D, D♯, E, F, F♯, G, and G♯.  There is an interval of half a step between each one of these notes.  Two half steps is a whole step.  A major scale – Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do has intervals of whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole.   Grabbing notes from the chromatic scale at these intervals means the A Major scale would be A, B, C♯, D, E, F♯, G♯.  A minor scale has an interval of whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, so an A minor scale would be A, B, C, D, E, F, G.  To determine other scales, I just need to know the intervals between the notes and grab them from the chromatic scale.  This is fairly simple, but the chromatic scale can also be written as A, B♭, B, C, D♭, D, E♭, E, F, G♭, G, A♭, so I had to figure out which chromatic scale to pick from.  I used string arrays with the different keys to determine if I needed to use the chromatic scale with the sharps or the chromatic scale with the flats to build the new scale.

For Major scales:
HasFlats={“G♭”,”D♭”,”A♭”,”E♭”,”B♭”,”F”};
HasSharps={“C”,”G”,”D”,”A”,”E”,”B”,”F♯”,”G♯”};
For minor scales:
HasFlatsMinor={“D”,”G”,”C”,”F”,”B♭”};
HasSharpsMinor={“E”,”B”,”C♯”,”F♯”,”G♯”,”D♯”};

When the user picks the key and the scale, I know which chromatic scale to use.  I had to figure this out by looking at the key signature of every possible key.  Adding a scale was now as simple as just adding an array with the correct intervals from the scale:

MajorInterval = Whole,Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole
MinorInterval = Whole,Half, Whole, Whole, Half, Whole

I then came up with the routine to plot the notes on the staff.  Adding a new scale simply means knowing the interval and adding another array of corresponding intervals like those above for the Major and minor scales.  So I finish this and am asked, “Why can’t we hear the notes?”

This actually was not as hard as I though it would be.  Java has a synthesizer package, but instead of notes it takes in numbers that correspond to notes to play a tone.  The low, open E string on the guitar is tone 64.  For every half step up, you just have to add one, so the first fret of the low E string is F, or 65, and so on.  I used the chromatic scale again to make a routine that converted a note to a corresponding number to play.  The synthesizer is not perfect.  The tone is very accurate, but if the computer is running something else (it’s always running something else) while playing notes, it alters the timing somewhat between notes.  Maybe I will figure out how to clean this up later.  To convert a note to a number, I take the element number from the chromatic scale, 0-11, where E=0, F=1, F♯=2 and so forth

“E”, “F”, “F♯”, “G”, “G♯”, “A”, “A♯”, “B”, “C”, “C♯”, “D”,”D♯”

NumberOfChromaticScale +64+ octave * 12 = Note number for synthesizer

So E=64, F=65, and so on.  I increment the octave every time the root note is encountered again.

There are many different instrument sounds that can be played, but since this is a guitar program, I chose the classical guitar sound.  Oddly, the code to play a note takes an INSTRUMENT parameter, but this does not change the instrument.  There is a parameter called programChange that changes the instrument.  It took a bunch of Googling to figure this out.  Here is the, Yawn!, code:

channels[INSTRUMENT].programChange(25);// 0-8 piano, 9-16 percussion, 25 Classical, 26 acoustic, 27-31 electric

When a program is compiled in Java a .jar file executable is created.  This just has the Java Coffee Cup logo icon.   I ran the jar through a program called launch4j and was able to convert it to an exe file and give it a custom icon.  I compiled the program on both a Mac and a PC and was surprised to find out that it did not matter which platform it was compiled on, the resulting jar file would run on either platform.  My goal in writing this program was to learn a little more about music theory.  I think I have done that.  If someone else happens to use and benefit from this program that is just icing on the cake.

http://erikboisen.net/ScaleMapper.html

Life at the Bottom is written by an English psychiatrist that goes by the penname Theodore Dalrymple.  His real name is Anthony Malcolm Daniels.  I personally think that Anthony Daniels is a more sellable name for an author, but perhaps the name Theodore Dalrymple has some hidden meaning to the author and he desired some anonymity.  The author worked for an extended period of time in hospitals and prisons working with many criminals and their victims.  He documents the situations and thought processes of each of his patients.  Patient of which are predominately part of Britain’s lower class.  He uses his experience in working with thousands of people to look for common threads that seem to keep generations of people continuously at the bottom rung of society.  The book is more a fairly coherent compilation of his notes and thoughts on his patients’ situations rather than a non-fiction novel.

Many of the experiences the author describes are quite horrific.  They contain serial child abuse, suicide, and long-term domestic violence.  The author notes that quite often the system in place to aid the victims of these acts, often helps to propagate them as criminals are given increased benefits in social programs as their behavior declines.  People who are trying to better themselves, in many cases, are given reduced benefits because they have worked and acquired more resources thereby making themselves ineligible for further help .  I found myself having difficultly sleeping when I read some of the sections too close to bedtime.  There are many stabbings, beatings, and overdoses described in the book.  If this were fiction, it would be easier to accept, but knowing that everything has occurred, and likely continues to occur, has made it far worse.

The vast amount of data that the author has unique access to make the book very interesting.  It would have been desirable, however, if he had presented it without too much opinion on what the data imply.  I believe the reader, in many cases, would come to the same conclusion as the author, but not necessarily.  I would, as I believe most readers would, prefer to be presented with the facts and draw my own conclusions.  The author appears frustrated with the situation.  I guess if I put myself in his shoes, it is difficult to show up for work every day for decades and see the same preventable problems manifesting themselves over and over and be helpless to stop them.  This very forgivable offense has definitely crept its way into this work.

The interesting thing the author does show is the mindset of many of the people that are trapped in this cycle of despair.  He has observed that nearly all of the violent criminals take no ownership of their actions.  They all describe themselves as powerless to stop their violence and criminal activity.  They view themselves as “victims”, often blaming the author for not “curing” them of their behavior or the victims of driving them to violence.

He also observed that keeping marriages intact, which was a rare observance in his cases, appeared to be one antidote to stopping the cycle.  People who lived in poor conditions, but managed to keep a family together, almost always faired better in all areas than those who did not maintain relationships.  He stated that these people were often immigrants who were clinging to values carried over from their home countries.  They often managed to avoid cycles of domestic violence and even managed on some occasions to transcend their poverty.

Another cure that the author suggests and that I believe has the most promise is exposure.  Exposure of those living in the cycle of poverty to different environments.  Having a city kid visit a farm or a museum or having them meet a previously impoverished person who has become a doctor or community leader has appeared to be helpful.  Those who are trapped in a cycle of poverty frequently have a very limited world view.  They are often not exposed to anything much beyond the often dismal neighborhood that they spend their lives in.  Just having the knowledge that there are other ways of living, and witnessing it, seems to have an impact.  It is very clear to the author that social programs that just dole out benefits are, in many cases, doing more harm than good.  There needs to be more incentive to promote a change in lifestyle and a pursuit of personal improvement.  There needs to be a push to destigmatize education and self-improvement in the lower class and there needs to be more incentive to those that embrace and pursue it in earnest and perhaps less incentive for those who pursue a life of crime to receive benefits.

The author also notes that people who come from countries without extensive social programs, but live in poverty, often do not have many of the problems he is observing.  In many third world countries there are people living in conditions that are far worse than those the author observes in Great Britain, but the literacy rate is higher and the crime rate is lower.  It seems as though the social programs are somehow breaking down the sense of community.  In third world slums people tend to help each other more and respect  each other’s property more.  They know and help their neighbors more.  They maintain marriages more consistently.  For whatever reason, the social programs seem to remove this sense of community, desire for self-improvement, and desire to maintain relationships much better.  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, due to social programs, everyone gets enough to eat, a roof over his or her head, and basic medical care without any effort, but those in third world countries have to go without these things or work very hard for them.  There must be a way, within the confines of human nature, to help those that are deserving of it, without removing the motivation of those being helped.  I am guessing that many of the things the author observes in Great Britain are true of impoverished areas of all first-world countries.

This book was very interesting and informative and I feel that I am better for having read it.  I may find myself pondering answers and potential outcomes for a long time to come.  Someone needs to properly address these situations if society is going to advance.  It is not reasonable to expect society as a whole to rise above a certain level when there are those who still live in reprehensible circumstances.  I feel that to some extent, we, as a society, are only as good as the least of those among us.

I read Orwell’s follow-up, 1984, a few years ago and really enjoyed it.  This book is like 1984 in that it is critical of the government, but that is about the only parallel.  This book, as the title implies, is about a group of barn animals.  These animals are meant to represent the government and the people they govern.  For the most part, the pigs are in charge with the dogs helping to protect the pigs.  All the other animals are subservient to the pigs.  This book was published towards the end of world war II, so the parallels between the animal characters and the actual people they are supposed to represent is not as obvious to me as it might have been to someone reading this book in say, 1950.  The main pig is supposed to be former Russian dictator Joseph Stalin.  I initially tried to match all the animal characters to their real-life counterparts while I was reading, but I found that the roles that each character was playing was still applicable to any government.  The story still shows how words and laws can be twisted to meet the needs of those in charge.

There are only a few human characters named in the story.  The most prominent one was Mr. Jones.  Mr. Jones was the farmer in charge of all the animals at the beginning of the story.  Mr. Jones is not the greatest person, for he drinks too much, and keeps the farm running in a somewhat sloppy manner.  The animals have bearable living conditions, but they could be better.  These conditions create a rift between the animals and Mr. Jones.  They also create an opportunity for the main pig, Napoleon, to seize control.  In a great rebellion, the animals force farmer Jones off the farm and, in doing so, gain the ability to run the farm themselves.  Initially it seems that the animals may have a better life in doing things for themselves, but the pigs lust for power and the other animals’ naivety create a much different situation.

The pigs are generally more intelligent than the other animals and make the rules for the farm.  They also alter those rules over time to suit their lifestyle.  The pigs present themselves as hard-working leaders that deserve extra privilege, but in reality, they are dictators that are taking advantage of those in their stead.  The pigs continually change the rules so that they are able to enjoy the fruits of the other animals’ labor while the other animals endure an increasingly difficult existence.  In changing the rules, the pigs also deny doing so, as they take the rules and modify a word here and there to change the overall meaning for their benefit and then deny doing so.  Most of the animals cannot read very well or not at all, so the pigs have a rather easy time doing this.  The few animals that do recognize what is going on, are outcast.  They are either killed or driven out and portrayed in a traitorous manner.  This is very much applicable today as government whistle blowers, such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning demonstrate.  The actors in this story may have changed over time, but the characters they are playing seem to be the same.

This book was a very easy read and quite enjoyable.

I was required to take one college-level economics class in order to obtain my engineering degree.  I am happy with the education I received and the school I received it from, but I believe I learned much more from reading this book than I did from a one semester class.  It is amazing how well-written this book is.  Einstein is quoted as saying that if you cannot explain something to a third-grader, then you probably do not have a full grasp of the topic.  While I do not believe this quote to be 100% accurate as most third graders have a limited view of the world, the gist of it is true.  If you can explain a topic in laymen’s terms, you have a good grasp of the topic.  This book is almost completely absent of equations.  Everything is explained in the simplest terms possible using hundreds of real-life examples to back up ideas and concepts.  Despite being a 700+ page economics book, it was a pretty easy and enjoyable read.

It turns out that economics is basically a predictive mechanism for human behavior when it involves the distribution of scarce resources that have alternative uses.  The health of a given economy is proportionate to the efficiency at which goods and services are provided.

This book delves into the failings of the former Soviet Union’s communist economy.  The Soviet government had ministers of industry that decided how much of anything was to be produced.  This is contrary to a free market where the decision to produce something is guided by the market’s need for it.  In a free market, if a producer is producing things that are not selling, that producer will soon be out of business unless the producer moves its resources into creating things that will sell at a profit.  The Soviet government would try to predict how many cars, washing machines, or crops to produce and would often be wrong.  Unused machinery or crops would just rot in warehouses.  The capital and effort used to create them was wasted.  Alternative products that the market desired should have been produced rather than what was produced and then never used.  A free-market is, for the most part, self-adjusting, and self-correcting.  Goods and services are produced in the quantities that are needed because the companies that produce them will fail if they do not.  Communism removes this mechanism.  In a communist government, competition is absent, and the government industries just become less efficient rather than fail.  These inefficiencies are passed on to the citizens in the the form of long waits for goods, poor selection, and an overall lower standard of living.

A theme that runs through this book is the notion that politicians often do things that sound good to gain votes, but are often detrimental to society.  One example is New York’s rent control policies.  These sound like a great idea to citizens desiring lower housing costs, but the effects on the general population is, for the most part, negative.  If a family lives in a large three bedroom apartment it is nice to not burden the family with high rent costs.  But what happens when the children are grown and move out?  Do the empty-nesters that no longer need three bedrooms leave for a smaller place? The answer is probably no.  If they were to leave, they would lose their rent control on that unit.  They likely would have to pay more to leave and move into a smaller place.  It is unlikely anyone would do this.  As a result, the supply of larger apartments for families is reduced.  Housing is no longer used efficiently.  Landlords of these buildings are often forced to host tenants whose rents do not provide enough resources to properly maintain buildings.  The result is often poorly maintained buildings, and in many cases, buildings that are abandoned by landlords.  Also, new apartments subject to rent control are unlikely to be built.  New apartment buildings in New York are usually luxury apartments that are not subject to rent control.  This eventually creates an even greater lack of affordable housing.  What was a great political platform to run on, affordable apartments,  in actuality results in shortages of affordable housing.

In a similar vein, minimum wage laws are typically popular with voters, but are often detrimental to the economy.  If a company has to pay all workers $15 an hour and there are some workers that only output $10 an hour of value, then that company will likely not hire those employees.  The unemployment rate increases when the minimum wage is increased.  Young, unskilled people who might gain skills working a $10 an hour job will simply go unemployed.  Similar occurrences are created when a government imposes lavish benefit requirements for workers as is often the case in European countries.  If the cost of adding a worker is greater than the benefit, a company will not hire that worker.  Over time, the young, unskilled workers are denied learning skills and entering the work force because it is not cost-effective for companies to hire them.  Minimum wage laws are sold by politicians as help for the poor, but the poor are the most likely to be put out of a job by these policies.  To quote the author in his Feb. 3, 2021 tweet –  “The minimum wage law is very cleverly misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero—and that is what many inexperienced and low-skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.”

The author, Thomas Sowell is an African American born in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1930 under the most humble of circumstances.  His mother was a housemaid and his father died before he was born.  Despite his early hardships, after being drafted into the Marine Corps for the Korean war, Sowell managed to get his BA from Harvard University, his MA from Columbia University, and his PhD from the University of Chicago.  He was the first member of his family to have studied beyond the sixth grade.  I imagine his biography, A Personal Odyssey is pretty interesting and I will likely read it in the near future.

I have read more books by Kurt Vonnegut than any other author.  I guess I enjoy the way he painted a wacky view of the way people interact in societies.  He somehow even makes human atrocities seem like they take place in a safe, cartoonish, alternate reality where the author and reader can both analyze things from a safe distance.  No topic seems off-limits.  Much in the way Quentin Tarantino uses levels of violence in some of his films that I would find off-putting if another director/writer were presenting it, Vonnegut seems to have had the ability to present any topic in a humorous, non-offensive manner.

This book deals with an apocalyptic substance created by a reclusive scientist shortly before his demise.  This substance is called Ice Nine.  Ice Nine was initially created at the behest of the military in order to instantly make marshy or swampy ground easily traversable by crystallizing all the water in it with a single “seed” of Ice Nine.   The problem with the stuff, however, is that it worked too well.  The crystalizing process would carry itself through every adjoining water molecule.  In other words, if it was placed in a swamp, it would crystalize the swamp, the creek that fed it, and any rivers, lakes, and oceans that were also connected to it.  Given that people are comprised primarily of water, they were apt to crystalize as well when coming into contact with the substance.

For better or for worse, this existence of this substance never seems to actually be known by the military.  The only known samples are held by the adult children of the deceased creator, Dr. Hoenikker.  Something like Ice Nine is going to be very difficult to ensure lack of contact with bodies of water, but Dr. Hoenikker’s children tote shards of it around in thermos bottles.  In the end, Hoenikker’s children end up on the fictitious island of San Lorenzo.  Islands are land masses surrounded entirely by water, so are probably the worst place to bring Ice Nine, right?  In a ceremonial display of the island’s military might, or lack thereof, and in celebration of its triumph over a fictitious religion, some of the Ice Nine ends up in the ocean.  The sequence of events that leads to the Ice Nine ending up in the ocean is an entire chapter of hilarious misfortune that leads to the presumable end of the world as we know it.

Overall, this was a great book, but I would definitely rank it below Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Player Piano.  If you are new to his work, I would definitely start with Slaughterhouse Five.  Cat’s Cradle was a little slow in building the story, but the final chapters are some of Vonnegut’s best work.   As a side note, I used to listen to a guitarist named Joe Satriani quite a bit in the early 1990’s.  He had an instrumental song that I enjoyed called Ice Nine.  The song was recorded in 1987.  Obviously this song predated the internet by quite a bit, so I never had any idea of the song title’s origin.  Now I know!

I watched the Queen’s Gambit on Netflix a month or so ago and found it quite entertaining.  I looked to see the story’s origin and found that it is a work of fiction from the same author that wrote The Hustler many years earlier.  The Hustler became a 1961 movie starring Paul Newman as pool shark ‘Fast Eddie’ Felson.  A character that was continued in 1986 film, The Color of Money with Newman and Tom Cruise.  According to his Wikipedia page, Tevis taught English literature and creative writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio from 1965 to 1978, where he was named University Professor.  Tevis passed away in 1984 of lung cancer.

The book’s main character, Beth, resides in Kentucky and starts in the early 1950’s.  I have read many books that were later turned into feature-length films and have grown accustomed to movies leaving out many scenes that are present in the original printed story.  This is the first book I have read that was turned into a mini-series.  Just about everything in the book is in the Netflix mini-series.  The only significant omissions are from the very beginning of the book.  At a very young age, both of Beth’s parents are killed in an automobile crash in the beginning of the book and it appears to be accidental.  In the Netflix series, just Beth’s mother dies from what appears as vehicular suicide.  Her father, in the series, wants no part of raising her.  In both versions, Beth ends up being raised in a Kentucky orphanage from an early age.

Another omission in the Netflix series is the relationship between Beth and Jolene – another older orphan.  They have a sexual encounter in the book that is not present in the Netflix mini-series.  I can forgive this omission.  It did not add much to the story, and putting a sex scene with two very young girls on video would probably not be a good business decision.

The orphanage initially gives daily sedative pills to the girls to keep them well-mannered.  Beth builds an addiction to them as a child and struggles with this and alcohol addiction throughout the novel.  Very early in her stay at the orphanage, she notices that the custodian, Mr. Schaibel, plays a peculiar game in the basement during his free time.  This game turns out to be chess and Beth is strangely drawn to it.  She convinces a reluctant Mr. Schaibel to teach her this game, which she quickly becomes extremely proficient at.  She has an incredible ability to visualize and play out games completely in her head.  She ‘sees’ the moving  pieces above her as she lies in bed every night.  Her skill does not go unnoticed by Mr. Schaibel.  Mr. Schaibel is a pretty decent amateur player and young Beth learns to best him in a fairly short time.  Still in grade school, she is able to easily best all of the local high school chess club members simultaneously.

Then her addiction to the sedatives gets the better of her.  The orphanage no longer gives out the pills and she goes into withdrawal.  In an effort to quell her cravings, she attempts to steal some sedatives, is caught, and receives the worst imaginable punishment for her – no more chess.  For three years she is not allowed to physically play chess, but she still studies a chess book given to her by Mr. Schaibel – Modern Chess Openings.  At night she still visualizes the board and pieces moving around on the ceiling above her bed.

She is then adopted by a couple, Alma and Allston Wheatley, when she is 13 years old.  I say couple because  a husband and wife adopt her, but the husband, Allston, is a traveling salesman who is never home and seems to have no interest in Beth or Alma.  Beth seems to be acquired to give Alma an acquaintance  to keep her off of Allston’s back.  The book paints Alma much like Netfilx does.  She is a heavy-smoking, somewhat alcoholic, motivation-less housewife with zero ambition and a love of television.  In the book, however, she appears much more overweight and out of shape.

Outside the orphanage Beth learns that, if someone is good enough, he can actually make a good living playing chess.  I say ‘he’ because chess is completely male-dominated at the highest levels, particularly in the timeframe of this story.  Contrary to the lackadaisical Alma, Beth is highly motivated to excel.  She is driven to play and compete.  Alma has zero interest in Beth’s desire’s to play chess and Allston appears to have dropped out of the picture completely – leaving Beth and Alma without much income.  Beth needs five dollars to compete in a local tournament.  She has to write Mr. Schaibel to obtain this paltry sum.  She wins the tournament, and with it, a decent sum of money and local notoriety.  This event puts some motivation into Alma who sees the golden goose in Beth, in front of her.  They travel the country and fund their existence with Beth’s tournament winnings.

Eventually Beth makes it to tournaments outside of the US and becomes a fairly well-known player.  At a tournament in Mexico, Alma dies in her sleep after not feeling well for a few days.  Beth, still a minor, has to fend for herself.  Allston does not return, but tells Beth over the phone that she can have the house.  She continues the routine of  traveling and competing to fund her life.  Along the way she makes friends with other players, adds to her notoriety, and struggles with her addictions.  Two of her friends, Benny, and Bektik become love interests for short periods with romances largely taking a back seat to a passion for excelling at chess.

She is becoming a world-class player, but also a world-class addict.  She recognizes her problem and manages to re-connect with Jolene, who is now a graduate student and fitness fanatic.  Jolene manages to whip Beth into shape and steer her from her self-destructive ways.

At the end of the novel Beth is playing in Russia against the fictitious world champion Vasily Borgov.  She recognizes that the great Russians rely on each other for help in tournaments and she is given help by her friends back home at a critical moment before she is to finish her match with Borgov.  In the end she defeats Borgov and is able to thank everyone that helped her on her journey.

I just finished reading A Harvesting of Souls.

It is set in the fictitous American Midwest town of Taylorsville in the late 1950’s.  The book begins in an ice cream shop attended by a local teen named Betty on a wintery day.  She is all alone, business is slow, and she is reflecting on her future if she remains in this small town.  She had a friend who recently left town to lead a more exciting life and Betty ponders following in her friend’s footsteps.  Shortly before closing, she gets an odd, grissly-appearing customer that makes her feel uneasy.  This creepy fellow reveals himself to be a medical examiner who is headed to the next town to survey the victim of a murder.  Little does Betty know, that the victim this unusual customer is headed to see is the friend she had been thinking of.  You see, there is a curse on Taylorville.   Residents who attempt to leave it behind will surely be the victim of unfortunate circumstances.  The same is true for non-residents who attempt to move to Taylorville.

The book goes on about many strange occurances of different people trying to leave or move to Taylorville and all meet unfortunate fates.  Another strange aspect of the curse is that the population of Taylorville always remains a constant 4,253.  For every new birth, there must be a corresponding death.  As a result, a town member deciding to have a large family is going to be frowned upon.  There is one such family, the Boersma’s, that has four children. For much of their early lives, at least, these children are shunned by the other children of the town for being members of a large family.  Eventually though, one of the sons becomes very interested in the curse and its origins and becomes a key member of this small society.

It is later revealed that everyone in the town has the same Dutch heritage prior to arriving in Taylorville 140 or so years earlier.  There is even one resident who has been around for the entirety of that time.  He represents an almost shaman figure in the story.  By the end of the book, the townspeople discover the truth about themselves.  They are re-incarnates of souls dating back to the lost city of Atlantis and they eventually re-discover their long-lost purpose for being.

This book can be found at Lulu.com

 

Other than Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, this is the fastest I have ever gone through a book.  I started on a Sunday and finished on Thursday while I was working full-time.  There are really only two characters in this book, and neither is given a name.  It is almost entirely about a man and his son in a post-apocalyptic world.  Almost nothing has been left alive on earth.  Everything is covered with a gray dust as the pair venture South in hopes of finding better conditions.

During their travels, they must take care to not be detected by other survivors.   Many of those who survived have resorted to cannibalism for sustenance.  As they travel, they scrounge for leftover food from a bygone world and rest in makeshift camps where they cannot be seen from the road that takes them South.  They encounter scoundrels they must kill or flee from along the way.   For most of the story, they trust no one.  During their journey they both struggle to keep their hope of a better tomorrow alive.  They refer to it as “the fire”.  They eventually reach the ocean, which is also gray and devoid of life.  Shortly afterward, the father begins to get ill.  He eventually succumbs.

Shortly before the end, the father instructs his son to leave him and continue the journey.  The son stays with him for some time after he passes and then is approached by a stranger.  This stranger appears to be part of welcoming family, also with a young boy, that accepts him.