Trent's Blog

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is the Pulitzer Prizing winning novel by Junot Díaz. I loved this book, but it’s kind of like reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. You need to have a web browser open in front of you to look up the references that you don’t understand. I saw a video…

“Nothing to Lose: A Reacher Novel” is Lee Child’s 12th book in the Reacher series. It came out in hardback in 2008, and paperback in 2009. In this latest story, Reacher is hitch-hiking across the country from Calais, Maine to San Diego, California minding his own business and living the drifter lifestyle (except that he…

“Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” is by Malcolm Gladwell from 2005. Like all the other Gladwell books I really enjoyed it. He’s a great non-fiction writer. I think it is his mastery of the anecdote that makes reading his work so enjoyable. Some critics give him a lot of grief trying to claim…

“Bad Luck and Trouble” is the 11th book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. (I’ve only got one more to review after this one.) In this one, Reacher reunites his old crew from his MP days to investigate the murder of one of their colleagues. It’s set in Los Angeles, and the action gets pretty…

Yes, “One Shot” is yet another Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. I actually read this book awhile ago, but I’m behind on adding books to my web page that lists all the books I’ve read since about 2000. I’ve got five books to go, and three of them are Reacher books. As I’ve said…

“Die Trying” is the second book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. It’s in the mystery-thriller genre. It was written back in the late ’90s when the militia movement was still taken seriously. In this book, Reacher and an FBI agent are kidnapped off the streets of Chicago by militia idiots and taken across the…

This is the 10th book in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. I didn’t read the books in order, but it really doesn’t matter. You still get the most important parts even if you read them in non-chronological order. In this episode, Reacher is in New York tracking down a mercernary’s kidnapped wife. The…

I picked up the latest Malcolm Gladwell book a few months ago at the Barnes and Noble. I had really loved The Tipping Point from 2000, and I’d seen a couple of videos of talks that Gladwell has done, so I was really looking forward to this book. I know that he has to take…

The Broken Window is by Jeffrey Deaver, copyright 2008. It’s another book I snagged from the shelves of the Wal-Mart during a fit of boredom. Deaver is the same guy who wrote “The Bone Collector” which was made into a movie with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Having read this book, it’s fairly clear to…

Yes, it is yet another Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. This one is the first in the series. It was written in 1997. I read it about 10th out of the 12 Reacher books that I’ve read so far. (There is a 13th book that just came out, but I’m waiting for the paperback…