The reason for these "quarterly" reports is that I just can’t keep up with the speed most of you read. It is not unlikely that I’ll only get one book done in a month and now that my "day" job has me doing less traveling, I don’t go through Books on Tape as often.

The latest from Michael Connelly is a standalone, Chasing the Dime. Henry Pierce just got a new phone number and is getting calls for "Lilly". Curious, he looks into it and discovers Lilly is a call girl and has gone missing. Henry is also the founder and president of a high tech company looking for investors. So it is seeming a bit strange for him to get all worked up by all of this. The story revolves around "nano-technology", the current frontier in which research is boldly going. Pierce's interest has medical impact and so they "chase the dime" belonging to investors who have a personal interest in this kind of development. Like most of Connelly's work, he has a meticulous prose that makes the scenes very real and adds a level of authority to his stories. I not only felt I understood what Pierce's research was about, I felt I now qualified to get a job with him! A good read.

Written in 1911, Arthur Conan Doyal's The Lost World, is an adventure story of a journalist who accompanies an expedition to a "Lost World" where there still roams prehistoric creatures. The team consists of four. Professor Challenger, who claimed have knowledge of such a land, Professor Summerlee the skeptic, Lord John Roxton, an adventurer and E. D. Malone, our narrator and journalist out to participate in some adventure, primarily to win the heart of his love, Gladys. The story doesn't live up to today's standards of adventure and suspense (even Michael Crichton's "Lost World" was more robust and as a novel, yet it paled in comparison to "Jurassic Park"). Doyle seemed to be trying to incorporate contemporary science into the story in order to bolster the plausibility of the adventure. Whether he was actually trying to do that, or I am just assuming, I don't really know. However, the story is salted with scientific details, some of which are not the current viewpoint but may have been then. Whether the details were or were not the contemporary viewpoint of 1911 or, if they weren't, that Doyle was misinformed or taking "liberties" with the contemporary facts, I can't say for sure. My impression, however, was that he was trying to keep the story within the bounds of contemporary thought for that period. And, for me, this is the charm of reading older novels. This is because it gives me the illusion that I'm going back in time and visiting a bygone era. This is different from reading historical fiction (something written in contemporary times, but set in the past). This is written in and around the contemporary times of the past. 

The recent airing of A&E's "The Lost World" was somewhat faithful to the book. However, there were some differences, which served to make the story a bit more suspenseful and to hold the interest of a contemporary audience better. First of all, there was a woman on expedition which was not part of the book (I'm sure that would have been considered quite scandalous at the time). There were more dinosaurs than in the book and their encounters were more threatening. The film also touched on a "creation vs evolution" debate which kind of surprised me (the book completely ignored the topic). The film made a whole subplot out of the conservationist viewpoint of not interfering with nature. Again, this thread was not an element of the book.
 

Open Season by C.J. Box is a great first novel. Joe Pickett is a game warden in Wyoming and becomes embroiled in the politics of the consequences of "Endangered Species". The story is homey and slow to begin and develop, but ends off with quite exciting wallops. It is a very good first novel. It is very easy for stories with themes on "political" or "agenda" items to get somewhat preachy and taking sides. Though there seemed to be a slant to one side of the issue in this case, it did not get preachy. The focus stayed on what happens to Joe and his family. This is a really good read.

In a recently produced audio book (1997) of his first book published in 1977, which Timothy Ferris reads himself, The Red Limit  subtitled The Search for the Edge of the Universe, is a non-fiction and fine introduction to cosmology for the general audience. True, the book is 25 years old, but the major portions of what we know and how we know it was unraveled, mostly, in the first half of the last century and began to be popularized in the last 20 or 25 years. This is his first book. The "Red Limit" of the title refers to the fascinating fact that the universe is expanding. Deep into space, stars and galaxies seem to be moving away from us. The farther out they are, the faster they retreat. This is evidenced by the analysis of their light spectra. Telltale "lines" in the light's spectra indicate what the kind of elements comprise the light source. But the lines of distant light sources are "shifted" to the red end of the visual band (which ranges from infrared to ultraviolet). 

There is very little, if anything, new in the this book that hasn't already been said or retold in the many books or other medium that has been made available since by others and even Timothy himself (the masterpiece of which is his Coming of Age in the Milky Way). However, much of the history and understanding of the cosmos is so outside our day-to-day experiences, it is difficult to understand and, if absorbed, easily forgotten. It is useful to be refreshed on occasion. In this case, it is also a pleasure because Ferris has an elegance in his writing which, aside from the subject matter itself, has its own beauty.

An eccentric rich, Rolf Rudolph Deutsch, will pay handsomely to find out if there is life after death. This is the premise of Richard Matheson's Hell House. He hires a physicist-parapsychologist, a spiritual medium and a physical medium who is the one lone survivor of Hell House. If proof of life after death exists, it will be here that it is found, the one haunted house on earth "…which has yet to be explained away…." Each has their own agenda and work against each other. It's pretty spooky. 

The film version from 1973 ("The Legend of Hell House") with Roddy McDowell and Clive Revel was surprisingly faithful to the book. Well, that shouldn't be a big surprise since Richard Matheson did the screenplay. The film has a "70's" feel to it (clothes styles) and a haunting sense characteristic of British films of the genera (little or no musical soundtrack, low camera angels, short, choppy, cryptic delivery of dialog).

Prey by Michael Crichton is a bio-techno-thriller involving "nano-technology" or "molecular circuitry". A software company develops and employs a mechanism to build medical "equipment" in the form of self organizing molecules. The objective is to have these tiny little molecular circuits organize into clumps to perform operations previously impossible because of the bulk of the equipment. For instance, this "swarm" can become a camera small enough to flow in the blood stream down to the capillary level and "transmit" back the images. The "self organizing" nature of the particles was necessary and beneficial to overcome some manufacturing problems and problems in practice. However, it was also a form of evolution and soon got out of hand and would loose sight of its programmed objective. 

Like much from Crichton since, the beginning, actually, this is another "warning" to the general population in the form of a thriller. It warns of the evils of unchecked bio-research. But this time, it seemed to me, to be way outside plausible. I don't mean that the story was too incredible to sustain the suspense. I mean it was more like yellow journalism than the forecasting of real or nearby threat. A good majority of the problem in the story was the technology evolved way to fast for people to react to it. True, the swarms it did have a sort lifespan and quite prolific, which lends itself to evolutionary "progress". However, one of the tenets of evolution (and a fundamental one) is that changes in individuals must give it an advantage to survive long enough to procreate. Further, without this advantage, individuals will have problems reaching maturity or procreating once there. For a trait to become dominate within a population, it must be past on and most of those that do have the trait have to survive long enough to pass it on. If both those, with and with out this trait, make it to maturity, the next generation will have the same mix and the evolutionary "enhancement" isn't necessarily any more present than before. It appeared that Crichton was ignoring this part. In this story, it seemed that things were "evolving" within a single lifetime and this learned experienced was passed on. 

Aside from that, it is a fun read and if you just accept the technology and the explanations provided, it maintains the plausibility and suspense level.