Le book du bus ride comprised two books today.
Loaded up the Sony with a couple of things from the latest Humble Bundle e-books bundle, which is the one with all the HarperCollins books in it.
Started and finished
Ben Mezrich's
Busting Vega$ [sic]
: The True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds, which is a fictionalized account of one of those MIT card-counting casino-hacking teams, and a minor draw for me in terms of buying the full bundle.
I actually would much rather have read the dramatized non-fiction book that Mezrich wrote about the same subject,
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, which got turned into a film, but this was as close as my bundle money could get and I figured it probably wasn't too far off anyway.
As for the actual story, well, remember that episode of
Futurama where they visit the amusement park on the moon* and something happens that winds up with Bender saying that he could build his own moonbase? With blackjack! And hookers!
Because yeah, it's kind of like Mezrich decided he could write his own casino-jacking heist flick. With blackjack! And hookers! (Both rather lovingly described.)
While as a novel it's not actually bad, it suffers from, IMHO, thinly-fleshed character types filling in for actual characters (there's the Only Sane Man™, who's got the troubled best friend who goes astray, the initially intimidating but increasingly friendly and approachable hot girl he has hopes of winding up with, the self-absorbed charismatic obsessive who drives them all, etc., etc.) who basically serve to enable the Hollywood film- standard plot and actions, as well as something of a redundant narrative structure that isn't pulled off well enough to justify it.
There's a conceit of having a modern-day writer narrate in the first person interspersing chapters where he's apparently on the trail of the long-disappeared Only Sane Man in the team, dropping little hints about how stuff you'll find out about in the main narrative happened that got out of hand in the past which leads us to his mysterious present situation.
But the anticipatory foreshadowing this is apparently meant to set up was handled perfectly fine in the the opening prologue, told in 3rd person POV from the Only Sane Man's perspective during a crisis point, setting up the flashbacks as to How It All Went Wrong, without needing to resort to inserting the future-writer character. And it's just not done well enough to make it seem anything other than an intrusive break in the real action happening in the book, which is actually rather interesting when it starts to get a bit into the techniques used to count cards for fun and profit while distracting the staff from noticing that you are counting cards for fun and profit.
Mind you, it does make it easier to set up the Where Are They Now? segment, although the lavish praise of the free open source software movement in the outroduction rings a little jarringly in conjunction with
In all, this was a mildly interesting, though ultimately rather generic standard Hollywood daring-heist-undermined-by-hubris film-type read whose only distinguishing feature is the behind-the-scenes-of-how-to card-counting stuff, which would probably be much better served by the mostly non-fiction book which the author wrote about the subject.
(ETA: Or maybe not, since this was apparently itself a dramatized non-fiction meant to be a follow-up to the first book he wrote,
according to Wikipedia. I thought for sure it had to be a mediocre
roman ā clef novel with both the writer character and the POV hacker as stand-ins for the author.)
I don't regret the dollar or so I spent for this as part of the Humble HarperCollins Bundle, but I wouldn't recommend it as a standalone purchase for much more than that.
The book that I got and read on the way back from the library,
William Sleator's
The Last Universe, was much better.
While this still wasn't quite as good as his more classic award-shortlisted YA SF, it was a vast improvement over the more supernatural reads of his I've been sampling over the past week.
This one had a nifty exploration of deliberately-cultivated quantum effects with characters sampling various multiverses with the occasional help of
a certain cat‡ in an attempt to understand and better their situation by swapping themselves into an ideal one, with attention paid to the typical Sleator-ish fridge horror examination of the ramifications of such, by looking at the possibilities of
And it also had that old-school Sleator-ish look at how the demands of an increasingly invalid family member upon the able-bodied one who's assigned to look after him (to both their increasing resentment and frustration) warps the usual interactive sibling dynamics, as well as the entire family and everyone who comes into their orbit, not unlike how gravity warps space-time, and sets up the entire adventure to begin with.
Moderate recommend for hard-ish SF fans interested in YA subgenre reads. Not among his best, but not bad, and if you had to pick one of his non-sequel 2000s-written things to read, this is actually a pretty decent one.
* To this day, even though I have only ever seen this episode twice (the 2nd time for the DVD commentary) and many years ago at that, I can still sing, with perfect recall, the fake theme park tune†. This means something, I think. Something sad.
† ♪
We're whalers on the moon; we carry a harpoon… ♪ ♫ But there ain't no whales, so we tell tall tales, and sing our whaling tune… ♫
‡ Sometimes the cat is helpful, sometimes it's not. You never know until you open the chapter and have a look.