It’s hard to believe that it’s already the end of June. The time has certainly flown by, despite the relative tediousness of pandemic life. But here we are once again, at what feels like the end of something, a certain melancholy for the end of the school year, but also the excitement of what seems like an endless stretch of lazy summer days…
Speaking of the end of something, as of July 1, Feedburner, the platform Blogger uses to deliver new posts to subscribers’ email addresses, will be cancelled, so if you are a subscriber who follows by email, this is the last post that will be delivered to you. I have been considering some options and would like to offer the following: if you would like me to send a link for each new post to you personally, please email me at: juliesreadingcorner@gmail.com and I will begin this service as of next week. A friend also sent me this suggestion: If you are an RSS/Atom feed reader, you can subscribe to this blog’s Atom feed at this link : http://www.juliesreadingcorner.com/feeds/posts/default. I hope you will continue to read my posts and hopefully find some interesting book suggestions, and I will do my best to provide options to make this transition easy and seamless. Thank you to everyone who visits this blog - I appreciate it!
I read an interesting book last week, another techno-thriller, this one by Irish-Canadian author Ed O’Loughlin. This Eden begins in Vancouver with two students who end up together due to circumstance and stay together seemingly out of convenience. Alice is a computer genius who wants to change the world. Michael just barely squeaked by the entrance exams to get into Engineering. They meet one afternoon when a group of students are enjoying a rare snowy day, knowing that these weather conditions are brief and fleeting. They end up together for the rest of their time at university, until Alice drops out and says she wants to go and work for a big tech company in Silicon Valley, one she has for years professed to despise. When the news of this company’s plan to introduce Omnicent, a cryptocurrency that will eventually wipe out the use of money, Alice knows something must be done or governments around the world will lose all power and will ultimately topple. Then Alice disappears and Michael is at a loss for what to do next, how to go on living. When he is recruited by this same tech company because of his relationship with Alice, he suspects that there is more going on than they are saying, but he has no proof. Then he is reluctantly but forcibly drawn into an espionage plan by an Irish asset named Aoife and her elusive boss, Towse, and his boring life changes forever. What follows is a rollercoaster ride of plot twists and turns through what I think of as “Around the world of horrors in 400 pages”. I really enjoyed this novel, which pulled me along in the excitement of the chase every step of the way and every page of the book. But it was so much more than a techno-thriller. It was a literary exploration into the very things that make up our existence in the world, and asks us to consider who we are and how we define ourselves. I have to say, though, that despite how gripping this novel was, after reaching the last page, I felt that I needed a break from reading about the darkest sides of humanity. I would definitely recommend this well-written literary thriller to just about anyone.
That’s all for today. Stay cool and keep reading!
Bye for now…Julie
No comments:
Post a Comment