Bernard Jan's Blog, page 24

Book Bundle Giveaway

It did happen but I did not expect it to happen! I am one of the three winners of Paula Wynne October Book Bundle Giveaway Competition! What does that mean? It means that I have won a bundle of 16 books of various authors! Wow, amazing indeed!

I want to thank Paula for this wonderful opportunity to get such unexpected and much appreciated gift(s) and I also want to thank the following authors for giving their books for free for this competition: PJ McDermot, Mike Hartner, Jody A. Kessler, Paul Casselle, Jacky Gray, Hilary Thompson, Norma Hinkens, J. Naomi Ay, JA Andrews, Jenny Green, Ramona Flightner, Ali Dent, Andy Graham, Vered Ehsani, D.B. Martin, and Michael Bolan.

Beside me, the two other winners of Paula's 3rd Book Bundle Giveaway are Darlene Write and Carol Peace.

Here is what we said upon receiving those wonderful books:

Darlene Wright from the US: “Wow! Fantastic! Thanks So Much!! Made my day!”

Bernard Jan from Croatia: “I entered the October Book Bundle Giveway just for fun, not really expecting anything. Thank you, getting 16 books at one time is totally unbelievable, especially when you have thousands of readers who entered!”

Carol Peace from the UK: “Wow what a great surprise, I am so happy and excited. I love books and reading. Thank you so much!”

This is the link for future book giveaways.

Onwards to reading!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers by Stephen King

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Upon reaching page 240 of Finders Keepers by Stephen King a thought stroke me. King cannot fail. What are the odds for that? Brilliant! This thought lingered and stayed with me until the very end of the book.

Finders Keepers, the second book in Bill Hodges Trilogy is a constant page-turner. A story about a vengeful reader obsessed with a retired writer spreads through 370 pages like fast and untamable fire. It burns its way to our hearts, brings us strong characters, lots of excitement and the fantastic plot! Again King has a surgically precise eye for the detail, which is a characteristic of his writing I probably like and admire most.

Brilliant! Five stars without much thinking!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Finders Keepers

Without An Angel

Without An Angel by Mitchell Bogatz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Broken heart can cut like a knife, tear up your world and torture your body and mind as you drift between two realities. The old one you know, love and miss every minute of your life, and the new one in which you feel lost, abandoned and cannot accept it as your new life order.

Mitchell Bogatz wrote his poetry book titled Without An Angel during the hardest year of his young life, when he fell in love with an unavailable woman. His raw and beautiful poetry, devoid of any pathos, is filled with unrestrained lust and almost desperate yearning to be loved, cherished, needed and appreciated.

While going through his short, vivid poems and experiencing his emotional and somehow so familiar verses, we drink straight from the fountain of the author's personal, intimate life. We are reminded of our own passions, of our own struggle to get back on our feet and SURVIVE on the ruins of forbidden love, of our own longing to quit, just let go, disappear and be forgotten: Sometimes I wonder if I’d be happier on a beach somewhere, nothing in my pockets, with no one waiting for me to come home.

If you like poetry, it would be a shame to miss this powerful and honest collection of poems. Even if you are not too big a fan of the verse, do yourself a favor and spend some time with Bogatz's writing. His suffering and pain might surprise you with hope and strength it gives you when you are faced with going through life without your angel, or, even better, encourage you to swing your wings to go out and find it.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Without An Angel

Big Data – Big Danger

Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel by Lucas Carlson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel is a new ingenious creation by Lucas Carlson, a fiction and non-fiction author and entrepreneur, who already got my attention and won me over with his first thrilling startup novel The Term Sheet.

Big Data is a maddening ride through our near future where artificial intelligence is incorporated in our lives to the point that people rely on its services more than on their natural instincts, reasoning and decision making. It serves us, it helps us, it cures us, and then it kills us...

This is exactly what happens when Luna Valencia's most-advanced supercomputer in history Ancien starts to refine and improve on its own code which can “solve many problems in the world of artificial intelligence without human assistance, interpretation, or intervention.” It is the holy grail in the world of computers, but it also is the weapon for mass murder in the world of humans.

Luna Valencia's own baby becomes her executor when it falls into the hands of Doug Kensington and Thor Massino, two ill-intentioned ambitious and unscrupulous people. There is no safe place for her or anyone, because suddenly “people are dying. Everybody. Everywhere. People are dying faster all over—in every region of the world—at a higher rate.”

On her quest to uncover the truth about mysterious deaths, Luna not only faces losing her company but is hunted and chased into walking the path covered with bodies and smeared with blood, both of the innocent and guilty ones. Even losing her own life is something she has to deal with in order to stop computers from killing people. The whole world is in grave danger.

In “a weird mash-up” of computers and people, “nobody was deciding who would die. Nor was anyone determining how these people would die. The computer figured out those parts on its own. But (...) it was human beings who created the intention to kill. Not the computer. The one thing nobody seemed to be able to synthesize with computers was the creative intention. The spark of why. More and more, any discrete task could be better accomplished by computers than by humans. But the intention behind the task, the creative force. That was still as mysterious and intractable as the soul.”

Lucas Carlson in this extremely exciting novel also doesn't lose a poetic expression during this fast and crazy artificial intelligence ride for life and death. He barely gives us a moment or two to catch our breath before we are thrown into another life-threatening situation in which someone is programmed to die. The thin line between our near future and actual reality becomes even thinner when we come to realize that technology already today is infused in so many aspects of our lives. We submit ourselves to it, we reap its fruits and we think we control it. Do we, indeed?

Alarm bells are ringing through all 400 pages of Big Data with the warning. We better snap out of our indifference and, as the author says in his afterword, ask ourselves, “how do we prevent bad people from getting their hands on software that could potentially destroy us? The world’s next generation of mega-weapons will be software. Code in machines. Machines that drive our cars, fly our planes, control our homes, run our hospitals, and do something new for us every day. (…) It is time that we, as a global human race, invent and adopt systems of technological checks and balances. Software is infinitely easier to infiltrate and steal than atomic bombs. And if we sit back and do nothing—if we just throw our hands up and ignore the problem—we will have to live with the consequences. (…) And what’s at stake is the very survival of the human race.”

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Big Data: A Startup Thriller NovelLucas Carlson

Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies

Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies by Dario Cannizzaro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dario Cannizzaro is a 35-year-old writer from Naples who managed to mislead me with the title of his collected stories Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies and a completely black cover of his book outlined with red images of a syringe, stars, planet Saturn, a cross, a profile of a woman, a naked female body, a hand digging out its way through earth, a spaceship, a pierced heart, and a cloud dialogue with xxx in it. My mind was sidetracked into believing that I will be reading gory, horror stories of aliens, zombies, death celebrated and life taken, so I embraced myself for this dark and short journey.

I was so wrong. And I wouldn't put a blame for it on Dario Cannizzaro for choosing this title and Vico for “lending his design talent” for this book cover. Actually, now when I reflect on everything that I've read in nine stories on 104 pages (Preface, Thank you and Bio & Contacts pages included), they are rather logical and smartly chosen. Only my dark and twisted mind has been looking forward to the rivers of blood and aliens and zombies hunting down the remaining surviving specimens of mankind!

Cannizzaro's stories are indeed stories about life, death, alien and zombies. They are stories about everyday life as we know it, life as it could be if things went slightly different (e.g. zombies walking among us, Pope admitting that aliens are gods we have been worshiping since the dawn of mankind), life and death that continue its perpetual circle despite the fact that aliens are watching us and we don't care much about it after the first initial shock of finding the truth that is out there, or that zombies are our new neighbors even though we do not see or hear them so we carry on with our daily life, normal as it can be under the new circumstances.

Cannizzaro's stories are also stories about love, passion and sex. In some we can so vividly taste the smells, fragrances and the bloodstream of Italy, in others we are faced with our own basic instincts, aspirations, cravings, hopes, dreams and memories. Some of them are not even two pages long, while others are a more complex and maybe even more demanding reading. All of them, though, are carefully written with Cannizzaro's beautiful style and meticulously chosen words and sentences.

Three of my favorite stories are Yet Another Zombie Apocalypse, The Best Place to Plan a Mass Shooting and The Announcement. If that describes me as an aspiring and sometimes misunderstood author who is scared shitless of zombies and hopes for aliens to come to his rescue, so be it. This is who I am. But these stories carry the weight of a deeper truth and hypothetical and yet not-so-alien reality, if we only allow ourselves to think outside the box we have been put and locked into.

There is one particular story I wanted to mention at the end and I am sure there is a good reason why the author saved it to end his first book of collected stories with it as well. Impurita is the most complex and in-depth story of them all, but what truly separates it and places it on a special pedestal is the beauty and love with which it is written, a strong and deep emotion and the poetry in every sentence through which it speaks to us. Would calling it a literary masterpiece be an exaggeration? I hope you will be able to tell me that after you read it.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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The Mean Innocence of Black Canyon

Black Canyon by Jeremy Bates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am so glad that Black Canyon is the first work by Jeremy Bates I've read. To be honest, since I have so many books waiting in line to be read – quite a pile on my table and in my Kindle, I wasn't planning on reviewing it at first. I wanted to save time and move on onto another book as soon as possible. But already in the first ten pages of this 2015 dark novella I knew this won't be the case, even if I reflect on it with just a few words.

It is a rarity to have an opportunity to read about the pre-teen young monster, who will grow into a new American psycho and a serial killer, from his own perspective. When a child (12-year-old Brian Garrett) tells you about the weekend camping with his parents in the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, you don't expect anything but the idyllic trip to the amazing and wild nature. And this is what you get. But coated with a few gory moments of surprise, very well timed twists, murders and true horror. The freakiest thing is the lightness with which Brian accepts his dark nature already at this early age, his calculated, heartless and almost mathematically precise survival instinct.

This is a quick-paced read about the seemingly normal but in truth one bad-vibed family which can be easily spotted and recognized too often around us, told in a simple and capturing narrative voice.

Black Canyon, which I also like to fondly call The Mean Innocence and The Growing of American Psycho, lingers in my mind with the aftertaste mixture of a novella and the movie Stand by Me and The River Wild movie, which I both quite liked, while Jeremy Bates, as an author, seriously competes to become one of my new darlings.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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9/11 Through Time and Space

But it happens. Time flows and changes things and erases old memories before the new ones for God knows what reason. People remember and people forget but some things are too important to be forgotten. We have to remember them even when the others think they belong to the past, some other time and place less important and too distant.

I remember.

First it is a day and a night thousand and thousand miles up in the freezing air, a massive moving body of cold Atlantic deep down under me as hours are slowly passing by. First there are clouds and skyscrapers probing them while skyrocketing from the island surrounded by the East River and the Hudson River. The World Trade Center, the Chrysler Building the Empire State Building and many others. First there is a wild beating of the heart when the plane touches its wheels with a soft thud and a brief screeching sound against the Newark Airport runway. The first white limo and your new friend Lidija taking you to her cozy apartment in the Jersey City.

First there are lights of Manhattan across the Hudson River twinkling through the slowly setting young American night and the wind of approaching train in the subway. First there are the Twin Towers, majestic and high high high and big big big towering over you into the endless night and the colorful lights of the Times Square in a warm and pleasant September New York night.

My first time ever on the American soil. My first time ever in New York City. It is September 11, 2000.

I am there, I am dreaming. No! I am living my dream. I am remembering everything: every step on Lower-Midtown-Upper Manhattan tarmac, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, jet lag, rollerblading the streets, avenues and Central Park, skateshops, squirrels, a candy for a dollar from a local teenage guy at the Washington Square Park raising funds for runaway kids, gay and straight couples, the hum of the waves at the Battery Park, tourists, smells of fast food, Italian food, Chinese food, French fries, pasta, any food, longboards, students, volunteering, gay parade, warm wind blowing around the corners of the streets and down the avenues bathed in sun, horns and traffic noise, ice water, museums museums museums, a roller coaster on the Coney Island, books, gifts, firefighters in action, skateboarders at the Union Square, street performers everywhere.

And I am in the midst of everything. I am there, the king of my dream, happy as can be when life throws into your lap everything. At least for a brief and short too short way too short twelve days.

And then there are tears. And screams. And people falling from the sky escaping fire smoke heat and falling debris.

And then there is a shock, disbelief, incomprehension, new explosions, new smoke, white dust, falling papers, death. More live news about the burning floors of the World Trade Center towers, about people being trapped about people being killed about death that cannot be avoided.

Then there is pain in your head and a hole in your heart and a big unanswered question in your eyes moist with tears – why? why? why?

I am far away from it, across the East River, across the Atlantic Ocean, on another continent. I am home from work, watching every news all the news everything, not missing anything and remembering that today is my anniversary of visiting New York. It is September 11, 2001.

I am piling up newspapers, magazines, pictures and articles so as to remember so as not to forget what is going on that day what was going on that day, the dead and the living, lost and found ones, tears, flowers, candles. Photographs and messages, lots of photographs and unanswered messages, thousands of them.

Remembering. It is important to remember. When life goes on and pushes death aside it is important to cherish the memory on the most nightmarish day in New York City. When the Twin Towers died.

When the Twin Towers were murdered.

I haven't returned to New York yet. I am trying to coexist in a parallel universe, sorrow in my head, fire, longing and desire in my heart for a distant city and a close memory I do not want to forget.

I remember everything.

Even the life I build here revolves around it, distractions help only temporarily. I whisper about it in my soul, I sing about it in my poems and in my books. And now in my blog posts on my web page, too.

Fifteen years after our encounter and fourteen years after the mortal wound to its soul I have launched my official web page www.bernardjan.com. It marks the beginning of a new life and a new adventure I am embracing and exploring every day.

Precisely one year later and fifteen years after the disappearance of the Twin Towers I am opening my Twitter account so I can better share what I love with you AND I'm writing this blog post because I want to remember and I do not want to forget anything. I want to remember my dream fulfilled, my love, my feelings, my story. I do not want to forget other people's tears, losses, pain, agony, ruined lives and stolen destinies.

But it happens. Time flows and changes things and erases old memories before the new ones for God knows what reason. People remember and people forget but some things are too important to be forgotten. We have to remember them even when the others think they belong to the past, some other time and place less important and too distant.

It is never too far and never unimportant to remember. With fire, longing and desire as a reminder, we may just realize that now we love New York more than ever.

We just have to – remember.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

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My Life on Twitter (Let's Follow Each Other!)

It is not a coincidence that my life on Twitter starts today (yes, you can follow me there now!). Those who know me will understand why this date is so important to me. Those who will yet become my friends just have to remind themselves on the significance of this date and the tectonic shift it made in the history of mankind.

Today is the day for remembering so this is what my first Tweets are meant for. I have both beautiful and sad memories of 9/11 and I hope to connect with you through these memories. I want to share what I love with you, things that meant something to me and are still meaning a lot to me. Through memories we live and defy the oblivion of time. Through memories we are here even after we're gone.

Beside following me on Twitter, you can also connect with me on my other social network platforms: LinkedIn, Goodreads and Promocave. Feel free to share what you love with me!

And, of course, don't forget to check out my new posts on my official web page; it was launched exactly a year ago, also on 9/11!

Thanks!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Uncommon Stock

Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Once in a while you come upon a book that throws you completely unguarded off your feet. When you buy a book you usually have an idea what to expect to find between the covers and you prepare yourself for a pleasurable journey into a new world unknown. But when you get a free copy of an e-book as a runner up for the review giveaway contest, you do not know much about it, or whom you are going to deal with and spend your Kindle-time with during the next few days or weeks.

Mara Winkle is the heroine of Eliot Peper's Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0. She is a strong female character caught in the bizarre love-business triangle between her boyfriend Craig and her best friend James. Craig and James are not too much fond of each other, which makes Mara's life even more colorful and exciting, pushing her every now and then to express her strong character in both decision-and-relationship making. Beside being strong headed and ready to cut off people seemingly without a second thought or regret, Mara is passionate about mountain biking and especially rock climbing. "Climbing was the most intellectually intense sport Mara had experienced. She had heard it described as physical chess. It was a kind of dynamic athletic geometry and there was a good reason bouldering routes were called problems. Every move was an exercise in balance, a special mixture of intuition and calculation." However, she is not so enthusiastic about studying at the University of Colorado, Boulder, especially when her best friend James asks her to partner with him to start a new software company Mozaik Industries.

This is a decision that changes both James' and Mara's lives. In their new partnership, James focuses himself on "what he does best, technical development to make Mozaik as awesome as it can possibly be" while Mara becomes "the buffer between him and all the rest of the random shit that needs doing" (Peper describes them as sales, investment, legal, and marketing). In short, they split their roles in doing what they are both best at: "programming for James, juggling for Mara." How this decision affects Craig we won't mention here, so as not to reveal too much and thus spoil the thrill of reading!

This is the moment when all the fun starts in Uncommon Stock, placing this novel among the ranks of fast-paced tech startup thrillers. For new entrepreneurs and enthusiasts Uncommon Stock may serve as a greatly informative and educational reading full of useful advice, but also as the warning on the cruel facts of starting your own business. "Founding a company is a fuck-ton of work. The sausage factory reality is far from the glitzy Silicon Valley mythology. It's a grinding slog that can be enormously satisfying and rewarding, but it's also painful, frustrating, and soul-crushing. If you're going to make it you'll have to sink blood, sweat, and tears into the process. And if you're going to make that kind of a commitment, you've got to truly believe in what you're doing. You've got to be such a zealot that other people are magnetically attracted to you and what you're working on. You've got to dream."

Eliot Peper masterfully leads us through a painful startup process, showing us all the traps and hardships we face along the way. No price is too high, every mistake is paid dearly. Before we realize it, we have already accumulated basic knowledge of the craft, ending up much smarter than we were before starting reading this exciting, adventurous, wise and gripping novel of a slightly unusual title.

In between twists and turns, Eliot Peper amazes us with beautifully intelligent descriptions and ingenious eye for a detail. "They people-watched along the way, relishing the familiar oddities of Boulder's unique human condition. Cyclists were out in force. Mara wondered why it was considered cool to wear jerseys plastered with tacky Fortune 500 branding. A shirtless homeless man was loudly touting the spiritual virtues of vegetarianism and handing out handwritten flyers on the evils of meat from a street corner." "The sky was mostly clear with a thin patina of smog and the sun shone down on an endless grid of concrete, steel, asphalt, and cars. An occasional palm tree or soccer field broke up the urban mélange." "Trees occupied a different dimension than humans. Movement was never an option. They were literally rooted in place and experienced the world through a permanently local lens. Seeds blew off in the wind to sprout new trees in places the parents would never see. And entire generations lived in one area."

Or, "The snakes in her stomach had distilled into a cocktail of righteous anger and frustration."

Beautiful!

I don't shun admitting: Eliot Peper bought me with his descriptions, if not only with his page-turning plot. Uncommon Stock is a high-quality intelligent and intriguing writing of a skillful and undoubtedly talented author whose success and a true value cannot be measured only by a number of sold copies, but also by a commitment and professionalism of this indie writer invested into creating the best end-product for his readers, the only ones that matter to him.

I wouldn't be surprised if it also helps a few startup businesses in the process with his motivational and inspirational dialogues, situations and advices, because, as the author himself says in the novel, "there is something ephemeral but infinitely satisfying about starting something yourself."

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

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Choices: Don't Leave Me

Despite a disclaimer “This video shows images that some people may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.” on the brand-new powerful music video “Don't Leave Me” by Moby & The Void Pacific Choir, I think that everyone should see it.

For far too long we have been turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the world around us, and simply because we chose to ignore it, it does not mean it doesn't exist or will go away. The truth is out there and one day we will find it, we may think, but the truth is everywhere around us. We don't see it only because it is hidden from us or we chose not to see it.

It is so simple: the choices we make in our everyday lives, the things we do (or not) for others, define the world we live in. The capacity for goodness of a human species is so powerful that it can switch our reality from hopelessness and desperation to an utopian realm of paradise for every one of us and every creature we share this one life with.

We are the only obstacle. We are the cause and we are the change. With every breath and every bite we take, by spreading our comfort zone onto others and the world that surrounds us. Not excluding anyone, even the tiniest miserable creature that crawls on this planet.

I don't need to tell you or anyone what to do. We are intelligent and compassionate creatures and we can make choices. We can fortify our hearts in goodness and do the right things. Or we can turn our heads the other way and pretend again that bad things are not happening. That they will disappear because they have nothing to do with us, because we are not accountable. Well, this is also our choice. But in that case, I am afraid, this world will be lost for us.

Please watch this video. And do something about it. Little choices we make today can mean the world to someone out there.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com