For this season’s catalogue, I’ll consider three variegated reads. I begin with The Narrows. Though twenty years old, Michael Connelly, my favourite author, penned this. Secondly, I waded through Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk. An instant NY Times Best Seller, the text takes us through the life and times of our age’s greatest innovator. For me, Elon was the year’s most challenging read. A few times, I thought of quitting altogether. There’s a lot of jargon and a litany of scientists and engineers. Yet I persevered and, after three weeks, I crested the hardback. Finally, John Grisham’s latest caps off my reading list. The Exchange is a sequel to The Firm, the book that made the latter a superstar. Like Narrows, its predecessor spawned a film adaptation. The events take place thirty years since Mitch McDeere did a runner and inspired the wrath of his erstwhile employers.

1. The Narrows. (Connelly) As readers, most of us survey the landscape. We must know the lay of the land before we point our precious eyes on the prize. Anyhow, this book has been on my shelf for over three years. I kept procrastinating and borrowing other material before settling on this gem. A nod to my earlier sentiments, the book is only 375 pages long. Divided into 45 chapters, that makes it about eight pages per chapter.

The Poet’s sequel, the book reunites Connelly’s stellar characters. Aside from Harry Bosch, there’s FBI agent, Rachel Walling. In this instalment, she becomes his muse. Obviously, the Poet makes a comeback. Nothing will stop him from his mission: getting closer to Walling, his former protege,. In Vegas, Bosch juggles being a new father while working as a private investigator. Hieronymus watchers would know that he had handed in his LAPD badge. A mass grave has been unearthed deep in the Nevada desert. The FBI is on to it and Harry’s findings put him squarely on their radar. Walling is a mere observer in the chess match, having been earlier banished to Dakota.

The plot is taut and thick with twists, a Connelly hallmark. There is even an Eleanor Wish appearance. His former colleague, Kizmin Rider, is his insider on the force. She relays to him that they want him back. The book opens with the death of Busch’s pal, Terry McCaleb. His widow, Grace, seeks his help for answers. They had been living down in Catalina island. McCaleb’s business partner, Buddy Lockridge, is an overly eager Robin to Bosch’s Batman. The film adaptation of Blood Work is sometimes mentioned here, employing a postmodern touch to the manuscript. There are also Mac and iPhoto sightings. Back them, these were top of the line purchases. These days, they have become more accessible to the commoner. Indeed, iPhoto has been replaced and rendered obsolete.

One thing I admire about Connelly is that, despite all the rabbits out of hats, his endings are consistent. There are at least two ways to view his protagonist. Bosch is either too reckless and gung-ho, acting always by instinct instead of the big picture. Skeptics will point out that, at the time, he wasn’t even an active officer. On the other hand, Connelly’s meal ticket produces results and takes the trash off the street. The body count will ease, the tummies in city hall will be full. Bosch’s means may be suspect but it’s the ends that count. A light, breezy read, Narrows is an ideal, if historic, instalment in the author’s long-running series.

Rating: 4.8/5

2. Elon Musk. (Walter Isaacson) The author is the preeminent biographer. That doesn’t make reading his work easier. To be honest, I skipped four short chapters as, doing otherwise, I would not finish Elon. For years, I’ve had Steve Jobs on my bookshelf. Having seen the film version, I am not that enticed to go through that one. Isaacson paints a very vivid impression of the world’s richest human. Though he glosses over the titan’s childhood, he devotes long stretches to Musk’s ‘demon mode’, his compulsion to get things done in an instant. The author admits that Elon suffered from a difficult childhood, before emigrating to Canada at age 18.

Musk apparently has Asperger’s, which could explain his lack of empathy towards others and his difficulty in recognising emotions. In between lengthy and technical discourses, Isaacson intersperses Musk’s romantic and family lives. The biographer is also overzealous in dealing with Musk’s politics.

Elon has some grand ambitions. He always envisions humans living in Mars. He’s been talking up the world’s first self-driving car. He wanted the US to retake the lead in the space race, which he accomplished by building SpaceX. In the past two decades, he has been at the forefront of the world’s finest companies. From PayPal to SpaceX, Tesla to Twitter, Elon is the brightest light in the age of wizard technology. Thus, his relations with other flag flyers, such as Bill Gates and Barrack Obama, are explored.

The author does not pull any punches in foregrounding his subject as difficult. Through various roles, his quick temper has left mangled reputations (and careers) in its wake. At Twitter (now X), he famously fired eighty percent of its former employees. He overworked his staff in his quest to manufacture his target of five thousand Tesla cars per month. He’s also notorious for speaking his mind on X, accumulating thousands of Tweets in a decade.

Elon is a tamer iteration of Obama’s presidential memoir. The book per se is massive, clocking in at over six hundred pages. Alongside Arnold Schwarzenneger’s Total Recall, this is the lengthiest memoir I’ve ever read. Of course, I did not even try to finish Obama’s. To keep tabs on the surfeit of names, Elon has an index at the end. The author spent two years ‘shadowing’ Musk and was given priority access to his microcosm. The language could get technical and taxing which deducts from the book’s star rating. Lots of peeps are touting Elon as the year’s finest. To be honest, I believe it’s somewhat overrated. Big name chronicler writes of big name innovator. If any other biographer penned this, I doubt it would trend as highly. All in all though, it has more pluses than flaws.

Some of the best anecdotes from Elon Musk:

‘Adversity shaped me’

‘Musk developed an aura that made him seem, at times, like an alien….You’d not be totally shocked if he ripped off his shirt and you discovered that he had no navel and was not of this planet born’.

Games

‘Thus began a lifelong addiction to video games….On one trip to Durban, Elon figured out how to hack the games in the mall. He was able to hotwire the system so that they could play for hours without using any coins’.

PayPal

‘…When Musk astounded him by knowing things. At one point, Levchin and his engineers were wrestling with a difficult problem involving the Oracle database. Musk poked his head in the room, even though his expertise was with Windows and not Oracle, immediately figured out the context of the conversation, gave a precise and technical answer, and walked out without waiting for confirmation.

SpaceX

‘Holy crap’, Mueller muttered. ‘Almost everything we need is here’….Musk pulled him aside. ‘Stop saying how good all this is’, he said. ‘You’re making it more expensive’. Musk ended up leasing the site for a mere $45,000 a year.

Gigapress

‘They have to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws and manufacture them all by Christmas, or there will be sad faces’. He repeatedly pushed his team, to get ideas from toys, such as robots and Legos.

‘The Starship Launch’

Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behaviour, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not….It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unravelling the whole cloth.

Rating: 4.1/5

3. The Exchange (Grisham). The Firm was his first bestseller. Since then, Grisham has had at least one chart topper each year since 1991, selling over three hundred fifty million copies. In recent releases, this marks his fourth sequel. Audiences have been wondering about what happened to Mitch and Abby McDeere after they fled the mob owned firm. Fifteen years later, in 2005, the pair are back. Mitch is a partner at Scully and Pershing. The big law firm is a recurring enterprise across his novels. Here, the latter has its headquarters in New York. Mitch’s employer prides itself on being the planet‘s biggest law firm.

On the family side, they have twin sons, Clark and Carter. Mitch attends their little league games on Saturday. Abby is now a successful cookbook editor. Soon, Mitch handled the Lannak case. Gaddafi, the Libyan ruler, owes the Turkish conglomerate four hundred million dollars after a botched bridge construction. He and Giovanna, his Italian colleague, are instructed to inspect the bridge site. At the last minute, he’s unable to accompany her. Giovanna is abducted. After playing the waiting game, the perps are demanding a hundred million dollars for her safe release.

What follows is a hopscotching trip through Rome, London, New York, Maine, Marrakech, and the Caymans. Jack Rich, Scully’s managing partner, has the unenviable to convince his company to pool together the funds for Giovanna. Her father, Luca, is a former partner at Scully’s. For decades, he ran their Rome office. He suffers from ill health but never forgets his daughter’s plight. As a precaution, Mitch collects his kids from school and deposits them in Isleboro, Maine.

As mentioned, Mitch zaps back and forth between Rome and Gotham. He meets diplomats, stays in luxury hotels, and commutes in chartered jets. The enemy is a shadow. They proclaim their demands but hide their faces. They murder foot soldiers and show no mercy. They are not wanting in shock value. Luca pays a ten million deposit, as agreed. The Libyan government wants to settle the lawsuit, until a clip of the terrorists in action bungles the covenant. Gaddafi is seething, silently vowing to pulverise the evildoers.

‘Not a single soul on a camel was safe at the moment’.

With Libya out, other involved countries cobble together the cash to bring her home. Marrakech is the apex, where the wheels are set in motion. The terrorists handpicked Abby as their point of contact in the matter. When the cash changed hands, Giovanna is finally free, after forty one days in captivity. She has lost twenty pounds but they got her back – at a price. Mitch quits the firm, disgusted at how they treat their own in duress.

It was nice to welcome back the McDeeres. This sequel though is not as enthralling as its predecessor. You could see that in the readers’ reviews. Still, Grisham gets another sure ball best seller, even though the ending was kind of half-hearted. Anyhow, style points for using Isleboro and Marrakech. With the latter’s alleyways, souks, colours, and hustlers, I felt teleported to a Scam City ep.

Rating: 4/5