Books-N-Wine Book Club

Additional Info from Jeff Nichols ---

Mark Russinovich is the developer of Sysinternals that was bought by

Microsoft. He is now a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. Dr. Russinovich

is also the one who found the rootkit that Sony music CDs would secretly

install on Windows computers for digital-rights management. Relatively

innocuous by itself, the Sony rootkit was so generally written that it

was easily exploited to hide real viruses. The back-pedaling that Sony

had to do because of this misstep initiated their lost of dominance in

the industry.

This is Russinovich's first novel. I'm a computational scientist at ORNL, so this

book

is right up my alley. I'd heard it raved about on several technology

podcasts. The technical details are precise and much of the plot turns

on rootkits and modern virus development. It's an engaging summer

thriller. More recently I've heard that a sequel is being written.

Here's an AuthorsCast link with Russinovich:

http://authorscast.com/Episodes/Mark-Russinovich-on-Zero-Day-A-Novel

So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell was published in 1979 in two parts in the The New Yorker magazine.  It is a short book as you'd think (less than 150 pages).  A review describes it as "A small, perfect novel."

Horse of a Different Color by

Ralph

Moody

is a autobiographical story and is the last in his "Little Britches" series.  The entrepreneurial, problem-solving spirit that his father instilled in his before Ralph was 10 shows through in each of the books including this one.  He ends up, despite his best efforts, being responsible to a bank for another man's huge debts.  How he pays back these debts in just a year is related in this book.

The entire "Little Britches" series is a great series to read as a family.

Published in 1981,

Midnight's Children

is a intermingling of the modern history of India played out through the life of a child born at the moment that India became free.

First book selection was "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.  A journey of a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic America.

McCarthy was a student at UT and bought his typewriter on which all of his novels were written at a pawn shop on Magnolia.

Notes from Jeff Nichols:

I'd previously read in the newspaper about McCarthy being at UT and

buying his old, reliable typewriter on Magnolia Ave at a pawn shop

(News-Sentinel).  He's now a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute

(computational sciences).  People there made fun of him using a

typewriter in a computer institute, until the day that the power went

out.  When the typewriter finally was irreparably broken, a colleague

from Santa Fe bought a replacement, matching typewriter for him on eBay

for like $10 and auctioned off his old one for charity at something like

$150K.  (I was off.  It was $254,500 for the typewriter.  Here's a picture:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/cormac-mccarthys-typewriter-dies-after-50-years-and-five-million-words/

)