Saturday, February 14, 2015

The Joint Is Jumpin'

I decided to go on and plow through Keynes "General Theory". It is rough going - harder to read than Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" written 150 years earlier. So I'm reading it 5 chapters at a time, with a break in between.

For my first break, I decided to read the latest Jumper book by Steven Gould, "Exo". This is the 4th book in the series. I started it and realized quickly I had not read the previous book. So I downloaded "Impulse" and then binge read the 2 of them in about 3 days.

The 1st book "Jumper" came out in 1992. A teenage boy saves his life by jumping (teleporting). He becomes a superhero, but is pursued by government agencies and/or an evil billionaire. There was a not-so-good movie made of this starring the ever-so-wooden Christian Hayden. They added very unnecessary plot modifications: multiple jumpers who have been pursued for millennia by a cult who ritually murders them because they are too powerful to leave alone.

The 2nd book, "Reflex" came out in 2004. The boy is older now and his jumping ability rubs off on his girlfriend who later becomes his wife. More trying to be do-gooders while evading the powers that be.

The 3rd and 4th books both follow their 16-17 year old daughter, who also learns to jump to save her life. In "Impulse" she is mostly helping out the downtrodden in her new high school (she had been home-schooled). "Exo" gets a little more cosmic in its scope, and we have bad guys back. Some interesting side effects of teleportation are put to good use.

These are all very enjoyable reads, total page turners. And no question that these are YA novels. There was 1 line about putting makeup on in "Impulse". I couldn't find it, but searching the eBook for "makeup" found 14 matches. So definitely a lot of teenage angst. Hmmm, the Wikipedia page for Steven Gould says he is 4 years younger than me. So, a pretty old guy, he must be using his daughters for source material.

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