Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

I just finished reading John Grisham’s The Broker, a fast paced thriller about a man with so many secrets to hide that the CIA wants to use him as bait just to confirm which country wants him dead.

It opens slowly, starting out with some Washington politics as a lame-duck president writes his last pardons before he’s replaced. One of those goes to Joel Backman, a lawyer and lobbyist on the hill who created the political scandal that enabled him to first become president. There are conditions attached to the pardon, though, and Joel is smuggled out of America and into Italy where he is expected to live in a CIA safehouse and learn Italian.

All the while, he is being closely watched by American agents. When the time is right, they plan to leak news of his location simultaneously to all the major world powers to discover who is most interested in the intelligence information that Joel managed to obtain as a broker. The first to kill or capture him will tell the CIA what they need.

Unfortunately, the information about a secret system of satellites and the programs to control them are actually in possession of our mysterious broker. Querying him directly would probably be more efficient. As it is, he escapes the CIA custody, flees to Zurich, recovers his funds, and makes it back into the US to negotiate with the government, software in tow. The foreign nations so bent on killing him generally realize that he’s no longer a good target and back off. The CIA stops messing with him.

And, in typical Grisham style, the book ends happily, reuniting Joel with his slightly younger but very attractive Italian tutor.

Take a look at the following chat conversation:

[16:57] <ats> Does anyone have/know where 2 get the RENT movie?
[16:58] <Qsldkfjbuiphqew> isn’t there a place in ctown
[16:58] <Kenemien> why do you capitalize and punctuate properly and then abbreviate a TWO LETTER WORD?!?
[16:59] <kiwiii> Isn’t it fun to sometimes substitute a word for another wd?
[16:59] <kiwiii> Like, if I am talking to u, why write out "you"?
[16:59] <Qsldkfjbuiphqew> huzzah!
[17:00] <Kenemien> yes, but why go to the effort to make everything else correct, and then save yourself a single keystroke in one word?
[17:00] <kiwiii> It’s not much effort to type correctly, for us people.
[17:00] <kiwiii> So when we save a keystroke, we take IMMENSE delight!
[17:01] <Pseudonym> i never abbreviate, but i’m always too lazy to capitalize correctly
[17:02] <kiwiii> lack of capitalization is an abbreviation in the dimension of case

Are chat abbreviations and contractions bad? Who knows…

I prefer the word “praeternatural” to the word “supernatural.” Super is such an overused prefix in modern English, especially given the pop culture associated with the superman TV show and movie series. Why would anyone use a particular word when there’s a delightful uncommon synonym to be found? It baffles the mind.