Christmas Week

Great time with the famalam. Nothing major to tell. One of my presents was a subscription to Netflix, so I've spent the last few days doing weights and watching animation- Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth. All funny stuff. Well, except for the weights.

I've spent the last few months reading The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy, a 'political thriller' about the possibility of nuclear war becoming more likely due to a missing Israeli warhead and an incompetent president. First published in 1991, it foresaw the Clinton / Lewinski scandal, the questionable intelligence of Bush Jr and the hazardous shortcomings of Trump. That said, despite President Fowler, the fictional world leader, having these aforementioned issues, he still comes across a thousand times more eloquent than any of them. (Obama was a lot more respectable and capable, mind.)

It may be a highly acclaimed release, but I read Clancy for war stories. This is a war novel with no war in it. There's some offensive action that takes place in the last eighth of the book, but a lot of it is one long build-up to a terrorist act, and a quick retribution. Like all the Clancy novels I've read, it's heavy, masculine, formal, intensely-detailed and, for all I know, well-researched and realistic. It just wasn't that much fun. Red Storm Rising and Without Remorse were better.

There was a movie adaptation of TSOAF, but it isn't on Netflix. It's apparently very different.