BRAINRUSH

The Bhagavad Gita took its toll on me. By the end, I was absolutely overwhelmed and waiting to finish it. The message of the scripture is very powerful but after a long while, my fleeting mind wanted something a little less serious to dwell on. I, however, did not give up on it and was relieved when it finally got done.

With all the upcoming holiday sales, Kindle books are a dime a dozen! This meant I could splurge on a few without busting out my wallet. And splurge I did. Add to the fun, I received a secret santa $25 gift certificate for Amazon! So bubbling with excitement; I don’t know how to spend my newly discovered riches!

Back to the Kindle sales, hundreds of books are going for less than $5 so I took the chance and bought a few  from lesser known authors but with good reviews. One of them that I now have started reading is called BRAINRUSH. Not sure why its all caps, but that’s the way it is.

Anyway, so the book is about this ex-army tough guy who was diagnosed with some sort of cancer (I forget which) a few years ago and fought back until it went into remission. Everything was hunky-dory until a few months ago when the cancer returns, this time as a tumor in the brain. The scene opens with him lying in an MRI scanner when the power suddenly goes off and he gets knocked around as a result. When the power finally comes back on, pissed, he gets off the machine and makes his way home, realizing something in his gray cells is not the same.

He has become a savant and has developed an eidetic memory. Now, he is a good guy so there has to be a bad guy lurking around somewhere. Turns out the bad guy is in Venice, in charge of this really big hospital for autistic children. On the face of it he appears to want to change the children’s lives and study them to prevent the disease from affecting others, blah blah but in reality he wants to understand how some of these children have these superhuman capabilities – able to learn a new language in a month, paint a Picasso and so on so he can use them on normal humans and make them deadly Al Qaeda weapons, yikes!

So one thing leads to another and the good guy comes to the bad guy’s attention. We’ll see what happens next. To be honest, it’s really not a bad version of events so far. The author is doing a good job of holding the story together and consequently the interest of his reader. Apparently there is a Part II as well.

I am ringing in the holidays with some travel, some mindless reads and family. Hope you enjoy yours too, under the Christmas tree, with a glass of eggnog; preferably with rum; opening presents and sharing some laughs with people that in the end matter the most.

Wish you a warm and happy holiday season!