I’ve ready plenty of books that were later turned into movies, but I think “The Thousand Dollar Tan Line” is the first book in my library that follows a movie that was based on a TV show.

Perhaps I should explain that.  Veronica Mars was a show that lasted three seasons on TV before being rudely cancelled.  Fans (such as myself) rallied to Kickstart a movie that picks up the story years later.  As part of the renewal of the story, the show’s creator and main writer Rob Thomas teamed up with Jennifer Graham to write a series of books that come after the movie.

If any of that is new to you, I recommend you finish reading this and immediately put all of your other life plans on hold until you’re caught up.  Actually, go now.  Stop reading.  It’s that important.

What’s interesting about this construct is that I didn’t have to spend any mental energy trying to imagine the town of Neptune, or what a conversation between Veronica and her dad, Keith, looked like.  That universe is fully vivid in my head.  Dialogue came out in each character’s voice just as if I were watching the scene play out on my television.  It was like reading a David Sedaris book after hearing him on the radio.

The best part of all that?  There are some kickass characters in Veronica’s world, with her chief among them.  She’s back in town after being away at law school, helping out at the family private investigation agency while her dad recovers from [THIS HAPPENS IN THE MOVIE GO WATCH IT].  Veronica is a tiny human but has little fear and loves nothing more than nailing people who deserve to be taken down.

The narrator describes her perfectly as she talks with boyfriend Logan:

“Logan had once told Veronica she didn’t have any flight — just way too much fight for her own good.”

Each episode of the show involves one case that needs to be solved, plus pieces of a season-long mystery that slowly comes together over time.  The book has one main case, tracking down a pair of girls who go missing during spring break in the seaside California town.

The investigation takes Veronica to the mansion where the girls each attended a party and where she encounters drug cartel-linked Rico and his associate Willie.  The boys are side-stepping that night’s festivities to play some video games upstairs and talk about how they can use a Ferrari to impress the ladies.

“‘Then we’ll load up the honeys and take ’em to Taco Bell.’
‘Taco Bell?  Man, there’s, like, smoked salmon and asparagus in truffle oil and, like, crudites downstairs.  Why the hell do you want to go to taco bell?’
Rico shrugged.  ‘I like their chalupas.’

So let’s recap.  We have a series I already love with characters I could watch forever, and then they add a Taco Bell reference?  My reading year is ending on the happiest of notes.

Don’t let me borrow your books.

Okay, do let me borrow them, but maybe not ones that have crazy geometric things going on with the front cover.  Otherwise, this might happen:

Sorry, Anastasia.  I did fix it!

“Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” was the first book by Haruki Murakami that I read despite years of walking past them in bookstores and meaning to pick one up.  Anastasia told me it was “fantastic” but that it left her and our other friend who read it “super disoriented.”

I think that’s an entirely accurate description.  It’s not a feel-good book really in any way, but we should read those once in a while.  Life isn’t all puppies and butterflies, after all.

The story basically follows Tsukuru through two periods of his life — late teens/early 20s and his mid 30s.  The events and experiences of the earlier time play heavily on the latter as he tries to deal with how his close group of friends suddenly cut him off for reasons he could not begin to figure out.

Murakami really brings out the book’s central theme during a conversation older Tsukuru has with a woman he is dating named Sara.

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them,” she says, in a phrase that gets repeated a few times later on.  “If nothing else, you need to remember that.  You can’t erase history, or change it.  It would be like destroying yourself.”

No matter what he does or what face he slaps on to face the world, what happened in the past never changes.  Tsukuru has so much that doesn’t go his way, and yet, he accepts everything as either blameless or his own fault.  He has a way of being sadly optimistic that straddles the line between looking to immediately move on and a thinking akin to “what can I do but accept it?”

A few people have asked me if I would recommend they read this book.  It’s really well written and grabs you in a certain way, but you have to be prepared for the mindset it leaves you throughout.  So maybe?

I was late enough to the “Divergent” series that all three books were very much out by the time I started, meaning I was already quite aware that people disliked the third one.  I now completely understand why.

In a world with no “Hunger Games” maybe “Divergent” would have an easier time, but by comparison it’s hard to ignore the flaws.  What’s great about the plotting of the “Hunger Games” is the way the drumbeat of action builds as the series goes along, especially with the way we get taken back into the games so early in the second book.  I finished those needing to immediately jump into the next one.

With “Divergent,” the story gets really bogged down with setting us up for action, basically flipping the second book from the “Catching Fire” model to being mostly the lead-in for a tiny bit of action right at the end.

I have a bigger complaint with “Allegiant,” the final book in Veronica Roth’s series.  Main character Tris narrates the first two, but suddenly shares those duties in book three with Tobias.  And really, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.  I get why she did it in the end.  But the execution is annoying.  In many dual-narrator stories they alternate chapters and have distinct voices, making it almost unnecessary to even label who is doing the talking.  You just know.

That was not the case in “Allegiant.”  I can’t tell you the number of times I was seven pages into a chapter and the narrator said something that made me realize it was Tris when I thought it was Tobias (and vice-versa).  Part of the problem is that they spent so much time doing similar things in the first two books that mentioning things from the past didn’t differentiate who was talking at all.

My other issue with this story was the amount of time Roth spent building up a romantic jealousy angle in the beginning and then letting it fizzle away to nothing.  Given all the pages that involved people sitting in a room and talking, and all the hot-and-cold behavior of Tris and Tobias from one page to the next, it might have been interesting to have some dating drama in this story.

It wasn’t the train wreck I was expecting from the reviews I heard, but certainly not my favorite book or even close to my favorite in this series.

I will give Roth credit for making me laugh when Tobias goes to basically kidnap Tris’ brother Caleb, who is not a nice guy and makes poor decisions like trying to flee people who are a lot bigger than him.

Tobias ends up knocking down Caleb, sending him face-first into the floor.  The effects of this event are evident when Tobias drags Caleb outside and another guy sees them.

Zeke: “Why’s he bleeding?”
Tobias: “Because he’s an idiot.”
Zeke: “I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.”

If only it did.

Go to download electronic copy of book: $19.99
See book available for shipping from same merchant: $14.99
Check their physical store for same book: $27.99

After taking all this in, I did end up doing the ebook version of Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise,” though largely because I wanted to start reading without waiting for it to be shipped.

Silver progresses through a series of topics building a case for improving predictions and models by largely being as honest as possible with the process.  He highlights the need for good input data and especially in expressing results with degrees of confidence.  As he argues, it may get more headlines to give an emphatic yes/no kind of pick, but everyone is better served if you honestly say there’s an 85 percent yes/15 percent no chance of whatever happening.

He focuses one chapter on economists’ forecasts for Gross Domestic Product, those periodic releases of data on how the economy is doing.  So many of the picks come out as just a number, like 3 percent growth next quarter.  But Silver says those picks tend to have what is basically a 3.2 percent margin of error, meaning a 3 percent target could in reality turn out to be 6.2 percent or -0.2 percent, which is a pretty significant difference.

To get the best use of a GDP forecast, Silver argues that perhaps we should be reporting them with margins of error just as we do with political polls.

“Danger lurks, in the economy and elsewhere,” he writes, “when we discourage forecasters from making a full and explicit account of the risks inherent in the world around us.”

The most fascinating chapter of the book for me is about weather forecasting.  It’s no secret that people love to make fun of the profession, but perhaps because of my personal relationship with some meteorologists, I find myself being more of a defender.  Silver points out that weather forecasts have gotten steadily better every year, and have dramatically improved in the past 10 or so.

But he brings up one thing that will truly make me see forecasts differently, and that’s how various outlets will talk to you about the chance of rain.  Silver says a National Weather Service forecast of 20 percent chance of rain really does play out that often, while the Weather Channel will say 20 when it actually only rains 5 percent of that time.

Why?

“In fact, this is deliberate and is something the Weather Channel is will to admit to,” Silver writes.  “It has to do with their economic incentives.  People notice one type of mistake — the failure to predict rain — more than another kind, false alarms.  If it rains when it isn’t supposed to, they curse the weatherman for ruining their picnic, whereas an unexpectedly sunny day is taken as a serendipitous bonus.”

Silver also talks about the challenges and risks of judging forecasts that may be what he calls “self-defeating.”  That is, a forecast that end up affecting itself and thus not coming true.

“The most effective flu prediction might not be one that fails to come to fruition because it motivates people toward more healthful choices.”

And yet, how often do we see people throw up a prediction about something like flu season and say “SEE! SEE HOW WRONG YOU WERE!”  More need to talk about ranges of outcomes and think about why things turn out the way they do.

Another chapter on his baseball model, called PECOTA, made me laugh and drop into a deep baseball-less depression.  Silver really became first known for developing PECOTA, and among other things he used it to project how minor league players would perform.  He says in the book that his model was optimistic about future stars like Ian Kinsler and Matt Kemp.

“But have you ever heard of Joel Guzman?  Donald Murphy?  Yusemiro Petit?  Unless you are a baseball junkie, probably not.  PECOTA liked those players as well.”

Yes, Nate, I HAVE HEARD OF YUSEMIRO PETIT.  Granted, this book came out two years ago, but just last month I sat freezing in Nationals Park as the San Francisco Giants outlasted my beloved Nats 2-1 in an 18-inning game that was the longest in MLB postseason history.

Petit pitched six innings in relief for the Giants that night, allowing only one hit and earning the win as the Giants grabbed a commanding 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series.

I guess I can’t hold Silver responsible for the emotional effects of his forecast coming true.  This is a great book for those interesting in modeling, data or just thinking about how we talk about the world around us.

A few months ago, I asked my friend Brooke for a book recommendation.  She described her pick as: “Hunger games on steroids from the male perspective.  With bonus space colonization.”

That was all I needed to get into Pierce Brown’s “Red Rising.”  After reading, I might add meth to Brooke’s description.

The best comp I can give it is “Catching Fire,” the second book in the Hunger Games series.  The methodically building drumbeat of the plot makes it impossible to put down.  My only complaint is that I was under the impression the second book in this series was already out, but when I went to purchase it I discovered it won’t be released until January.  THANKS, BROOKE.

“Red Rising” follows a teenager named Darrow who is a superstar worker in a mining colony underground on Mars.  This universe has colonies on all the planets and moons governed by a master race of people, and a society delineated by colors.  The highest are the Golds, while Darrow and his Reds sit at the bottom.

Darrow is plugging along in life, aware that the system he lives under is pretty unfair, but not sure what exactly he can do to change anything.  His wife, Eo, is a fireplug of a young woman who wants nothing more than to upend the entire structure.  She pushes back when Darrow talks about how his father was hanged for his activities with no apparent gains for their people.

“Death isn’t empty like you say it is,” she says.  “Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow.  Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, of death.  I say we break those chains.”

A series of spoilery things unfolds, legitimately making me angry as I read on the train and leading me to tweet to Brooke in all caps wondering how I was supposed make it through work without knowing what happened next:

@txtingmrdarcy I’ll have to settle for a day of suspense while my rage subsides
— Chris Hannas (@cjhannas) September 23, 2014

She questioned the wisdom of her selection:

@cjhannas I am trying to decide if this book was a good recommendation or a REALLY BAD IDEA.
— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) September 23, 2014

But it was a good choice.  The story of Darrow fighting back under an elaborate, yet believable plan so captured my attention I flagged only a handful of passages.  He has to immerse himself in a world of the Golds he has only partially gleaned before being in their midst, and face-to-face he confronts stark realities of how and why they rule.

“I hate them, but I hear them,” he says.

I cannot recommend this book enough.  And if you want to be on the early curve of pop culture, it’s already been picked up to be made into a movie.  What do you need in movies?  A cast.  If Hollywood is listening, Brooke and I are ready to take our jobs as expert casting directors:

@cjhannas That’s a good call. I pictured Sam Claflin as Darrow, Jena Malone as Mustang (i tend to go older, apparently) and…. Eo?
— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) October 15, 2014

@txtingmrdarcy Totally on board with Claflin. Let’s make the other kid Cassius. Samantha Barks (?) for Eo?! Liam for Fitchner?
— Chris Hannas (@cjhannas) October 15, 2014

We’ll have to wait and see who gets the real roles.  But for now, as of this moment you have 46 days to read this book before the next one comes out.  Get to work!

If you obsessively check here for new posts you’re about to think I’m going to skip eating and breathing this weekend in favor of reading.  Somehow I haven’t done a book post since mid-September, and combined with the fact that I have actually been reading, there are four I need to talk about.

Here we’re just going to worry about the first — Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

This is one of those books I’ve walked past or picked up in a bookstore roughly 2.8 billion times before I actually committed to reading it.

The story is a multi-generational tale from one family and multiple narrators.  Diaz does a really incredible job of differentiating their voices so that even with no labeling you would easily know who was talking.  Remember this when I get to the fourth book (the final in the Divergent series), which I think is equally as poor as “Oscar Wao” is good in this department.

For much of the story Oscar is the main focus.  He’s a nerdy, awkward kid who struggles to be “normal” in many social settings and yet outwardly maintains a sort of detached attitude about his results.  It’s as if in his failures he sees in retrospect he should not have expected success and adopts that as a memory instead of seeing that view as hindsight.

One of the other narrators, who at one point dates Oscar’s sister, Lola, describes one episode of Oscar’s charm:

“Oscar’s idea of a G was to talk about role-playing games!  How fucking crazy is that?  (My favorite was the day on the E bus when he informed some hot morena, If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!)”

I most enjoyed being led along this story by Lola, who is a few years older than Oscar.  Diaz gives her a certain thoughtfulness that comes with having to grow up early and take care (in certain ways) of both her mother and brother.

She talks at one point about discovering her mother’s breast cancer, beginning that story with, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”

I think I would disagree with that slightly — I shy away from using that kind of absolute — but I think saying it’s rarely the changes we want that change everything is accurate.  Yes, there are a few cases in which a surprise is positively life changing, say a job offer out of the blue.  But most often it’s the negatives that blow up your world.

Lola isn’t on the same level of dorkdom as Oscar, but she’s studious and likes to read.  She describes part of her life in which she wanted to get away from all the responsibilities that had been thrown on her shoulders.

“All my favorite books from that period were about runaways.  “Watership Down,” “The Incredible Journey,” “My Side of the Mountain.”

This sentence made me wonder how many people reading this book are like me and have also read “Watership Down” and “My Side of the Mountain.”  We need a form of Google for this.

When I was a kid, my neighbors gave me “My Side of the Mountain” as a birthday gift.  It’s the kind of book that has a map in the front, the ones you study for a few minutes before getting to the text even though you know there’s no chance you’ll remember anything useful without learning the context.  The main character is living on his own in the woods (I think he sleeps inside a tree?) and has a pet falcon.  As a boy, that’s a pretty dope protagonist.

“Watership Down” was one of the required summer reading books for my 10th grade GT English class.  I thought it was going to be the most boring book in existence, but mainly because I didn’t know what the word “lapine” meant.  The reading list had a description of each title, and I read this one to my mom in a mock aristocratic tone, thinking that “lapine society” involved people with powdered wigs.  She let me finish, then informed me that lapine meant it was a story about rabbits.  It was fantastic.

Back to Oscar — I should never have put this book down in the bookstore.  It can be super depressing at times, but I think that makes you better appreciate the highs and the beauty elsewhere.  I also should have been less engrossed in the story and flagged more things.

I’ll close with this insight from Diaz, which I don’t think need any caveats:

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”