Candide is cast out and must make his way in life, having been taught that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," but finds that there is much that is wretched, unjust, and painful; along the way he meets up with a series of coincidences that would be a perfect fit in any Dan Brown novel, but here used for comic effect.

I recently read a book that billed itself as inspired by Candide, so I decided to read the original. (I should have started with this one and not read the other.) This is seriously laugh-out-loud funny. Wish I had read it in high school. The voice the reader used for Candide reminded me of a young Michael Palin, so that's who I imagined throughout, which was perfect.

Now I'm onto HELL IS EMPTY by Craig Johnson, another entry in the Walt Longmire series of books.  Always entertaining and a good way to take a break in-between works of nonfiction. 

An ex-computer geek gets a job at a computer game company run by two of his closest friends from high school, and finds a bug that runs thru all of their games, and which might ruin their company.

Given his last (and first) book "Soon I Will Be Invincible" I was really expecting this book to be filled with geekiness, but have a solid core of storytelling behind it; which turned out not to be the case. This is basically about the underlying story of action-oriented computer games, and viewing it thru the lens of growing up with early D&D and Commodore computers, which just isn't enough to fill out this book.

He made up the word "meme" in that book, which has since made it into the public lexicon; so, yes, he has!

Just read "Map of Time" a few books ago. As if you didn't know, it plays out more like three really interconnected books than one long book; which is interesting, but several of the plot devices didn't ultimately work for me.