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Billy is a staff member at museum who leads a tour into the museum's star attraction, an immaculately preserved giant squid, only to find that the massive tank has somehow vanished from the locked room.

This sends him off on adventures through London where he learns of its role as a world nexus for all manners of magic and cult activity while also trying to prevent the stolen squid from being used to spark a global apocalypse.

Not terribly deep, but an entertaining light romp.

First book of this year that's on the Penguin Top 100 novels list (sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100/#top-100-novels).

A summary of anthropologist Gabriella Coleman's time observing and floating on the surface of Anonymous. It walks through their history coming from places like /b/ to bursting on the scene taking aim at Scientology through times like OpTunisia and Occupy and ending with Stratfor.

The characterization of Anonymous as being the digital version of the trickster gods is apt - the chaos of the extreme decentralization of Anonymous along with their tactics (legal, illegal, and everything in between) resulted in some spectacular wins and some equally spectacular losses.

The book ended with the breaking of Edward Snowden's expose of the NSA's extensive surveillance activitiers, though that wasn't something that involved Anonymous. It attempts to end on a positive note that groups like Anonymous and the other groups might provide some sort of defense against the surveillance state, but in hindsight that hopeful optimism seems to have been rather misplaced.

The biggest observation in the book for me was the note that for those years Anonymous was the only group stepping forward in a time when more people needed to throw off the apathy and lend their voice to things like the Occupy movement.

A very quick read - Joker breaks out of Arkham Asylum, causes mayhem and havok, Batman shows up. As part of the graphic novel it also gives an origin story for the Joker (making him more of a tragic character than out-and-out villain) told in flashbacks as part of the story.

Entertaining enough, though ultimately not something that gave me anything other than a fairly bland and blase feeling after reading. The most notable thing about it was that I dug out my old Fire tablet that I had intended to toss into electronic recycling so that I didn't have to read this on the actual Kindle.