I read Upgrade by Blake Crouch and wasn't a big fan. The outline of the story was promising but the execution was inconsistent, in my view. I'd give it maybe a 6.5/10. It's set in the near future, with a specific event having messed everything up. A genius scientist that tried to solve world hunger by genetically modifying crops accidentally caused a global famine, killing 200 million and damaging the world economically and socially for decades in a way that it never fully recovered from. Gene editing is now forbidden, and since the technology is accessible at pretty low cost, there are police forces dedicated to surveilling for usage of it and raiding peoples' houses to prevent another catastrophe. The main character, the son of that scientist, gets infected with a disease that changes his genes and makes him superhuman mentally and physically in a world where that's outlawed. And thus his adventure begins to find out who infected him and what to do. Without giving spoilers, probably my main issue with the story was the villain. She was badass with a cool background and setup, but then her motivations didn't really make sense. And the majority of the book is about the philosophical and external conflict between the hero and this villain. Solid outline and idea, but felt rushed and not as well thought out as it could have been. Some elements felt preachy in the sense that it feels like the author set up this conflict, which didn't really need to happen, in order to make a point. By fine-tuning the plot a bit more, I think it could have been executed better and more believably and preserving the overall outline.

My mother is visiting and she often has an interesting or story or two that I hadn't heard before. She was an attorney in the early 1980s. There was a Korean janitor who worked in a university in Seoul, and he managed to steal a copy of the university seal. This allowed him to make very convincing forgery diplomas, so he made himself a fake medical degree. He then got a fellowship in the US, married an American woman, and was working at a US university hospital. He did various additional forgeries, like getting a medical license from a retired doctor and altering it for himself, so he had an office filled with all sorts of fake diplomas, licenses, awards, etc. He had a private practice where he preyed on the Korean immigrant population in the city with his fake medical skills. Anyway he was eventually caught upon further scrutiny of his documents. The judge was lenient on him and gave him a prison sentence of 364 days, which is 1 day less than a year which is the threshold for crimes that often get people deported. Seems like a crazy story to me and could be a movie.