The Practice Effect

By David Brin

Dennis Nuel was the genius behind the zievatron, a machine that opened a portal to an alternate universe, but he got pushed out of the research project and sidelined. So he was thrilled to be offered a chance to rejoin the team. But there was a catch...he would be obliged to enter the zievatron and allow himself to be transported to an unknown world, a world from which he may never be able to return.
When he exited the zievatron and onto the strange planet, he immediately discovered why the return mechanism had stopped functioning. It had been hacked to pieces. Before much longer Dennis discovered that the locals were humans who even spoke English. But their technology was at a stone age level and they regarded Dennis as a kind of wizard and he soon found himself in thrall to the local warlord who wanted him to create powerful weapons like the gun they confiscated from Dennis.

This was a fun story. Dennis soon figures out that the physics of this strange place are very different and quickly manages to use it to his advantage, winning his freedom from the tyrant and rescuing the beautiful princess in the process. He and his friends, including a strange little animal, a robot, the princess and a thief, have lots of adventures and Dennis uses his superior knowledge to create devices, that, with the strange local physics, enable them to rescue themselves from peril from the bad guys who are anxious to capture their escaped wizard. It was quite an enjoyable read.

The Color of Water

By James McBride

Ruchel Zylska was born in Europe and immigrated as a child with her parents to the United States. Her father Fishel (good name for him as he was a kind of "fishy" guy) was a traveling rabbi, moving his family from city to city, from temple to synagogue. He was an unpleasant person and soon wore out his welcome at every new job. Finally he decided to give up the traveling rabbi business and opened a kind of general store in Virginia.
Fishel was neither a loving father or loving husband. He married his wife Hudis for her family connections and made no secret of his disdain of her. His children were obliged to work in the store all the time except on the Sabbath and when they were in school. They despised their father and quickly left home as fast as they could.
Ruchel, who was called Ruth, became enamored of a young black man and soon found herself pregnant. Her mother sent her to New York to stay with the mother's sister and an abortion was performed. But Ruth decided that New York was the place for her and, once back in Virginia, quickly escaped again, returning to her aunts in New York. It was there that she met the man she was to marry, Andrew McBride.
This was not what Fishel wanted for his daughter. He wanted to marry her off to a suitable Jewish man not to a black man and a Christian to boot. Ruth found herself cut off from her family, told that she was dead to them.
Ruth and Andrew had eight kids together and after he died she remarried and had four more with that husband. She never spoke of her past life to her kids, she never practiced the Jewish religion, becoming instead a born-again Christian. Her break with her past was total. Her kids never even met any of her relatives.
Her son James never knew his father. He died while Ruth was pregnant with James. Ruth was left in dire straits, with no support from her family and no money coming in. She did what she could, but the family always struggled, even after she remarried. She never talked to her children about her past, even about the fact she was Jewish. She had left her Jewish past behind. But as James grew older, he became curious about her past and his heritage and he gradually coaxed the story out of his mother. It was a journey of discovery that helped him to understand some of the puzzles that used to confuse him as a little kid and come to grips with his mixed blood heritage.

This was a interesting story. Ruth raised her twelve kids and saw to it that they graduated from high school and went on to college. Sure they struggled and times were hard, but somehow they all made it through. It is a story about a family who overcame the many strikes against them, with their determined Jewish mother as their guiding star.

Leaping to the Stars

By David Gerrold

After Jumping Off the Planet and Bouncing Off the Moon, Charles and his two brothers Stinky and Doug are now Leaping to the Stars with their fugitive computer HARLIE that is disguised as a toy monkey. And once again they are on the run as various factions are determined to gain possession of HARLIE and the power that it can deliver. So they are pretty much forced to leave the moon and decide on Outbeyond, a struggling settlement on a planet in a different star system. Problem is, due to the state of crisis on Earth, it will be a one-way trip with no chance of return. And no guarantee of survival once they get there. Plus the only reason the Outbeyond colonists are willing to take the fugitives is that they also want the HARLIE unit, which could be the key to the colony's survival on a hostile and dangerous and isolated alien world.

Currently this series is referred to as a trilogy, which leads the reader to the assumption that Charles and the rest will reach their destination and have all sorts of adventures in their brave new world. At least that's what I thought. So I was disappointed that this book is solely concerned with the journey and not the arrival. Once the author gets his players off the moon and resuming their journey, that's all the further they get. The rest of the story is situated on the colony ship headed to Outbeyond. So that was a let down.
This story mainly focuses on Charles' growing pains as he learns to negotiate life on the ship. His older brother and younger brother are merely bit players in this story as are his mom (the dad got left behind on the moon), popping up occasionally to offer bits of advice and wisdom. Even the HARLIE unit makes only brief appearances and has a few boring philosophical discussions with Charles. Speaking of philosophical discussions, the book is loaded with them, a real bonus if you like that sort of thing. I don't and found them tedious and sometimes preachy.
Anyway, the main thrust of the book becomes the conflict between Charles and a large group of passengers who are a bunch of religious zealots. They feel that the HARLIE unit is a tool of the devil and that Charles is its pawn. At first they try to convert Charles and when that doesn't work, they organize a mutiny.
I tried to like this book, but what I really wanted to read was a book about settlers on a new world, not about dissension between a bunch of people stuck on a spaceship. Still parts of it were pretty interesting and engaging even if the story ends before they ever arrive at Outbeyond.

Citizen Girl

By Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

Girl (that's the character's name) majored in women's studies and was pleased to get a job working for a feminist nonprofit. But it soon becomes clear that feminists are no different than most and her boss is taking credit for Girl's work and when Girl dares to mention it, she is abruptly fired. When she goes to file for unemployment, she finds out she is ineligible because her boss is claiming Girl quit.
But despite the rough-handling she received working for an avowed feminist, Girl is still committed to the cause and is thrilled to be offered a job at My Company, an online service that is interested in attracting the feminist element to their website and has hired girl as their expert in this demographic. But Girl soon discovers that My Company is not really interested in supporting feminism. No, what they really want is to sell stuff to feminists. And they want Girl to promote products as feminist that really have nothing to do with feminism, like cosmetics and skimpy underwear. Well, the job pays really well and My Company has promised to donate one million dollars to a feminist nonprofit that helps exploited women if Girl succeeds, and so she swallows her misgivings and gives it her best shot. But in the process she manages to really annoy her boss, Guy, while earning raves from Guy's boss. But in the end, nothing can save My Company and a new boss is brought in to run things. Finally, Girl has a boss she can admire, a woman who is organized, intelligent, competent and down-to-earth, everything Guy was not. Now maybe Girl can finally relax and breathe a little. Or not.

This was an OK story. I did think Girl was a little too naive and more than a little gutless. She seemed incapable of getting through to her boss and her fellow employees. She pretty much lets folks run over her, including her boyfriend, who comes off as a jerk and makes one wonder what she sees in him. I can't say I really liked Girl and it is hard to understand why it took her so long to figure out that business is all about making money and that any philanthropic impulse it has is merely a ploy to increase sales.

Bitter Is the New Black

By Jen Lancaster

Jen had the world by the tail. She had a well-paying job, a nice apartment, a sweet live-in boyfriend, and money to spend. She never imagined living any other way. But life has a way of kicking us in the ass, and Jen sure got her ass kicked, big time. She lost her job and was unable to find another despite her excellent work credentials and experience. But the boyfriend, Fletch, was making a very good living and, with a little effort and some minor economizing, they would be OK. Because, surely Jen would soon find a new job...
But she didn't. And then Fletch lost his job. And now the two are going to have to make some major changes or end up living on the street!

It's not a new story. There are tons of books about people who lose their jobs only to find themselves. But what set this memoir apart from many of those other books, fiction and nonfiction, is the author's very funny take on herself and her life. She knows she is a bit of a diva, she isn't ashamed to admit it and to laugh at her pretensions. It was a funny read and I liked it a lot.

From the Dust Returned

By Ray Bradbury

A collection of stories about the Elliot family, who live in the Midwest but are certainly not the typical Midwesterners. There's Uncle Einar with his great huge bat wings. Great-something Grandmere Nef, who is an Egyptian mummy and Nefertiti's mommy. Cecy, beautiful and young and always asleep but who travels in the minds of others. And there's Timothy, just a regular kid who somehow ended up in the care of this very odd family and who is torn between their midnight ways and normal life in the sunshine. It's a gathering of the strange, the spooky, the hidden and the ought-to-be-dead. But what these strange folks want mainly is to be left alone and yet not be forgotten either.

For the most part I enjoyed the stories, like "Uncle Einar" who flew into an electrical line and lost his night vision and thus his ability to fly at night. And "West of October" where the minds of four rambunctious young men end up occupying the body of a 4000-year-old man, the mummified husband of Great-something Grandmere Nef. Some of the stories didn't appeal to me but overall it was an entertaining and enjoyable read.

Available Light

By Ellen Currie

Kitty is afraid to commit herself wholeheartedly to her lover, Rambeau, and as a consequence, he has moved out of their home. Only after he is gone does Kitty come to realize how much she really does love him. She spirals down into depression and is not helped at all by her jealous, neurotic sister Eileen or by their wasp-tongued, house-bound, decrepit Irish mother. At one point, Kitty believes she is pregnant and her sister believes that she too is pregnant and it seems from appearances that their mean old mother is acting like she is pregnant too. Add in a mean-tempered pit bull (is there any other kind?), an amoral teenager who really is pregnant, and a lecherous, elderly neighbor, and you have a cast of characters who are strange, repulsive, nasty and all more than a little bonkers.

I can't say I cared at all for this book. For one, it is billed as being funny. But it isn't. Unless you are the kind of person who laughs at the disabled and thinks heartbreak and tragedy are hilarious. Because this is not a happy story. One character gets mauled by the mean dog. One character and her unborn child die in a car crash. The mean old mother has a series of strokes. And speaking of mean, it seems like the favorite activity of these character is making each other feel lousy. I didn't find it funny and beyond that, these people all act like escapees from a loony bin. I just couldn't relate to their insanity, their pointless cruelty to each other.

Water Witches

By Chris Bohjalian

Scottie Winston is a lawyer in Vermont and one of his firm's major clients is a local ski resort. Times are rough in the ski industry, what with competition from the big Western resorts and with the drought that Vermont has been suffering through that has reduced the amount of snow on the ski slopes. Lots of resorts have gone under. But the local resort has plans to prevent their own decline. They want to expand the ski trails, build a new ski lift and expand their snowmaking capacity. Of course, all these plans will have an impact on the surrounding wilderness, and most especially on the nearby river the resort wants to tap to supply its snowmakers. The drought has seriously depleted the river and locals and others are afraid that if the resort is given the go-ahead on the snowmaking, it will cause the river to run dry. Not to mention all the trees to be removed for new ski trail and parking lots and all the other development the resort wants to do.
Scottie is kind of caught in the middle. On the one hand, the resort is a major client and Scottie believes in the economic benefit the expansion will bring to the local community. But on the other had are his wife, his daughter and his wife's friends and family. Because Scottie is married to a water witch, and his little daughter is a fledgling water witch and his wife's whole life and family are tied to and involved with water witches and water witching and they are all up in arms over the proposed ski resort expansion. How can he please both his clients and those who are closest to his heart?

The first two thirds of this book were really interesting and enjoyable, reading about Scottie's odd family and relatives and water witching. But then it gets bogged down in politics and protesters and legal battles and it got really boring really fast. The author drags the main character's little girl into the legal battles but that just wasn't enough to make it interesting again. And I felt the whole business about the cougars was kind of contrived and, as before, it just wasn't enough to make that part of the story as interesting as the part about the water witches and Scottie's family.

The Uplift War

By David Brin

Garth is a planet that was abused greatly by its previous tenants has been granted to humans and neochimps to colonize. Their mission is to provide a home for a growing colony of neochimps and to restore and bring into balance the planet's ecology. It's just too bad they end up as pawns in an interstellar conflict.
Although the humans and neochimps put up a gallant defense against the Gubru invaders, they are out-gunned and out-numbered and soon the Gubru are ruling the roost, literally. (Gubru are bird-like beings who like being on a perch.) Their purpose in seizing Garth is to blackmail Earth into doing what the Gubru want. Failing that, they will use the inhabitants of Garth to prove that humans don't deserve to be Galactic citizens and that humans should be indentured to a more advanced, superior race, like the Gubru. Also that humans are botching the Uplift (genetic engineering) of chimps to neochimps and that someone more qualified should take over the neochimps' Uplift. Someone like, oh, I don't know, maybe...the Gubru?
Well, the Gubru might think they are an advanced Galactic culture, but basically they are out to get whatever they can. And if it means gassing humans and destroying forests and imprisoning and brainwashing neochimps and holding entire worlds hostage, well, that's just too bad. The Gubru may look like a flock of birdbrains but they are a ruthless bunch of intergalactic baddies.

This was an OK story. It was too long and slow, I thought. The romance between one of the main characters and an alien girl was not very satisfying and also kind of disturbing. The neochimps came off as too human. And I never did understand the whole thing about the gorillas coming into the Gubru-controlled town and crashing some ceremony intended to raise neochimps to Galactic citizenhood. And, strangely enough, even though the Gubru are stinkers, I felt sorry for the way it turned out for them in the end. It felt like a real lost opportunity for something wonderful and magnificent.

The Devil in the Junior League

By Linda Francis Lee

Texas socialite Frede (pronounced Freddie) Ware was certain that her husband loved her and wanted to have children with her. After several years of marriage and no babies, followed by numerous trips to the fertility doctors and lots of medical tests, Frede finds out that she has been living in a fantasy. Not only does her husband, Gordon, not want to have kids with her, he had a vasectomy before they were even married. Further, he has been having an affair with his homely secretary. And, as Frede later finds out, he has swindled Frede out of her large fortune, her house, her expensive artworks and has even replaced her fabulous jewelry with fakes. For the first time in her over-privileged life, Frede is going to have to stand on her own two feet.

Only, of course, she doesn't. She turns for help to some old friends and to some new friends and together they manage to pull her ass out of the flames. Only after being rescued does Frede finally leave her warm and cozy rich-girl enclave and set out to find herself. And that is where the story ends.

Frede Ware must be just about the stupidest rich girl there ever was. Why else would she blindly sign whatever paper her conniving husband sets in front of her, signing away her trust fund, rescinding her prenuptial agreement, and even signing over to her hubby her house and expensive artworks? This girl is just too stupid to live. But besides being stupid, Frede is one of the most stuck-up, arrogant, judgmental and all-around-stinkers of a heroine. If a woman shows up wearing a flowered print dress or, god forbid, spike heels, they are written off in Frede's book as NC: No Class. Not-One-Of-Us. This Frede is such a pill who so does not deserve her good fortune that I sort of wished the errant hubby succeeded in ripping her off at the end.
Other than the fact that Frede is a prig and a very unsympathetic heroine, sneering as she does at every little infringement she sees of her precious social code (for instance, she is shocked to see her friend is wearing animal print socks under her slacks), this story was pretty engaging. A behind-the-scenes look at the lifestyles of a particular class of society that was quite interesting. However, I did feel that Frede's husband and his complict girlfriend get off too easy. I didn't find their punishment very satisfying. And as for Frede, she's just lucky her creepy husband only swindled her.

The Boy Who Looked Like Shirley Temple

By Bill Mahan

Billy and his family leave their home for the greener pastures of California in the 1930s, hoping for better times there. They find a place to rent in Culver City and are down to just a few dollars. The dad is a hopeless hypochondriac and the mom finds a job only to have her boss skip town without paying her for two weeks of work. Looks like it's up to the two kids to support the family, which they manage to do pretty well by stealing lima beans from a nearby farm and selling them on the street. The customers are lining up for the discount beans but then the mom finds out what her two kids have been doing and puts a stop to it, despite the fact that the family is on the verge of being evicted from their crummy little house. But then cute little Billy gets discovered by Hollywood and things start to look up...maybe.

This was a fun and enjoyable read, a great trip back to a time that makes our current economic struggles look like child's play. It was a real hand-to-mouth existence but Billy and his older sister managed to keep the family going despite their parents' incompetence. I really enjoyed this very amusing story of a Depression-era family coping with hard times.

Potatoes Are Cheaper

By Max Shulman

It's 1936, the heart of the Depression, and two young men, Morris Katz and his cousin have hit on a way out of poverty to a better life. They'll enroll in college and find rich, homely Jewish girls and woo them and marry them.
They get the necessary cash together for the first semester and they are off and running. Morris hits upon the only daughter of a local theater magnate, wooing her with poetry written by his cousin Crip. But then the girlfriend sends the poem into the college literary magazine and it is a big hit with the editor, a gorgeous gentile girl, Bridget, who Morris falls for hard. Now he has to choose between money and security and love and happiness, with everyone in his family pulling for money and security, while his heart and loins are pulling for love and happiness. He better make the right choice because his whole future depends on it. And even if he does marry the gentile, he tells himself, "Of course she [his mother] might topple over dead when I told her about Bridget, but that didn't seem too likely. Jewish mothers do very little actual dying from shicksas. A lot of hemorrhaging, of course. But actual dying is seldom."

This was a very funny and entertaining novel. Morris and his various family members are all amusing as are his two prospective brides. Eventually, Morris makes his choice and it turns out to be the best one and the story ends happily, dilemma solved. And it was a lot of fun getting there, for sure.

Healer

By F. Paul Wilson

Steve Dalt was trying to locate a lost spacecraft when he encountered some hostile natives and took shelter in a nearby cave. He was briefly puzzled that they didn't come after him:

But his five pursuers were doing nothing. They sat astride their mounts and stared dumbly at the cave mouth. One of the party unstrung his crossbow and began to strap it to his back. Dalt had no time to wonder at their behavior, for in that instant he realized he had made a fatal error. He was in a cave on Kwashi, and there was hardly a cave on Kwashi that didn't house a colony of alarets.
He jumped into a crouch and sprinted for the outside. He'd gladly take his chances against the crossbows rather than alarets any day. But a warm furry oval fell from the cave ceiling and landed on his head as he began to move. As his ears roared and his vision turned orange and green and yellow, Steven Dalt screamed in agony and fell to the cave floor.
Hearing that scream, the five Tependian scouts shook their heads and turned and rode away.

Only one in a thousand can survive an alaret attack and it turned out that Steve Dalt was that one. When he regained consciousness, he discovered he was no longer alone in his own head. He was now sharing his body with a powerful new presence and he would be forever changed. And this amazing change will enable Steve Dalt to save humanity from an implacable, unseen new enemy.

This is a good story. Steve's adventures in his partnership with the alaret who invaded his body make for quite a good read. For it turns out that the alaret has given Dalt the gift of virtual immortality, an immortality that, as the years flow by, seems more of a burden than a gift. A burden that Steve learns to bear as it becomes apparent that his unique gifts make him a kind of savior to humankind, always ready to step up when needed. I enjoyed reading this book again, having read it in the past more than once.

Amazonia

By James Rollins

Nathan Rand's father disappeared on an expedition to discover lost tribes of the Amazon. A few years later, one of the members of that expedition came out of the jungle but died within hours without revealing the fate or location of the rest of the members of the expedition. This man, a former Special Forces soldier, had lost an arm previously but when he came out of the jungle, his arm was back.
News of this miracle sends a new expedition into the Amazon, to attempt to trace the dead man's trail and lead them to find out how the man regrew his arm. And Nathan Rand is part of that expedition and he is determined to discover what happened to his father. Plus they have a new, urgent quest: to discover a cure for a new and terrible disease that apparently came out of the jungle in the tissues of the dead man and is spreading like lightning throughout Brazil and the United States where the man's body was transported for study before anyone new that it was the bearer of a plague.

This story is part adventure story, part horror story and part mystery novel. The expedition has lots of exciting adventures, including encounters with giant piranha who have legs and can walk; gigantic caimans, a kind of alligator; a pack of huge jaguars and with a gang of thugs who want the discovery of a medicine that can regrow human limbs for the unscrupulous pharmaceutical company who has hired them. Heads will roll and so will a lot of other gory stuff but the story is certainly exciting and the source of the cure is simply amazing and fascinating and it is too bad it is just a fantasy. This was a very good read, if you don't mind all the gruesome stuff.

Startide Rising

By David Brin

Some time after humans have achieved starflight and become a rather unwelcome part of the galactic community, an experimental mission consisting of a crew of a few humans but mostly "uplifted" dolphins sets out on a shakedown flight that ends up turning the whole galaxy on its ear.
First, the galactic community, consisting of many different intelligent species, has existed for millions of years. They have pooled their knowledge into a vast Library which they share among themselves.
The origins of this community are pretty much unknown, but the common mythology is that a race of intelligent Progenitors established the Library, started the process of "uplift" and developed the galactic culture and community and then disappeared. Consequently, a fundamentalist-type of religion has developed in the galaxy that maintains that someday the Progenitors will return and establish a new, perfect community and reward the true believers.
"Uplift" is the process whereby an intelligent species takes a species that is just verging on becoming self-aware, and using genetic manipulation, push it into intelligence and then the uplifted ones spend a long time, maybe thousands of years, as servants and slaves of the species that uplifted them.
Uplift is the main reason that humans are not liked in the galactic community, because humans developed intelligence on their own and are not beholden to anyone. Plus humans uplifted some Earth species and did not make them slaves or servants to humanity, namely chimps and dolphins. This the galactic community finds outrageous because it flaunts millions of years of tradition.
So when this spaceship of humans, a chimp, and mostly dolphins discovers a graveyard in space of huge, moon-sized spaceships, the galactics, believing that the spaceships are those of the Progenitors and herald the beginning of the return of the Progenitors, will do anything to get their paws, flippers, tentacles, whatever on the location of this graveyard. The little spaceship becomes a target and gets shot down on a water world and its combined crew is in for a fight to the death to not only save their own lives but to protect the hugely valuable information that all their many enemies are dying to possess.

This is an ingenious and interesting story about a most unlikely situation, namely a spaceship crewed by a bunch of dolphins and that spaceship in turn trying to face down an armada of enemy ships determined to possess it. It was an exciting and intriguing read and I enjoyed it a lot. The only quibbles I had with the story were the dolphins, which I thought seemed too human in their behaviour, and the religious fanaticism of the galactics, which came off as too primitive for such supposedly highly advanced species. But other than that, it was a very enjoyable read.

Mannequin: My Life as a Model

By Carolyn Kenmore

The true story of a work-a-day model's life trying to make it in New York City.
Carolyn graduated from college but decided she would like to be a model so she left her home town in New England and set out for the big city. She never really explains why she chose this route instead of finding work in the field for which she spent four years in college.
Anyway, she details the effort to get started in the business, acquiring a portfolio, clothes, learning about hair and makeup, posing and so forth. Plus dealing with sex-obsessed and demanding clients, challenging shoots, not to mention the rejection inherent in a career based on looks.
It's an interesting look behind the glamour and the glitz and even though it was written in the 1960s, I don't suppose much has changed except for the introduction of the cell phone, which has probably helped with the time management and maintaining contacts in a big way.
From what she writes, I don't think she ever made it to the big time, certainly not to the stature of a Heidi Klum or Kate Moss or even Twiggy, who was a very famous model at about the same time as this book covers. But still, she gives a detailed picture of the life of a typical model. It made for a pretty good read.

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past

By A. Roger Ekirch

This book takes a look at how people lived in the days before the invention of modern lighting. How did they spend their evenings, once it got too dark to work? How did they spend their nights?
Turns out they spent their nights a lot like we do. Most people didn't go to bed and get up with the sun. They were out and about, visiting, working, getting up to no good. They just had to do it in a lot darker conditions than most folks nowadays.
For some, nighttime was the only time when the conventions and restrictions of their daytime lives were lifted. At night, you could do in darkness what you feared to be seen in the light. Sexual adventures, gambling, drinking, general rowdiness, and crime all thrived under cover of darkness. Crime especially seemed to know no bounds after nightfall. Housebreaking, robberies, muggings, hijackings, prostitution all benefited from cover of darkness.
Yet, even though life was riskier after dark, people still got out and about, visiting, working, socializing, even travelling in the darkness. In many ways, it all sounds familiar, if a lot harder and more dangerous given the lack of light.
As he brings his book to a close, the author describes something that he says has changed a lot because of modern lighting and that is our actual sleep habits. According to the author, people used to practice what they called first sleep and second sleep. First sleep lasts about fours hours or so at which point the sleeper awakes and stays awake for up to an hour or two and then goes back to sleep until morning. This interval between sleeps was a time for thinking over the day or for contemplation, for prayer, for quiet conversation with a bedmate or even for sex. The author feels our modern lives are the poorer for losing this quiet awake time in the middle of the night. I personally think he is wrong about that. I don't think most people sleep straight through the night. They would probably like to but don't. I know I don't. It is a rare thing for me not to wake up after about four hours sleep. I get up, let the dog out, use the toilet, get a drink of water, get the dog back in and head back to bed. True, I don't spend any time thinking about the day or contemplating my existence; I just want to get back to sleep. Maybe what has changed is not that people have stopped waking up in the middle of the night, but that our expectation is that our sleep should be uninterrupted and so we are less accepting of being awake then.

The Girl Watcher

By James Lawson

Arleigh Eliot is a middle-aged executive in New York City who is at a point in his life where his main preoccupation is sex. He visits massage parlors, peep shows, strip joints, makes obscene phone calls and is a window peeper. One day a beautiful young woman caught his eye. She seemed to him to be the epitome of young, desirable womanhood. So he began to stalk her. He became so obsessed that he even left his wife and moved into an apartment across the way from the woman's so that he could spy on her.
Eventually his attraction to this young woman led him to make contact with her and to his surprise, she was attracted to him also. They get together and Arleigh finds that he isn't as deliriously happy as he thought he would be, that a fantasy girl friend may be better than the real deal.

Arleigh is a guy who makes no bones about his own desires and selfishness. Although at the end of the novel he admits that some day it may all catch up to him, he really doesn't seem to care. He does what he wants in his personal and professional life. He is a creep. But as despicable as Arleigh is, still his frankness and openness are refreshing and amusing and entertaining. Arleigh is a scoundrel, but he is a lot of fun to read about and an unforgettable character.

Glory Lane

By Alan Dean Foster

Seeth is a young punk who, with his brother Kerwin, who's a bit of a nerd, see something strange at a bowling lane: a bowling ball with a mind of its own and a bowler who has seven fingers. But before they can get a closer look, two thugs show up and start dragging the seven-fingered bowler and his ball away. Seeth, being a kind of anti-establishment sort of person, steps in to challenge the two thugs and in the ensuing hassle, he and his brother and the stranger manage to escape. But not for long, because the two thugs come after them, shooting not guns but some kind of beam weapon. And as their new friend, Rail, explains, the thugs will not be satisfied with anything less than all their deaths. So all three of them, and the bowling ball, and a air-headed young woman who gets dragged into it all also, have to leave Earth and flee in Rail's spacecraft to seek refuge from the relentless thugs who are after one thing: the bowling ball.

This book tries real hard to be funny but it just isn't. Mostly it is dull. Seeth is a creep, his brother is a zero and the young woman, Miranda, is just a parody of a woman, constantly obsessed with shopping. The whole universe is after the bowling ball, and lots of aliens pop in and out of the story, but even the aliens miss the mark too. About the only thing that was engaging in the story was the puzzle of the bowling ball. It was the only thing that kept my interest and I found the solution of the bowling ball satisfying and surprising. So for the sake of the bowling ball part of the story, I think this book gets a fair rating.

Sunburn

By Laurence Shames

Vincente Delgatto is an old man. He should be retired but he isn't. He is the Godfather. And he is in Florida to visit his son, Joey Goldman. He has two sons, Joey in Florida and Gino Delgatto in New York. Joey is not involved in his father's business but Gino is. Joey is smart and Gino, not so much.
As an elderly man, Vincente is looking back at his life and feeling a heaviness about some of things he has done. He is thinking maybe if he had someone to talk to about it, it would help him feel better. So he gets together with a friend of his son Joey's, a newspaper man named Arty. Toghether they are writing the Godfather's memoir.
Gino is also down in Florida, trying to arrange a deal without his father's knowledge but the deal goes sour. In order to save his own life, he reveals that his father is writing a memoir. To prove himself, Gino is told to kill Arty, to stop the memoir from being written.
Also interested in the memoir is the FBI. They want it, badly. So badly that they try to squeeze Arty into giving it to them. Poor Arty is getting it from both directions. But not to worry, he has the Godfather on his side.

This is a story about gangsters. It is also a story about an old man who loves his sons and who just happens to be the Godfather. It's a story about how the choices people make twist their lives. It's about regret and love and compassion and duty. And about friendship, old friends and new friends, old loyalties and new ones. The gangster stuff is pretty routine, but Vincente's personal life, his connection with his family, his old friend, Bert the Shirt and his new friend, Arty, that makes this story surprisingly warm, sweet and touching. I enjoyed it.