The Infernals

By John Connolly

The second book in a series of which the first book, The Gates, has the main character coming up against the demons of hell. The demons came through the gates between the two realms and young Samuel Johnson was instrumental in sending them back to hell and sealing the gates.
Samuel Johnson's main adversary from the first story was a demon called Mrs. Abernathy. Since Samuel's triumph, Mrs. Abernathy has been in disgrace for its failure. So when it sees a brief opening in the gates, it reaches out to snatch Samuel to hell intending to deliver him to the Lord of hell and thus get back in favor with the head demon. But during the process not only does Mrs. Abernathy snatch Samuel (and his dog), it gets a police car (with cops inside), an ice cream van and its attendant, and a van full of dwarfs.
So Samuel and various others find themselves wandering through the strange, frightening and depressing realms of hell without a clue as to how to get themselves back to the land of the living. But then Samuel meets some old friends from the previous novel and together they and the cops and the ice cream guy and the dwarfs will stand against all the dire forces of hell and especially Samuel's old enemy, Mrs. Abernathy.

This was an okay story. It was in the adult section of our library but it is really meant for older children or possibly young adults. It was often funny but clearly geared for a younger reader, with footnotes on how to annoy your parents and explaining things that an older reader doesn't need explained, like what a chancellor is or what truculent means.
There isn't a lot of meat to the story. The humans mainly just wander around experiencing the nastiness of hell. The most interesting part of the story was the power play by the demons who are moving to take over Mrs. Abernathy's position and gain favor with the ruler of hell.
So I did enjoy the humor but found the plot a little light but I think older kids, 12 to 15, would enjoy it.

Grey Mask

By Patricia Wentworth

Charles never knew why his fiancee dumped him just a few days before their wedding. In anger, he left home for several years. When he finally returned, he was surprised to discover that she was unmarried and barely getting by as a sales clerk in a hat shop. He had always thought she jilted him for another man.
Meanwhile, society is buzzing over the recent death of wealthy Edward Standing, swept overboard at sea and presumed drowned. He left no will and his only child, beautiful, young Margot has no papers to prove she is his child or that her parents were ever married. And if she can't produce her parents' marriage certificate, her cousin Egbert gets everything.
Charles, who is currently staying at a hotel, pays an unannounced visit to his house, a house that is supposed to be empty, with only his caretaker in residence. Charles, arriving at the house, finds the garden gate and the back door both unlocked. Thinking to surprise a burgler, he creeps in and finds no burgler but a criminal gang, led my an anonymous man in a grey mask, in the midst of a plot. They are plotting to get rid of some girl before she can produce "the certificate." (Charles later realizes that they were talking about Margot Standing.) He decides he will go get the police when his ex-fiancee joins the gang. When he realizes she is involved, he changes his mind about informing the police. Charles and his ex will end up trying to protect Margot from those out to get rid of her, with the help of Miss Silver, a private investigator.

This is the first story in the Miss Silver series. It was written in the late 1920s. Miss Silver is an older British woman, similar to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple but Miss Silver is a professional investigator who works discretely to bring miscreants to justice with the minimum of scandal.
I liked this book a lot. The plot is interesting, the characters are pleasant and familiar, and it has secrets aplenty waiting to be revealed, with a couple of romances for another element of interest. And despite it having been written more than eighty years ago, it holds up really well. It was a good, and at times, even humorous story.

It's My F---ing Birthday

By Merrill Markoe

Told in first person by the unnamed narrator who writes a sort of memorandum to herself about the events of the past year, starting with her 36th birthday and concluding with her 42nd. In the first chapter, she writes that she is still grieving over her break-up a year ago with long-time boyfriend Carl. Oddly, Carl sends her a huge bouquet of flowers with a card signed only, "Happy Birthday Carl" with no punctuation between birthday and Carl. She doesn't know what to make of this and it just brings out her bad feelings again. Meanwhile, her parents are there to take her out for her annual birthday dinner, an event she doesn't like and dreads every year. Her relationship with her parents is rather rocky: her mother constantly criticizes her and her father is a conceited bore and a bully.
She concludes each chapter with a review of what she learned that year and also what she hopes to learn and in the first chapter she claims she wants to learn more about quantum physics but by the last chapter she gives up on quantum physics with a quote from Richard Feynman: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

I enjoyed this book although I found it hard to understand the main character's reluctance to stand up to her emotionally abusive parents. I should think that by the time one is 36, one would be able to tell the parents where to get off.
So the main character is a bit of a pushover but despite that, her story was interesting and a little bit amusing and, while not a real engrossing book, still made for a pretty good read.

The White Lady

By Leonard Dubkin

When Leonard Dubkin was driving home one evening, he passed a field that he recognized from his childhood. It was a small wilderness within the confines of the city of Chicago, a place with a low, rocky hill, some grass and weeds and a few trees. So he decided to stop and take a look around at his old stomping ground. As he wandered through the area, he came upon a tree which had growing around its trunk a large and dense collection of vines climbing up the tree to almost twenty feet high. Curious to look inside the thicket, he tried to push through the vines but failed. So he climbed up the outside of the vines and up on to the tree trunk. Once above the vines he could see an opening in the vines close to the trunk, big enough for him to stick his head in if he wanted to. But as he gazed at the hole, he became aware of some kind of movement inside the vines. He tried to see what it was but he lost his grip and tumbled into the midst of the vines, landing on a thick carpet of dead leaves at the base of the tree. Looking up toward the hole, Dubkin saw that the inside of the vine structure was full of little brown bats.
Dubkin was fascinated by the bats and that whole summer and into fall made repeated visits to observe and enjoy the bats. He came back the next summer also and that is when he discovered the little bat he called the White Lady. He was able the observe the little white bat as it was being born and, over the summer, he and the bat became friends of a sort with the little bat taking insects from his hand after it learned to fly.

This was a sweet story of a man getting to know bats in a way that most people would never wish to try. In fact, he was bitten several times but he never seemed worried about getting a disease. His mother, with whom he still lived at the time, strongly disapproved of all the time he spent with the white bat, at one time saying, "I was just coming to the conclusion that if you had to choose between us, the white bat would win." In fact, it was the time he spent with the bats that helped him to realize that he was too much under his mother's thumb and that he needed to break away and make a life for himself.
Dubkin's descriptions of the antics of the bats make them seem very appealing and endearing and even people who don't particularly care for bats might find this book interesting and informative. And maybe even improve their opinion of these mostly harmless and often very beneficial creatures.

The Shadow of the Wind

By Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When Daniel was a boy verging on manhood, he encountered a book that captured his imagination. Wanting to know more about the author, Julian Carax, he began an investigation that lasted almost ten years.
In due time and with the help of his friends, Daniel finds that Carax's life is a mystery: what happened to him, why did he disappear. It is a story of blighted hopes, blighted love and blighted lives. And if Daniel is not careful, his name will be added to that sad list.

I started reading this book months ago but put it aside as I found it rather boring. But I kept hearing what a great read it was and how much people were looking forward to reading it so I gave it another go.
Just like the first time, I found it kind of boring. It just seemed to go round and round without really getting anywhere. But I stuck with it and finally finished it.
It is a kind of murder mystery, set in the mid 1940s to mid 1950s, in Barcelona, Spain. It has lots of mysterious characters (maybe too many mysterious characters); dark, rainy nights; creepy, deserted buildings; a real Gothic atmosphere. I can't say I disliked the book but it was just too long. I did like the ending, which is not as grim and dire as the rest of the book.

A Fall of Moondust

By Arthur C. Clarke

People are living on the moon and a tourism industry has been established. One of the things the visitors to the moon like to do is take a sightseeing cruise on the Sea of Thirst in a boat specially designed to travel across the surface of this sea of dust. Captain Pat Harris has made this trip many times before without incident. But this time something entirely unexpected occurs: a sinkhole opens in the dust beneath the boat and it is pulled down some fifty feet into the dusty depths.
The boat is a bubble air trapped beneath the cold, airless moon dust and the 22 people on board can do nothing to save themselves. They just have to sit and wait and pray that help arrives before they run out of air.

Written about 1960 and somewhat dated, this was still an OK story. I found myself skipping parts of it, mainly the technical descriptions of the rescue effort which provided a lot more detail than I was interested in reading. Other than the sometimes boring tech stuff, it was pretty interesting, despite the fact that the moon does not have seas of dust deep enough to sink a boat.

The Thief of Always

By Clive Barker

Harvey is 10 years old and bored. School is boring, the weather is boring and there is nothing to look forward to in the middle of boring old February. So when a stranger invites Harvey to visit Holiday House, he is suspicious but eventually gives in to his longing for something fun and different.
At first, Holiday House is everything the stranger promised: the weather is beautiful, every day is Christmas and there is food and treats aplenty. Plus, Harvey enjoys the company of two other children at Holiday House, Wendell and Lulu. Of course, Holiday House is not the wonderful paradise it pretends to be. All those presents and toys and treats have to be paid for. And the price is very steep, indeed.

This was an OK story, rather predictable with what I felt was a weak ending. I mean, why would a creature as old and experienced as Mr. Hood, the power behind the house, fall for the very obvious trick that Harvey pulled on him?
The blurbs in the front of the book claim it is intended for teens and adults but I think most adults would find it as predictable as I did. It was not a surprise that Holiday House turns out to be a snare and a trap and that Mr. Hood is feeding on the souls of all the lost children that end up there. Or that Harvey is the hero who will rise to the occasion and rescue not only himself but all the lost children. Or even that each day at Holiday House is a year in the real world. I can't recommend this book for adults but kids would probably enjoy it.

A Gathering of Saints

By Christopher Hyde

London, 1940, the Blitz: German planes swooping in at night to drop their bombs on London and other targets in Britain. In the midst of the chaos and destruction, a sick mind takes advantage and kills, thinking perhaps one more body will not be noticed by the authorities. But the police do notice, and as the killer stikes again, it becomes apparent that he has advance knowledge of when and where the Germans will be striking. Who he is and how he is getting his information is not just a matter for the police: now it is a vital concern of national security!
Detective Morris Black is assigned to the investigation at the beginning. But before long, the British Secret Service has co-opted the investigation and Morris Black too. He will be privy to secrets that very few are allowed to know, including the secret of Ultra, the ingenious decoder that lets the British decipher all of Germany's secret communications. And yet somehow a madman has gained access to Ultra and is using it to plan his murders. And to complicate things further, a German agent has also gotten wind of the killer and is on his own mission to discover how "Queer Jack" knows in advance about Germany's bombing runs.

This was an extremely exciting and interesting murder mystery, set in perilous times with Detective Morris Black trying to conduct his investigation with the bombs literally falling around him. And the story also includes some very interesting history of that time, including how close English sympathizers in the government and with close ties to the government came to making a secret deal with Hitler to pretty much turn the country over to the enemy!
But one thing I did have against the story was its ending, which was more than a little disappointing. Bit of a spoiler here: but I always like a happy ending and this book doesn't really have one. However, despite the ending, overall I really enjoyed reading this taut and engaging mystery.

Beginning Operations

By James White

Beginning Operations is a Sector General Omnibus containing the three early Sector General novels, Hospital Station, Star Surgeon, and Major Operation.







Hospital Station is a collection of short stories starting with Medic in which Sector General hospital is under construction. O'Mara, a worker on the project, is suspected of negligently causing the death of two alien workers. Pending an investigation he is restricted to quarters and given the aliens' child to care for. His competence in caring for the alien baby is the first step on the road that leads him to the position of Chief Psychologist of Sector General.
The second story, Sector General, introduces the main character in the series, Dr. Conway. Conway, a bright young physician, has arrived to take his place among the throngs of beings working at the hospital. He finds himself dealing with all kinds of medical mysteries and strange aliens but manages to do his job not only competently but often brilliantly.
The other three stories also center around Dr. Conway: The Trouble with Emily in which Conway has to treat a very large dinosaur-like animal; Visitor at Large in which a frightened young shapeshifter runs amok in the hospital and which introduces the giant insect being and empath, Dr. Prilicla; and Out-Patient in which Conway's apparently callous and cold-hearted treatment of a patient turns his compatriots against him.



Next in the omnibus is Star Surgeon. Having proven himself, Dr. Conway is now a Senior Physician at Sector General. Called to aid the ailing population of a planet, Conway and the Monitor Corps run afoul of a corrupt regime. The evil empire sets its sights on Sector General, making the hospital ground zero in a war. The hospital is evacuated but Conway and others stay behind to take care of the casualties from the battle for the hospital itself.




The third novel is Major Operation. It starts with a sudden rise in inexplicable errors on the part of the surgeons and staff of Sector General. The errors are traced to the presence of an amazing malleable tool that can shape itself into whatever tool is needed at the moment. The tool is traced back to a planet with an intelligent population, but they are not the ones who created the tool and it turns out the one who created the tool is gravely ill and may die and take with it the secret of its magical tools.

I enjoyed these stories very much. I especially enjoy White's many interesting aliens and the medical puzzles that Conway and company deal with at Sector General and beyond. One of the things that I have always liked about the Sector General stories is the basic decency and good intentions of the characters. Even in cases where it seems the characters have ill intentions, it usually turns out they were misinformed or misunderstood. Plus, Sector General is teeming with strange and interesting beings and it is always fascinating and entertaining.

Drowned Hopes (A Dortmunder Novel)

By Donald E. Westlake

Back when he was a young man, Dortmunder shared a prison cell with Tom Jimson. Jimson was in for various crimes and should have spent the rest of his life behind bars. But some twenty years or so later, Jimson was released, due to overcrowding. All those years behind bars didn't do a thing to improve his disposition either. He went in a bad guy and came out a bad guy.
One of the crimes Jimson committed (but for which he was not convicted) was the robbery of an armored car that resulted in a take of $700,000. It was buried in a casket behind the library in a small rural town in New York. But in the many years that Jimson was locked up, a lot changed in that small town. Mainly it is covered by a whole lot of water. A dam was built downstream of the town and now the town is at the bottom of a resevoir.
After all those years in prison and given his penchant for killing off his co-conspirators and now an old man, Jimson is going to need help getting his money. Otherwise, as he tells Dortmunder, he will simply blow up the dam and drain the lake and get his money that way and too bad for all the people living downstream of the resevoir. Dortmunder, who knows perfectly well what kind of person Jimson is, feels pressured to come up with a plan that will rescue the money and keep Jimson from creating his devastating flood. But this is way out of Dortmunder's comfort zone and he and his usual gang will find themselves doing things for which they are ill prepared.

This was a very funny story. Dortmunder tries to learn to scuba dive with indifferent success. He brings the usual gang along to help: Andy, who also learns to scuba dive, and Stan the driver, and Tiny the muscle. They also need the help of a couple of new characters: Wally, a computer nerd and Doug, a diver. But even with the help of these two experts, the challenge of digging up a buried casket under fifty feet of water in a dark and murky lake is going to test the gang to the very limits. Even Dortmunder's girlfriend May and Stan's Mom get entangled in the plot, playing key roles. This was just great fun to read and I really enjoyed it.

Godbody

By Theodore Sturgeon

A naked man who calls himself Godbody appears on the rural outskirts of a small town. He comes into contact with a small number of people, offering them his unconditional love and healing their wounds, both mental and physical, winning their love and devotion. But it all ends tragically when the little group runs afoul of a straight-laced, angry spinster who sees it as her mission to keep the little town on the straight and narrow.

Sturgeon's version of a hippiefied, modern Jesus Christ. A sweet and captivating story, even with its sad ending. I was disappointed but only because I was expecting a science fiction story, which this really wasn't. It is a story about God's love.

In the Belly of the Bloodhound

By L. A. Meyer

Another installment in the adventures of Jacky Faber, girl sailor. Jacky has found out that the British government has charged her with piracy and ordered her arrest. She returns to Boston and once again enrolls in the Lawson Peabody School for girls. Soon after, an outing to a nearby island is proposed and a group of the girls board a boat to the island only to find themselves kidnapped and taken away to an ocean-going ship. This ship, the Bloodhound, is a slave ship and the girls are destined for the slave markets of North Africa. Jacky organizes her fellow students and develops a daring escape plan. They have about a month to get everything ready and with a little luck, courage and a friend in the crew, they are going to save themselves from a fate worse than death!

What an exciting and entertaining story this was. You wouldn't think that a story that takes place mainly in the filthy, dark hold of a slave ship would have much scope for adventure and excitement, but it sure does. I really enjoyed this story very much.

Mission of Gravity

By Hal Clement

Mesklin is a huge, cold planet with liquid methane seas and crushing gravity from three to 700 times that of Earth, depending on where you were on the surface, with the lightest gravity at the equator and the heaviest at the poles.
Inhospitable to human life, still Mesklin is not a barren planet. It teams with plants and animals and also has intelligent denizens who are not technologically advanced.
Humans have a scientific outpost on a moon of Mesklin and have sent a survey rocket down to the poles. It is the only rocket they have that is designed to withstand the tremendous pressure it will encounter there. But something has gone wrong and the rocket, which apparently landed as intended, is not responding to their communications.
Fortunately, a scientist at a station on the planet's equator (the only location where a human can survive the planet's gravity since it is only three times that of Earth's there) has established friendly relations with a few the natives of the planet, a group of intrepid explorers and traders. Led by their captain, Barlennan, they have agreed to travel to the pole and, with the advice of the humans, attempt to salvage the rocket's mission. But this will be a journey of thousands of miles, across strange territory, inhabited by unknown perils. Why would Barlennan and his crew undertake such a risky and dangerous expedition? Because they want to get their pinchers on human technology!

This was a really good story. Barlennan and his friends have lots of exciting adventures and, with the advice of the humans communicating with them from the moon base, manage to reach the disabled rocket and conclude their mission, helping not only the research scientists but gaining a lot for their own people. Just a fun read, with a lot of hard science for the science buffs to enjoy.

The Candle of Distant Earth

By Alan Dean Foster

Book three in the Taken Trilogy, finds Marcus, George, Sque, and Braouk traveling in a convoy of three Niyyuuan spacecraft, searching for their home planets with the help of their Niyyuuan allies. Their first productive stop on the journey is the planet Hyff, home to an unassuming people who live in fear of their maurading neighbors, the Iollth. Marcus and company arrive in time to help the Hyff mount a successful resistance against the Iollth. Plus the Hyff are familiar with Braouk's people and are able to give the wanderers a heading to take them to to Braouk's home planet.
Looks like they are all well on their way to getting back home...maybe.

This was an good read, a lot better than the second book in the trilogy but not quite as interesting as the first book. George and company face various challenges and triumph and attain their goals but discover in the process that maybe they already had what they were looking for.

Fingersmith

By Sarah Waters

Susan was raised in a den of thieves in Victorian London. The matriarch of this den was Mrs. Sucksby. Mrs. Sucksby was not Susan's mother, but had been a foster mother to her since Susan's infancy. Mrs. Sucksby ran a "baby farm," a kind of black market orphanage. She received orphaned and unwanted infants and took care of them until they could be placed with a family or work situation. She also sometimes received young women in trouble who needed an out-of-the way place to bear their bastard children. At about the time that Susan was born, an unfortunate young woman from an upper class family took refuge with Mrs. Sucksby and gave birth to a baby girl, a baby girl who would be the sole heir to a vast fortune. But there was a catch to this inheritance: the girl had to be married before she could receive her inheritance. This is what the young, pregnant woman confided to Mrs. Sucksby and Mrs. Sucksby held on to this information until the time was ripe to act upon it.
So almost 18 years later, Mrs. Sucksby, Mr. Richard Rivers, a young man and confederate of Mrs. Sucksby's, and Susan come together in a plot to get their hands on this vast fortune, due to be inherited by a young girl living in a lonely and isolated mansion about forty miles outside London. The plan is for Mr. Rivers, posing as an art expert, and Susan, posing as a ladies' maid, to insinuate themselves into the lonely mansion and seduce the young woman, Maud, away from the protection of her uncle and thus gain access to the vast fortune by Mr. Rivers marrying Maud, getting her wealth and then abandoning her to an insane asylum.
That's the plan, anyway. But the plotters have plots of their own and things go awry and some will end up in places they never expected and some will gain all and some will lose all.

This was a really good read, with lots of plot twists, and double-dealing aplenty. And I liked the ending, too.

All the Dogs of My Life

By Elizabeth von Arnim

A memoir of all the dogs that shared von Arnim's life, starting with Bijou, who she only had for a few weeks before her parents sent the dog away. She later, as a child, briefly had another dog, a Pomeranian, who was also soon sent away. Her parents didn't care for dogs.
It wasn't until she became a woman that von Arnim was able to really have a dog and she did, ending her memoir with dogs 13 and 14, Woosie and Winkie, of which two, Winkie was still with her. Like all dogs, her dogs had their ups and downs, their illnesses and misadventures and their tragic ends.

When she wrote this book, it was intended to be a story of her dogs and not an autobiography. And she kept to her intention, which at times made for rather awkward reading. Maybe she figured her readers would be familiar enough with her to be able to read between the lines. But I found her coy references to her own past to be rather annoying, like when she referred to the appearance of her next husband as her "doom" without ever explaining why he was her doom.
However, she is open about the mistakes she made with her dogs, like leaving one behind in Switzerland for several years and then coming back for it only to find it was dying. And having one neutered and then blaming herself when the dog became fat and lazy. Anyone who has ever had a pet should know those feeling of guilt and regret when the pets have to suffer the consequences of our decisions and failures to act.

Anyway, it was a pretty good book written by a woman who truly did love her dogs even if she made some mistakes along the way. But who hasn't?
She was also the author of Enchanted April, which was made into a very fine movie in the early 1990s.

The Moon By Whale Light

By Diane Ackerman

Ackerman travels the world to see animals in their native habitats, focusing in this book on bats, American alligators and crocodiles, whales and penguins. For those who are not particularly familiar with these animals, this book is an excellent introduction. I found the section on bats to be the most interesting, followed by that of the penguins, mainly for it very evocative descriptions of the scenery. The sections on whales and gators were less interesting to me, since they didn't have a lot of information that was new to me.
As for the section on bats, what I most enjoyed were the adventure stories provided by Merlin Tuttle, bat expert and founder of Bat Conservation International. I don't know if he has ever written a book about his adventures, but if he hasn't he sure should. He has led a very exciting life, out in the field studying bats. What a guy!

First Grave on the Right

By Darynda Jones

Charley Davidson is a grim reaper. She is the gate to the other realm that the dead pass through. As such, she can see and talk to the dead, which comes in handy for her day job, private investigator. Through her contacts with the police, she is able to pass on the information she gleans from her dead witnesses and thus solve crimes.
Talking to dead people has been a skill Charley has possessed since her birth. In fact, the first person to pass through her portal was her own mother, who died at her birthing. Even as a tiny child, Charley saw and spoke to the dead, confiding the information thus gained to anyone who cared to listen. That is until her stepmother slapped her silly for claiming that Charley saw a missing (and dead) child.
But bad relations with her stepmother is the least of Charley's problems. Lately she is being haunted by a devastatingly handsome man, a man who enters her dreams and makes hot, passionate love to her. Now he has started appearing in the daytime, with his burning kisses and caresses, sending Charley into a tizzy. And reminding her of an unrequited love from her high school days. Does this mean the man for whom she has carried a torch for so many years is dead? Or trapped in some sort of limbo, unable to cross over? She doesn't know, but she means to find out, even if she has to go knocking on the gates of Hell to find him.

This was a pretty typical entree in the supernatural romance genre. It is also clearly meant to be a series, since the ending is very open-ended with many strings left dangling. It is also supposed to be "hilarious" but I didn't find it so. I did get rather tired of the main character constantly being injured or beat up. That was really off-putting, as I don't find abuse particularly entertaining. Also, I'm sure the sex scenes are appropriately steamy, but overblown depictions of the sex act don't appeal to me. As far as the plot goes, it is basically a murder mystery, when three dead lawyers visit Charley after they have been murdered, all three lawyers working for the same law firm.

I am such a sucker for any book that claims to amusing, funny, or hilarious. Here lately, though, it seems I am usually disappointed when the book turns out to be, at the most, mildly amusing. That is the case here, where a book is hyped as hilarious but isn't. Sure, it has a few lighter touches but mainly it is not a funny book. How could it be with the subjects of human trafficking, child abuse and murder as its topics? Overall, the book is a pretty good murder mystery with an intriguing supernatural mystery attached. But it is not hilarious. I am not going to hold the misleading blurbs against it, though. I was disappointed that it wasn't the humorous book I was looking for, but it was a pretty good read.

Hons and Rebels

By Jessica Mitford

Born in 1917, Jessica tells the story of her growing up years as the daughter of British lord, Baron Redesdale. From what she says, Jessica was not a particularly happy child. Hers was a large family, she had several sisters and a brother and perhaps Jessica got lost in the shuffle. Living in what she felt was a kind of isolation, she longed to go to school but her parents insisted on her being educated at home, although she didn't learn much beyond proper English and French, as those where just about the only subjects deemed relevant for the education of an upper class female. She was not taught anything practical, like how to take care of a home or family, since it was assumed she would marry into her own class and those things would be provided by servants.
But Jessica was not interested in society boys. Early in her life, Jessica developed a social conscience when she became troubled by the differences between how she lived and how most other people lived. She felt the best way to equalize that difference was through Communism and she became an ardent supporter of the Communist cause. But her parents and her sisters were at the opposite end, politically, in that they supported the British Union of Fascists and were fans of Adolph Hitler.
Eventually Jessica ran away from home with her cousin, Esmond Romilly, who had fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. (Romilly was the nephew of Winston Churchill.) Esmond was planning to rejoin his comrades in the Spanish Civil War and Jessica wanted to be involved. But it didn't work out, and pressure from Jessica's family pretty much forced them to get married and return to Britain.

This was an OK book. I can't say that I cared much for Jessica's family, in that they were Jew-hating fascists and supporters of Hitler. Nor did I care for Jessica's politics, not being a fan of Communism myself. I didn't know about her family's shocking history when I started reading the book and when I did find out, it really put me off the whole book. It's probably not a reasonable attitude but that's how I felt.

This Is My God

By Herman Wouk

Author and Jew Herman Wouk attempts to answer the question, what is the Jewish faith? He gives a brief history of the Jewish people and how the Jewish religion came to exist. He also looks at the evolution of Judaism from its beginnings in Middle East, to its adaption to exile over the centuries and to its modern existence in the forms of Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Hasidic Judaism. It's a very informative view of the religion designed for the reader who is totally unfamiliar with Judaism but it is also of value to others. The author presents his information in an easy-to-read style without a lot of complex and confusing detail. I am not familiar with Judaism but I still think he does a good job of explaining it.

My Dog Skip

By Willie Morris

Willie Morris' memoir of his boyhood in a small Southern town, centered around his pet dog, Skip, a terrier. Morris was an only child and Skip became the brother he never had. The two did everything together, hunting, fishing, playing ball. Morris had lots of friends and an active social life and Skip was a part of it all. He even learned to play football and other sports. Together he and Morris lived an almost idyllic existence. Of course, there were tough times, like when Skip was poisoned or when he got trapped in an abandoned refrigerator. But he managed to squeak through and the two remained nearly inseparable until Morris went off to college.

There were lots of things that I enjoyed about this book and some not so much. The descriptions of childhood pranks were funny and I liked the excursions into the dense woods nearby and of the closeness between Morris and his dog. In fact, I would have like a lot more about the local wildlife and the woods. What I didn't enjoy so much was the extensive descriptions of the football games and other sports Morris played where the dog was included. Yes, it is remarkable that Skip learned to play those games, but too often it seemed like I was reading the sports report. I got rather bored with the extensive descriptions of sports games. But other than the emphasis on sports, it was a pretty good story and Skip sounds like one of the best dogs ever.

Snuff

By Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork Commander of the City Watch Sam Vimes has finally agreed to take a much-deserved and long put-off vacation. So he and his wife, Lady Sybil and their young son, Sam, are going to spend a couple of weeks at Lady Sybil's family estate in the country.
But it isn't long before Sam's vacation turns into a criminal investigation with Sam set up to take the fall for a local man's disappearance, a man with whom Sam had a brief confrontation at the local pub. Before long, Sam is on the trail of a cruel murderer and after a gang of drug smugglers who are being backed by the local bigwigs.
It all leads to a thrilling riverboat ride on a river in roaring flood. Sam comes out on top and in the process manages to bring a downtrodden local minority into equal status with the rest of the Discworld community.

This was another interesting novel in the Discworld series but not as funny as some of the earlier novels. It does have some amusing moments but its also pretty serious as it deals with discrimination, murder and the indifference of the illegal drug industry to the dire effects of their product on their customers. I appreciate that Pratchett has some important points to make about society. But I don't read his books for their social commentary. I just want to be amused. For the most, I wasn't amused by this book. It was just too serious for my taste.

The Worst Hard Time

By Timothy Egan

When the Great Plains were opened to settlement, the area was thought to be prime farmland. The great grasslands were plowed under, the native bison destroyed, and the prairie divided into fenced plots and sowed with crops. At the time, the area was experiencing a period of fairly wet conditions and crops flourished. The price of wheat was high and more and more land was put to the plow. Overproduction resulted and prices crashed. Wheat was piled up on the ground as the elevators filled. Farmers' cost of production exceeded the price they could get for their crop. At about the same time, the country was plunged into the Great Depression and America's buying power was decimated, which didn't help the farmers at all. Then, on top of all that, a drought struck the Great Plains, a drought that lasted for years and years. Farmers tried to plant a crop only watch it wither and die from lack of moisture. Too much acreage was laid bare to wind, wind which is a permanent feature of the Great Plains. Gigantic dust storms ensued, storms so massive that fences were buried, tractors and vehicles buried. The good top soil was stripped off and sent up into the atmosphere traveling at times as far as New York City and Washington DC.
This is the story of those times, of the people who stuck it out and refused to give up on the dream. They dealt with the dust that got everywhere, that destroyed not only the health of their livestock, but their own health. It's a fascinating, heartbreaking and even frightening story as greed replaced common sense and people believed what they wanted to believe and converted marginal, semi-arid land into farmland, telling themselves that "rain follows the plow."

Threshold

By David Palmer

Peter Cory was a self-made man, confident, smart, athletic, successful and extremely wealthy. So wealthy that he owned his very own tropical island, equipped with the finest security possible. So how was it possible that the lovely young naked woman had managed to elude said security and invade Peter's highly prized privacy? Add in the talking cat who came with her and Peter's life was about to change direction in ways he could never have imagined. Ways that included the power to alter his appearance at will, and traveling across the galaxy to a distant planet and then fighting his way across that planet battling fearsome monsters every step of the way. He will be tested almost beyond endurance and his survival is the key to the survival of the whole galaxy.

Quite an exciting adventure story as Peter faces the challenges he encounters and manages to come out on top for the most part. I did find the fact that the main character is a little too over the top (even Superman had to worry about kryptonite) and the endless procession of monsters gets a little tedious after awhile and I just skipped over the many technical descriptions, but even so I enjoyed the book a lot.

Pebble in the Sky

By Isaac Asimov

Joseph Schwartz was just a regular guy, a retired tailor living in Chicago who found himself, through no fault of his own, catapulted 50,000 or more years into the future and, again through not fault of his, embroiled in a deadly plot to overthrow galactic government.
Coming from the past to an Earth that is now radioactive and partially ruined, Schwartz finds nothing recognizable and doesn't even figure out until quite a bit later that he is in the future and on Earth. He falls into the hands of an enterprising scientist who subjects Schwartz to a medical procedure that vastly improves Schwartz's intelligence, even to the point of giving him the power to read people's minds.
The people of Earth live in virtual quarantine, viewed as pariahs by the civilized worlds of the galaxy. Because of Earth's degraded environment, population is strictly controlled with only a very few exceptional individuals allowed to live past their sixtieth birthday. Everyone else at that age is killed to make room for the next generation. It is not a happy world and the galactics just ignore the misery of people on Earth. Plus they refuse to admit the humankind originally came from Earth. All of this creates great resentment on Earth.

This was an OK book. I found some parts of it a bit dull and the plot against galactic government didn't make much sense to me. But other than that it was interesting reading about Schwartz finally getting a handle on where he was and what was going on and learning to use his new mental powers to help himself and his friends.

Memphis Ribs

By Gerald Duff

J.W. is a homicide detective in Memphis. It's May and tourist season is just starting when a tourist is murdered. The tourist had the bad luck to stumble upon a crime in commission. Then an upstanding citizen of Memphis is also killed in what looks like a robbery gone bad. At first, it would appear that the two crimes had nothing in common. The tourist was killed in the street and the citizen in his own home.
But the powers that be need both crimes solved and quickly. It looks bad for Memphis when tourists are murdered in the streets. And the dead citizen is the father of the soon-to-be-crowned Maid of Cotton at one of the premiere social events of the season, The International Barbecue Contest and the Cotton Carnival. It is up to J.W. and his partner Tyrone to figure out the connections between these two seemingly unrelated murders.

I enjoyed this book once I got into it. I must admit I found it not that engrossing at first but it did start to grow on me. It took me awhile to warm up to the main character, J.W., but once I did I really started to like him a lot. It was quite a good read.

Getting Over It

By Anna Maxted

Helen Bradshaw works at a magazine and her life is pretty much OK. She doesn't like her boss who treats her like a go-fer instead of a journalist. She doesn't like her boyfriend because he keeps hooking up with his ex. She doesn't like her landlord although she does lust for him. But everything is pretty much OK. Then her father dies suddenly and Helen finds herself mourning not only the loss of her father but also that she never had the kind of loving relationship with him that she always wanted. Meanwhile she has to cope with her needy, depressed mother, her increasingly hostile landlord, her on-again, off-again relationship with her new boyfriend and one of her best friends who is locked into an abusive and violent relationship. And still come to terms with her own deeply buried grief.

This was an OK story, if pretty typical of the "chick-lit" genre, following the usual pattern of girl who undervalues herself and ends up jumping from man to man until she straightens up, realizes her mistakes and finally gets the man of her dreams. Only this book adds the trauma of losing a parent.
Oddly, this book is covered with blurbs describing it as "laugh-out-loud," "always funny," and "hilarious" despite its rather grim subject matter, the death of and coping with the loss of a loved one. I will admit it has a few amusing moments and some that I suppose some would consider funny (like when Helen gets so drunk she pees her pants in public) but that I thought were more sad than funny. Also, the book seemed a lot longer that it needed to be, some 400 pages long, one of those books that go on and on and on. Anyway, it was an OK book but nowhere near as funny as the blurbs indicated.

Where the Boys Are

By Glendon Swarthout

Set and written in the late 1950s, this is the story of a young woman and her friends who go to Florida for spring break. And like college kids today, Merrit and Tuggle are looking to have a whole lot of fun, fun that includes days on the beach, evenings drinking and partying and nights having sex. About the only thing missing from this 1950s story is obvious drug use (the author mentions "herbs" a few times and I don't know if this is code for marijuana or just plain cigarettes: "He chauffeured us everywhere, served our Cokes, lit my herbs, bought our movie tickets...") and intentional nudity. They even refer to other kids as "nurds" but spelled differently and I couldn't tell from the context if it meant the same as nerd does today: "I feel any guy who chickens out on an easy, part-time operation like this is a nurd. In fact he's a green nurd."
Anyway, Merrit and Tuggle achieve their goal of meeting eligible males and Merrit ends up falling in love with three different men and having to figure out what she wants to do with the rest of her life. She and Tuggle have a lot of fun, drink too much beer and liquor, have lots of sex, get involved in a conspiracy to send arms and sympathizers to Cuba and in general make asses of themselves.

I was interested in this book because I saw the movie on which it was based. The movie stayed pretty close to the narrative of the book, but I was surprised that the line I remember from the movie where the Paula Prentiss character says she her ambition is to be a "walking, talking baby factory" is not in the book. So kudos to the script writer that came up with that very memorable line.
But other than that minor disappointment, I did enjoy this book a whole lot. A real trip back to a time that it turns out was not simpler or more innocent than today. It was a lot of fun reading about the antics of our parents and grandparents and shows that things really haven't changed that much at all. Except we are perhaps more open about it than back then.

Such a Pretty Fat

By Jen Lancaster

Last time Jen had just sold her first book and was in that in between time of selling the book and waiting for it to be published. This memoir starts after she has sold her second book, Bright Lights, Big Ass and she is looking for a subject to write about, having pretty much exhausted the topic of personal memoir. But then she gets an idea: why not write about going on a diet?
So that is what this book is, Jen's weight loss journey and her experiences with exercise trainers, Jenny Craig, and Weight Watchers. Like her first two books, this one is amusing and fun and even informative as Jen relates her experiences with diet and exercise. I enjoyed it a lot even though it took her to about the middle of the book to finally start the whole process.

Farewell, My Subaru

By Doug Fine

Doug Fine wanted to reduce his carbon footprint and yet still enjoy all the advantages that modern life offers. His solution -- move to a ranch in southeastern New Mexico and raise goats and grow vegetables. But that part of the world is rather arid and so one of the first things he had to do was install an solar-powered water pump to provide water for the house, the livestock and irrigation for his garden. He also bought himself a used diesel pickup truck which he then had converted to run on waste grease procured from restaurants at no cost to him. He also acquired a couple of young female goats intended to provide milk in due time. This was a vital part of his plan because he loves ice cream and the idea of giving up ice cream was intolerable. He also raised chickens for awhile but eventually lost most of them to predation. In fact, at times the threat to his livestock became so bad that he had to sleep out in the goat pen to protect his two goats. But all in all, he found that he was meeting his carbon footprint goals and pretty much really enjoying himself in the process.

This was a fun and amusing book to read. Doug has his struggles and manages to cope pretty well and he seems to be really enjoying his new lifestyle, raising vegetables and taking care of his goats and chickens. Of course, one thing became pretty apparent after awhile: Doug has plenty of money with which to indulge his fantasy life style: a solar-powered well pump which, with just two hours of sunlight a day, will be able to fill 500 gallon water tank; a Ford F-150 pickup truck; a super-efficient drip-irrigation system and $12000 dollars worth of solar panels. Not to mention buying a whole ranch on which to live. But even though most of us can't do what Doug Fine did, it still made for a very enjoyable and even exciting read.

The Secrets of Harry Bright

By Joseph Wambaugh

Sidney Blackpool is a homicide detective in Los Angeles. His son drowned while surfing and, even though it has been quite some time since that happened, Blackpool is not coping too well with his loss. He is guilt-ridden because of harsh words exchanged with his dillitent and drug-using son shortly before the teenager died. So when the opportunity arises for Sidney to give up police work and take a job as head of security for a cushy salary at private business, Sidney is raring to go. All he has to do is look into the death of the son of the man who owns the business.
The man is convinced that his son, who died near Palm Springs, was killed by kidnappers, but the Palm Springs police have not been able to close the investigation and the case is so far unsolved.
Sidney and his partner head to Palm Springs, all expenses paid, to follow up on the investigation and also to play a little golf. But what Sidney finds out reveals more about himself than he would probably like to know and even though he solves the riddle of the dead boy's death, it doesn't quite pan out the way he and the boy's father had imagined.

I really enjoyed this book a lot. It has lots of intriguing secrets to be solved, colorful and amusing characters, quite a bit of humor and a compelling and engaging mystery to be solved.

Bright Lights, Big Ass

By Jen Lancaster

After losing her job and then her husband losing his job and then nearly ending up bankrupt, Jen Lancaster decided to write a book about it all, which was Bitter Is the New Black.
After she wrote the book, she had a gap of several months between selling the book and having it published. This next book, Bright Lights, Big Ass, covers that gap.
As the book starts out, things are looking up for Jen and Fletch. Fletch has a new job, they have moved to a better apartment, but money is still a worry. Jen is now working for a temp agency and she has found out that it suits her and she is happier as a temp than she ever was as a high-paid professional when her boss at a temp job thanks her for making copies:

Back when I made the kind of decisions that impacted stock prices...no one verbalized appreciation. Ever. Nobody valued my fourteen-hour days. No one cared when I sacrificed my weekends to tweak proposals and prepare RFPs. I was barely ever congratulated for projects implemented, deals closed, agreements struck, and when I was, it was in a backhanded, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately sense. Even though I gave my company my all, nothing I did was ever good enough.
Yet for the act of making a simple stack of copies, something any child could do, I receive the kind of accolade I used to dream about. At this moment, I realize I never had a professional job I didn't loathe on some level. NYSE parties not withstanding, I despised almost every aspect of all the real jobs I ever had -- the backstabbing, the premeeting meetings, the protracted "mission statement" discussions. I detested the bullshit conference calls, the ridiculous panty hose-mandatory meetings even in hundred-degree August humidity, redundant results reporting. Although I was unaware of it at the time, getting up every morning and facing chaotic day after chaotic day managing people and products I hated was an exercise in futility. In short, I despised every bit of Corporate America and now it makes sense why I was so mean to people and why I tried to bolster my happiness with multiple $150 Ralph Lauren skirt purchases.

Written in her usual fun and open style, Lancaster paints an amusing picture of her life in the months before she became a successful author. While not as compelling as her first book, still this book was quite engaging and definitely in the same light vein as Bitter Is the New Black.

Child of Fire

By Harry Connolly

Ray Lilly is a wooden man. His role is to serve as a decoy while his boss, Annalise, moves in for the kill. As a wooden man, his life expectancy is nil. Which is fine by Annalise because she hates him. He caused the death of a very good friend of hers and she cannot forgive him for that. The sooner Lilly is dead the better as far as she is concerned.
Annalise is a powerful sorcerer, member of the Twenty Palace Society. Their goal is to hunt down and exterminate dangerous renegade magicians. She and Lilly are off to investigate a very successful toy company in a small town where it seems much of the company's success may be based on illicit magic. Before they even arrive at the town, they discover the townsfolk are paying a terrible price for the success of the toy company: the destruction of their children. To feed the demon powering the rogue magician, the children are gradually being consumed in a fiery blaze and all memory of them erased from the community.
The townsfolk love the prosperity the toy company has brought to them and, since they don't remember the many children lost to the demon, they are putting every obstruction in the way of Annalise's and Lilly's investigation. But the demon behind the magician doesn't care about humans and many more will perish in fiery oblivion as it fights to stay in a world that will soon fall victim to its terrible power. This is what Annalise and Lilly must prevent even if it means their own deaths.

This was an exciting story. The relationship between the implacable Annalise and Lilly adds a real depth to the story as Lilly struggles to build trust between himself and his ruthless boss. The story is jammed packed with action as Lilly pretty much fights a running battle between himself and the angry townsfolk who fear Lilly is there to mess up their sweet deal. Meanwhile, the rogue magician remains elusive and protected not only by the townsfolk but also by the demon who is only using the magician in an attempt to gain access to our world. And speaking of the demon, this is no horns, pointy tail and pitchfork kind of demon. It is a creature from another dimension, completely alien to our universe, and with an appetite that would result in the destruction of all humanity if it ever managed to free itself from the magician's control. So not only are Lilly and Annalise trying to save one small town, they are trying to save the whole world.
On the other hand, even though this is a very exciting and engaging story, the body count is really high, starting with a little boy who burns up in front of his parent's and Annalise's and Lilly's eyes. And the the body count continues to mount as the demon possesses its victims and turns them into living flame throwers as weapons against Annalise and Lilly. So even though I did enjoy the story very much, I found all the death and destruction, especially of the little kids, rather depressing and I am not planning to continue on with the series. It's is just too gruesome and grim for me.

The Spellman Files

By Lisa Lutz

Izzy Spellman has a big problem: her family. They are nosy and intrusive and demand to know everything that is going on her life. Which is probably one of the hazards of their profession: private investigators. And they have their reasons for being concerned: in her teens, Izzy was not exactly the best behaved kid. She drank, drugged, broke curfew, stole, vandalized. But now she is in her late twenties and she wants her P.I. parents to give her a little space. Which they seem unwilling to do, going so far as to plant a bug in her room and hire her uncle to tail her.
Izzy finally puts her foot down and they come to an agreement. Izzy, who also works for her parents as an investigator, will do one last case and then they will let her be.

Here are some of the words used to describe this book in the blurbs on the cover: delightful, droll, fun, funny, hilarious. It is true that is does have a few amusing moments but mostly it is just annoying. The behavior of these people, the parents and Izzy's bratty sister is very off-putting. Especially the sister whose parents seem not to have a grasp of how to discipline their out-of-control child. I didn't not find her antics amusing nor did I find the parents spy tactics against Izzy amusing. And Izzy comes off as an odd combination of gutsy and gutless. She grouses about how impossible it is for her to get away from her family and I kept thinking, if you want to leave just go. It's that simple. Just go. So, although the book does have a few funny moments, mostly it was just irritating and about halfway through it just seemed to drag on forever.

Shameless

By Karen Robards

Lady Elizabeth has a reputation for breaking betrothals. She has been engaged three times and three times broke it off. The last fellow she dumped didn't take it so well, though. He arranged to have Lady Elizabeth kidnapped and taken to be sold as a sex slave. And the only man who can save her is a ruthless assassin who wouldn't think twice about snapping her neck if he had to.

This book starts off as a pretty ordinary period romance. But when Lady Elizabeth gets kidnapped it turns into quite an entertaining adventure story. Lady Elizabeth and some of her fellow captives make a break for freedom, with the assassin, Neil Severin, luckily showing up to help them on their way. They narrowly escape, but Neil gets shot in the process. They end up in a smuggler's cave and have to climb to safety only to be stopped by a rock slide. They escape the rock slide but Neil is captured by the authorities. And the adventure continues from there, with the ladies he rescued helping him and Lady Elizabeth escape.

This was a pretty entertaining romantic adventure story. Actually, I enjoyed the adventure story more than I did the romance. There are some sex scenes but fortunately not too graphic.
But as much as I enjoyed the adventure part of the story is how much I didn't enjoy the last part of the story, where Lady Elizabeth is safely returned home and Neil and she are trying to take their place in society. It felt like the obligatory nod to a Regency romance, with dances at Almacks and rides in the park and damped petticoats and stolen kisses and the threat of scandal. Nothing new there and all pretty boring. But the adventure part of the story was first rate!

Garlic and Sapphires

By Ruth Reichl

When Ruth Reichl accepted the position of restaurant critic at The New York Times, she soon found out that the local restaurants were ready and waiting, with photos posted and staff briefings. The key to reviewing restaurants is to be anonymous, so they can't put their best face on for the critic. So Reichl came up with a strategy: disguises.
With the help of a couple of experts, she developed some characters to hide her true identity behind. First was Molly, a rather staid, older woman. And Brenda, a flamboyant and kind-hearted redhead. And the woman in tweed, who didn't have a kind word for anyone. The disguises worked and Reichl was able to give honest and impartial reviews of area restaurants. But after awhile, she began to question herself and wonder about all these strange women lurking inside her own head.

After reading Reichl's book, I know that she would eat almost anything. She would probably eat a pig fetus. In fact, I bet she has eaten pig fetus and loved it! I bet she has eaten those unhatched ducklings still in the shell and raved about how their little bones cracked between her teeth. But even though her very evocative descriptions of the food she ate left me unmoved I still enjoyed this book very much.

Sex and the Single Vampire

By Katie MacAlister

Allie is a Summoner, or rather she hopes she is. A Summoner is a person who has the power to call up ghosts, poltergeists and demons. For Allie, the trouble is, although she is highly trained, she has yet to actually summon anything. So her boss has given her one last chance to prove herself. She has been sent to London and if she can't manage to summon some spirits while there, she is out of a job. Things are not looking good until one night in her hotel room she does summon a spirit: a three-legged ghost cat.
Buoyed by this dubious success, Allie pays a visit to an old building that is rumored to be haunted. But although she can't get any spirits to appear, she does stumble across a wounded vampire, a very handsome and manly vampire who is an angry and upset vampire who doesn't want Allie interfering in whatever scheme he is running. But for Allie this vampire is the man of her dreams, literally. She has had some very bad and intense dreams about this vampire, dreams in which the vampire is in terrible trouble and Allie is the only one who can save him. Now it looks like her dream has become reality.

This was an OK story, even if the plot was a little on the weak side. The bad guys kidnap a vampire who is a friend of Allie's vampire, then they grab Allie's vampire and they are also holding various ghosts captive, but the explanation for why all this was done didn't make a lot of sense to me. Still, the author includes a lot of comic relief in the story, mainly provided by the various ghosts that end up attached to Allie. And since this is also a romance story, there is a lot of sex, but it is not excessively graphic.

Lily Pond

By Hope Ryden

For four years naturalist Hope Ryden studied a family of beavers that lived on a stream in a park in New York State. She was able to observe the beavers even in winter and at night, when the animals were most active. She was with them as their family grew with the arrival of babies every spring. She brought them branches to supplement their food supply when she was concerned they might starve. She and a friend helped the beavers repair their dam when vandals tore a huge hole in it. And she drove away a trio of people who were possibly trying to raid the beaver lodge for the vulnerable beaver kits inside, the kits to be sold as pets. She came to identify with the beavers and gave them all names and worried about their welfare. Eventually she realized it was time to move on and leave the beavers to manage on their own after the matriarch of the beaver family died of old age.

If you have ever been at all curious about beavers then this is a great book to read. It details the lives of the Lily Pond beavers, their trials and tribulations, their triumphs and accomplishments and their remarkable ability to engineer their environment to suit their purposes. Really, beavers are amazing animals and this book is an excellent window on the their hidden world.

The Professor and the Madman

By Simon Winchester

For centuries, the English language went without a complete, comprehensive dictionary. Finally, it was decided that such a dictionary should be created, backed up by extensive scholarship and quotations from literary works and other writings illustrating the meanings of words and how the meanings changed as the language did.
Professor James Murray became the chief editor of the dictionary as it was being created. Coming from a ordinary family, it was soon apparent that young James was no ordinary child. Extremely intelligent and consumed with a hunger for knowledge, James excelled in school. But since his parents were not able to pay for his further schooling, he quit at the age of 14. That didn't mean an end to his scholarship, as he continued to educate himself in a wide variety of fields, including archaeology, languages, and history. By the age of twenty he was the headmaster of the local academy for boys. It was at about this time that he discovered his passion for Anglo-Saxon and was soon presenting learned papers on the subject.
Meanwhile, across the ocean in America was another young man of about the same age as Murray. William Minor, unlike Murray, was born to a family of distinction and wealth. Like Murray, however, Minor too was a bright, intelligent and gifted lad, if a little on the sensitive side. He pursued the study of medicine and became a talented and competent surgeon, this at the time of the American Civil War. Dr. Murray enlisted and before long found himself performing surgery on the battlefield. But his sensitive nature was overwhelmed by horror of war and his fragile mind cracked. He left the military in an attempt to recover his mental balance and eventually decided a trip abroad might help, which is how he came to be in London. The change of scenery did not help, his private demons still plagued Minor. Early one morning, in the grip of his delusion of persecution, Minor shot and killed a man, a man Minor didn't know and who had never met and who was simply on his way to work.
The courts were lenient and recognized Minor's illness so instead of hanging he was incarcerated at Broadmoor, a prison for the criminally insane. He lived pretty well there, in a private room and with money from his military pension and funds from his family back in the USA, Minor amassed quite a large library of books which he was allowed to keep in his room.
Meanwhile Professor Murray was sending out a call to the public asking for volunteers to read and look for words and note down the passages where the word's context helped to reveal its meaning. Thousand of slips of papers poured into the Scriptorium, the building where the dictionary was being created, and one of the most prolific and helpful of the volunteers was Dr. Minor. And while Professor Murray relied on and valued the contributions that Dr. Minor was making to the dictionary, he had no idea for many years that one of his most important volunteers was a madman locked up in an insane asylum.

It sounds like a dry subject, the creation of a dictionary. But the human drama behind the fact makes this anything but a dry subject. Dr. Minor's story is so sad and compelling and his life was such a waste, except for the work he did to help with the creation of the dictionary. It was the one of the few bright spots in his otherwise blighted life. Reading about his story and the story of the dictionary and its editor, Professor Murray, was really interesting. It was a very good read.

Ready Player One

By Ernest Cline

It's 2044 and things are not good for planet Earth. Overpopulation, declining resources, rampant poverty and crime are worldwide. Wade Watts, a high-schooler, is a typical example of the times. He lives in the Stacks, an urban slum that used to be a trailer park but now is trailers, piled on trailers, each trailer crowded with multiple families. But there is one place that anyone with Internet access can go to escape the harsh realities of life: the Oasis. The Oasis is a virtual universe, with thousands of planets and uncounted adventures to be had. It was created by gaming genius James Halliday and can be accessed free of charge.
But then Halliday died and left no heirs. What he did leave was a challenge -- anyone who could solve the puzzle he created would inherit his vast fortune and control of Oasis!
Thus challenged, millions of people set out to solve the puzzle set in the Oasis universe, including young Wade Watts. But individuals were not the only ones who wanted to solve the puzzle. Also determined to solve the puzzle and gain control of Oasis is IOI, an near-monopoly Internet service provider. If IOI wins, it will limit access to Oasis to only those who are willing to pay a fee to use it. Naturally, everyone is up in arms over this and determined to prevent IOI from winning. But IOI is willing to go to any lengths to win, including mass-murder, as Wade finds out when his home is blown up by IOI because he has become the first person in years to solve the first part of the multi-part puzzle and IOI wants to take out any one who even gets close to solving the puzzle.
Before he came into conflict with IOI, Wade was like the thousands of other "gunters" trying to figure out Halliday's puzzle. The person who will be successful at it will be the one who understands and knows the most about the puzzle's creator, James Halliday. Halliday loved American culture of the 1980s, especially science fiction, fantasy and video games. The solution to the puzzle lies in Halliday's obsession with that time. As a result, gunters spend their time researching Halliday and Wade is one of the best gunters. He has a "quest journal" with meticulous and detailed notes on Halliday's life and Halliday's obsessions. He has played and mastered the games Halliday loved, viewed, read and memorized the shows, movies and books Halliday enjoyed. He is the first person to solve the first part of the puzzle but he is soon followed by four other young gunters, Aech, Art3mis, Daito and Shoto. They all find themselves targets of IOI and together and apart will work to solve the puzzle and keep themselves alive despite IOI's dirty tricks and financial muscle.

I loved this book. And I am not a video gamer. You really don't have to be a gamer to understand and enjoy this fun and engaging action-adventure story. Wade has lots of adventures, gets to be on top for a while then falls back but stages a tremendous rally at the end. I don't know if this is true, and it isn't meant to disparage the book, but it reads like it was written to be a huge special-effects movie. It is chock full of 1980s sci-fi culture, movies, books, TV shows, games, comics and music. Anyways, I enjoyed it so much, that I was sorry to reach the end of the story.

Hellspark

By Janet Kagan

Tocohl Susumo is a Hellspark, an interplanetary trader. Like other Hellsparks, she is an expert linguist and fluent not only in several languages but also in the customs and cultures of the peoples who speak those languages. She is called upon to bring her expertise to bear on the question of whether the denizens of a newly-discovered planet are sentient or not. If they are found to not be sentient, then the planet will be open to exploitation. But if they are, then the planet will be closed to development.
The corporation that is doing the initial survey of the planet would prefer that the natives be declared not sentient and the planet open to exploitation. But one of the expedition members is sure that the sprookjes, large, humanoid, bird-like beings are intelligent. The leader of the expedition has decided they are not, because they simply parrot what the people in their midst say, they don't really communicate. And that is where a Hellspark like Tocohl may be able to help. Because Hellsparks are not only expert linguists, they are also experts in body language and culture and may have the necessary knowledge to determine if the sprookjes are indeed sapient or just good at imitation.
But that is not the only reason Tocohl is there. She is also investigating the death of one of the expedition members who died under suspicious circumstances, including the fact that he was one of the staunchest defenders of the sprookjes. As her investigation continues, whoever killed the first man is definitely trying to eliminate Tocohl too.

I enjoyed this book. I liked Tocohl, she is smart, competent and cool. Although she is there to figure out if the sprookjes are intelligent, the main thrust of the novel is about how expedition members all try to get along in a very stressful situation and coming from widely separated backgrounds and clashing cultures. For instance, one woman comes from a planet where the people regard the bare human foot as shocking and indecent and another woman likes to run around bare foot, which produces tension between the two women. The different customs and cultures were interesting, as was Tocohl's near-sentient computer, Maggie. The only problem I had with the story was the rather minor role the humanoid alien sprookjes played in it. I would have liked a lot more about them.