Title: Adept
Author: Robert Finn
Rating: 1 stars out of 5
Publisher: Snowbooks
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 1905005571
Pages: 446
Keywords: occult thriller
Reading period: 18-22 June, 2007

A ninja with improbable abilities steals an ancient Tibetan artifact in London. David Braun, hunky insurance investigator cum martial artist, sets out to recover it with the aid of Susan Milton, an American researcher. I can tell you no more, because I could't bring myself to finish it.

It is rare that I abandon a book halfway through once begun, though perhaps I should more often. Adept is ludicrous and clumsily written. I found it impossible to suspend my belief.

Title: Prior Bad Acts
Author: Tami Hoag
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 9780553583595
Pages: 525
Keywords: crime
Reading period: 16-17 June, 2007

Karl Dahl is about to go on trial for the obscene murders of a woman and her two young children, and everyone wants to lynch him. Judge Carey Moore rules that Dahl's prior criminal record is inadmissible. Hours later, she's beaten up in the courthouse parking garage. Is it (a) an enraged member of the public, (b) the family of the murder victims, (c) a hit man sent by her estranged husband, or (d) the sidelined detective driven out of his mind by the horrors of the case? Then Karl Dahl escapes....

The whole book is like this: one over-the-top plot device laid on top of the next. It is fairly effective at keeping the adrenaline flowing, but otherwise has little to recommend it. Empty literary calories. It would have been a better book if most of the plot had been left out.

Title: Hearse of a Different Color
Author: Tim Cockey
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Hyperion
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0786889632
Pages: 382
Keywords: mystery, humor
Reading period: 13-16 June, 2007

Hitchcock Sewell is an undertaker who finds the murdered body of a waitress on the front door of his funeral parlor, one winter's evening during a wake. Hitch and his weatherwoman girlfriend, Bonnie, become obsessed with finding out who killed the waitress.

This is a fairly amusing comic mystery, with a semi-plausible but twisted plot. Hitch is a sympathetic character, albeit one who drinks too much and whose eye wanders.

Title: Proven Guilty
Author: Jim Butcher
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Roc
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0451461037
Pages: 479
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 9-12 June, 2007

Ninth book in the Dresden Files series of urban fantasys.

Harry Dresden is a wizard who consults with the Chicago Police on weird crimes. Molly, the rebellious teenaged daughter of an old friend, leads him to a horror fiction convention where the fans are being attacked by real monsters. Given Harry's smart mouth and talent for drawing trouble upon himself, it's not too long before he's captured by a sadistic villain who tries to auction him to his many enemies on eBay. He escapes but then has to lead a rescue mission into the land of Faerie to save Molly.

Entertaining, fast-paced, funny in places, and a little less grim than some of the previous books in the series. The back story continues to develop and Harry's relationships with the ongoing characters evolve, mostly for the better.

I made my radio debut this afternoon. The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read a couple of short excerpts on KBCS from James Joyce's Ulysses, as a foretaste of the readings we're doing next weekend.

This year's reading is of the Nausicaa chapter, wherein Leopold Bloom reposes on a beach to recover from clashing with the Citizen in the previous chapter, and flirts at a distance with young Gerty MacDowell. This is the infamous masturbation chapter that led to Ulysses being banned for obscenity.

There are two readings.

• Sat, June 16th, 4:30pm
  Elliott Bay Bookstore
  101 S. Main St,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

• Sun, June 17th, 6pm
  Pike Pub and Brewery
  1415 First Ave,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

I will be one of several readers giving voice to Leopold Bloom. It is likely that Jim McDermott will once again be reading with us.

Title: Roma Eterna
Author: Robert Silverberg
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Publisher: Eos
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0380814889
Pages: 449
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 5-9 June, 2007

Rome has never fallen to the barbarians. The eternal city has stood for 27 centuries. Its empire has ebbed and flowed, from weak emperors who submitted to their co-emperors in Constantinople, to mad ones who drain the treasury, to conquerors who spread the might of Rome across the globe.

The premise is interesting, but the execution is weak. The book is written in a Micheneresque style: a series of disjointed chapters set decades or centuries apart. The viewpoint characters usually have some connection to the emperor of the time. Reviewing the front matter moments ago, I see that "sections of this book have been previously published in somewhat different form, copyright 1989, 1991, 1994, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003". It's clear that it was cobbled together from a series of short stories.

Title: The Portrait
Author: Iain Pears
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 159448175X
Pages: 211
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 3-5 June, 2007

In 1912, Henry MacAlpine is a well-known British painter, living in self-imposed exile on a small island off the coast of Brittany. His old friend, William Naysmith, the renowned art critic has come to see him and have his portrait painted. Over the course of several sittings, we come to learn why MacAlpine has left London and why he has lured Naysmith to see him. Naysmith has misused his great influence as an art critic to destroy several painters.

It's extremely rare to see an entire novel written in the second person. The Portrait is written as a series of MacAlpine's monologues addressed to Naysmith. It's a difficult technique, but Pears pulls it off. He reveals the backstory with great skill, painting verbal portraits of MacAlpine and Naysmith, while MacAlpine paints Naysmith. Pears is an art historian as well as a novelist, and he marries his two interests to great effect here.

Title: The Black Death, second edition
Author: Philip Ziegler
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 1998
ISBN: 014027524X
Pages: 339
Keywords: history
Reading period: 6 May-3 June, 2007

After reading Doomsday Book, I decided that I wanted to know more about the Black Death. And I learned a great deal from Ziegler's book.

The Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1350. It was hugely traumatic for the people of the time, with their profound ignorance of medicine and science, and it was widely viewed as a punishment from God.

Ziegler spends the first few chapters showing how the plague affected Italy, France, Germany, and other European nations, but most of the book concentrates on England. He describes the state of medical knowledge, the deleterious effects on the Catholic Church's influence, and the social and economic effects. He recreates what it must have been like in a village as it succumbed.

This book was first published in 1969 and seems to have been only lightly revised in 1998. It by no means represents current thinking amongst historians as to the causes or effects of the Black Death. Still, the book is well written and approachable, shedding light on the period.

Title: The Far Side of the World
Author: Patrick O'Brian
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Copyright: 1992
ISBN: 0393308626
Pages: 366
Keywords: historical fiction
Reading period: 27 May-1 June, 2007

This is the tenth of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, and it provides much of the basis for the film Master and Commander.

During the War of 1812, Captain Jack Aubrey is sent in pursuit of an American frigate, which has sailed around Cape Horn into the Pacific to seize British whalers in the South Seas. Aubrey and his good friend, the surgeon Stephen Maturin, overcome many obstacles during the pursuit: the ship is badly damaged at one point, crew members are murdered, and Aubrey and Maturin manage to get themselves marooned not once but twice on remote islands.

I received a boxed set of the 21 novels for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I've been working my way slowly through the series. Slowly, because I find that if I read several books in a series back to back, they start to blur together, and these books are so good that I want to savor them. Some argue that this series is one 6000-page long novel, since the books are so clearly linked in a sequence.

O'Brian draws you back into the world of 18th-century seafaring, writing in the style of the period, thick with authentic nautical detail. Long tales of adventure and travel and friendship between two very different men. The wretched tedium of months at sea; the thrill of the chase; the horror of battle.

This week, I have written code in C#, C++, Managed C++, C, WiX, NAnt, ActionScript, VBScript, JScript, cmd batch, NMake, HTML, XSLT, and Ruby. And I will probably get some Python in before the weekend is over. <boggle/>