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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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/>

The book that introduces Serge A. Storms, the hy­per­ac­tive serial killer, and his stoner sidekick, Coleman.

The frenzied plot follows a large cast of characters chasing $5 million of drug money down Florida to the Keys. Most of them are Unnice People who will come to well-deserved bad ends.

Dorsey is not in control of his plot. Random flashbacks lay down the backstory for newly introduced characters. The plot jumps about with wild abandon, revving on all cylinders. Somehow it comes together at the end, with some funny moments along the way.

(I read the latest book, Hurricane …continue.

This book concludes Robinson’s trilogy about en­vi­ron­men­tal collapse, begun in Forty Signs of Rain and continued in Fifty Degrees Below.

Set in the near future, major climate change has already begun: freezing winters, melting icecaps, and rising sealevels. Senator Phil Chase has just been elected President and his aide, Charlie Quibler, must help the new ad­min­is­tra­tion tackle en­vi­ro­men­tal collapse head on. Frank Vanderwal, formerly of the National Science Foundation, follows his boss to the White House when she becomes the new president’s science advisor.

Robinson draws a fright­en­ing and realistic …continue.

Sequel to The Wrong Kind of Blood, in which private eye Ed Loy returned to his native Dublin after 20 years in Los Angeles.

Loy is asked to find Emily, a teenager from the pres­ti­gious Howard family, after porno­graph­ic photos of her are sent to her father. He locates her easily, but not before he finds a body, the first of several murders that will rip the Howards apart, unearthing long-buried secrets.

Loy is a hard-boiled private eye, somewhat in the Marlowe vein: "a man of honor, by instinct, by in­evitabil­i­ty, …continue.

(Image courtesy of The Learning Center.)

Up to now, all of the books that I’ve reviewed have been ones that I have bought or borrowed.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a publicity manager at Harper­Collins in reference to my review of The Wrong Kind of Blood. She offered to send me a copy of the next book in the series if I would be willing to review it on my site. No strings were attached. I agreed. The review will follow in a later post.

It’s time for me to establish a formal review policy, so as to maintain trans­paren­cy.