Sequel to The Sunrise Lands. The travellers continue to head eastwards across post-apoc­a­lyp­tic America. They encounter many obstacles and not a few enemies on their quest.

En­ter­tain­ing enough that I read it in one day. Scourge did not fall prey to Middle Book Syndrome.

A faceless corpse has been found in a remote valley in the Yorkshire Dales. Is it connected to another murder there, five years earlier? Chief Inspector Alan Banks in­ves­ti­gates in the village of Swaineshead, which leads him to Toronto to dig into the dead man’s background.

Competent, thoughtful police procedural told from the viewpoints of Banks and Katie Greenock, the doormat wife of one of the villagers.

Farthing is set in a world where the British agreed to a peace with Hitler in 1941, eight years ago. This book starts out like a classic British murder mystery: a prominent right-wing politician is murdered at the Farthing country estate and Scotland Yard are called in. The story is told from two viewpoints, that of the secretly homosexual Inspector Carmichael and that of the daughter of the house, Lucy Kahn, who married a Jew. The dead man has a yellow star pinned to his chest, making David Kahn a likely suspect.

The …continue.

Kylar Stern ap­pren­tices himself to Durzo Blint, the city of Cenaria’s most ac­com­plished assassin. A truly successful assassin can have no friends or emotional at­tach­ments, something that Kylar struggles with.

This coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of intrigue and sorcery is en­ter­tain­ing but somewhat clumsy.

It’s shocking how few times I’ve crossed the Cascades into Eastern Washington in the seventeen years that I’ve lived in Seattle. We go up or down the I-5 corridor, usually heading for Portland or Vancouver, or we cross Puget Sound to the Olympic Peninsula. But we never go more than about 30 miles inland.

We needed a break and we wanted to celebrate our 12th an­niver­sary. For once, we decided to head over to Washington’s wine country. The Tri-Cities Wine Festival was being held in Kennewick today, so that was our des­ti­na­tion.

We drove across Snoqualmie Pass yesterday, through sleeting rain and snow, arriving in Kennewick after dark. This morning, we wandered around …continue.

Twelve years ago today, Emma and I met face-to-face for the first time. We had been talking on the phone for about three weeks after I had answered her personals ad in The Stranger. We might have met a little sooner, but she was busy meeting the other guys who had responded, and I was undergoing the IIS 4 deathmarch at Microsoft.

We were both nervous and we each responded char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly. Emma babbled; I said very little. She told me later that she thought that she had scared me off. She hadn’t, though. We had already talked several times on the phone and she had been less nervous. I liked her and I …continue.

I’m fairly confident that Referendum 71 will be approved. It was leading by 51% this morning and by 51.8% this evening, and leading 2:1 in King County, the most populous, most liberal county in Washington state.

Ballots merely have to be postmarked by Election Day to be valid, and hundreds of thousands of them have not yet been received by the vote counters.

I attended the Election Night party last night and helped the tech team with some behind-the-scenes arrange­ments. In the photo, Joe Mirabella (lead blogger) and Josh Cohen (tech lead) are being thanked by Anne Levinson (campaign chair) and Josh Friedes (campaign manager).

The mood was cautiously optimistic about Referendum 71 passing, tempered …continue.

Sonchai Jit­pleecheep is a devout Buddhist, half Thai and half American, and one of the few Bangkok cops who is not on the take. An American marine is murdered grotesque­ly in a manner that ac­ci­den­tal­ly kills Sonchai’s partner and soul brother. Sonchai must help the FBI in­ves­ti­gate and seek his own revenge. The trail takes them through the foulest gutters and the palaces of the wealthy. We encounter pros­ti­tutes, monks, shemales, jade collectors, and gangsters in a tour of the Thailand that most Westerners barely glimpse.

When we moved to Beacon Hill in 2000, we were totally dumb­found­ed by the number of kids who came trick-or-treating to our door. In the prior two years, we had been renting a house in Walling­ford, and we had only had one set of kids each year.

We had about 100 kids that first year. We were not expecting the onslaught and ran out of candy, which led to Emma being berated by some pre­sump­tu­ous mother. We live in a relatively affluent block and kids are brought quite a distance to partake of the goodies. One small boy peered up at Emma once and asked her, “Are you rich?”

And so it’s been …continue.

I saw Greenstage’s production of Titus Andronicus on Sunday night. Normally, this is Shake­speare’s bloodiest tragedy, but Greenstage chose to play it as a dark comedy. It’s still bloody, extremely bloody, blood everywhere, spurting from severed wrists, spraying from cut throats, shooting over the stage (and some of the audience).

The first twenty minutes were very confusing. The actors spoke their lines very quickly and I had a hard time tuning in to what they were saying and what was happening. Then either they slowed down or I tuned in, but it started making sense, inasmuch as Titus Andronicus can ever make sense.

I’ve seen Greenstage do comedies and straight tragedies. Here they hammed it up, putting a …continue.