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 disbelief.

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 …continue.

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.

Ninth book in the Dresden Files series of urban fantasies.

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 …continue.

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/>