Over the weekend I finished the book I was reading and was looking around for something new to start. I have a copy I am Charlotte Simmons and as I liked Tom Wolfe's other two novels (The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full), I thought I'd give his "latest" one a try.

So I went to Amazon to see how it reviewed. 3 and 1/2 stars after 598 customer reviewers. What was disappointing was that the top review only gave it one star. 361 of 596 people "found the review helpful", which I usually take to mean that they agreed with the reviewer.

When this sort of negative review happens for an author I like, I usually then go and look through the other reviews by that reviewer to see how they have reacted to something I've already read. I came across a review from Laurel962 for A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, and a book that I loved. This is a book that has 4 and 1/2 stars after 207 reviews. Again she gave it 1 star. 8 out of 38 people found it helpful. From reading the review, and I'm not convinced she got past the cover. Lines like:

"Obviously the many positive reviews here (which mostly sound as if written by one person, using different psuedonyms, and undoubtedly in the employ of Ms. Bujold's publicist ..."

make me sincerely doubt the reliability of anything she's reviewed.

At this point I decided to total up the number of stars that she gave for all of her reviews. There are supposedly 115 of them, but I could only find the reviews for 109:

   5 stars - 6 books
   4 stars - 6 books
   3 stars - 6 books
   2 stars - 41 books
   1 stars - 56 books

Wow! 97 of 109 books have rated 1 or 2 stars according to Laurel962. Somebody should recommend something good for her, although I suspect she'd even give that a negative review. What's disturbing is that her helpfulness is rated at 50% (1,955 of 3,970 votes), which I personally think is rather inflated, and yet this isn't obvious to anyone reading here reviews unless you dig into it.

What I'd like to see is Amazon actually put the reviewers helpfulness percentage beside their reviews so it's clear how useful other people find this reviewer. Maybe even the total number of reviews they've done as well. These are probably simple things to do.

How about it Amazon?

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I noticed that four of the book lists that I have near the top left corner of my main blog page, have acquired bit-rot. Most of the images of the book covers were no longer being found.

Now I don't know whether this is a result of Amazon changing their API's earlier this year, or the cache URL's are just no longer valid, but I thought I'd fix them up. Rather than taking the URL that Amazon supplies when you search for a particular ISBN programmatically, I'm now using the "standard" medium size image URL that seems to nicely work with most books at Amazon with a recent publication date.

The four lists are:

• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

• Pulitzer Award Winning Novels.

• 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century.

• Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.

I'm one of those people that finds it easier to remember an unfamiliar book by its cover than its title. That doesn't always help as they seem to need to change the art-work for the same book with each new release. It did enable me to find a few of them at the Los Altos library book sale last Friday evening.

I also highly recommend the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors. The list only gives the suggested book to start with for each of the authors, but the actual book goes much further than that with mini biographies and bibliographies plus various essays and digressions under a multitude of topics.

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I got "spammed" by Amazon today, telling me that there will be a new book by Rowling coming out in December, and that it was written to supplement the Harry Potter series.

It's titled The Tales of Beedle the Bard and comes in two flavors:

• The Standard Edition. Looks like a regular hardcover. Okay, it is a regular hardcover. Something you child can safely read and not cause you conniptions every time they roughly turn the page.

• The Collectors Editon. This is the special version, offered exclusively by Amazon, that you will keep in your book safe (you do have one of those don't you?), and where you put on the special gloves to gently turn the pages when reading it in your special climate controlled reading room.

And yes, like lemmings off a cliff, I'm sure we'll be ordering it (the common or garden variety), so the Amazon marketing machine is working just fine.

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Here's a list of the books I've recently read, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

• The Best Man To Die - Ruth Rendell
  Another Chief Inspector Wexford novel. Not here best.

• Fables of Aesop - Trans: S. A. Handford
  I never read these when I was a kid. I wish I had. Some good lessons to live by, though they got a tad repetitious near the end. Too many variations on a theme.

• Florence of Arabia - Christopher Buckley
  
• No Way To Treat A First Lady - Christopher Buckley
  One more to go, then I've read all of Buckley's novels so far. Great political satire. I particularly enjoyed No Way..., the "Trial of the Millenium":

  "There are few spectacles more pathetic than a roomful of otherwise responsible people trying to squirm out of a civic duty enshrined in Magna Carta as one of the signal boons of democracy. On the other hand, who in their right mind wants to serve on a jury?"

  One of the best aspects of his novels is the names he uses. Also lots of pot slots at Clinton, O.J. and numerous others.

Three more from the Salon.com list:

• The Street Lawyer - John Grisham
  My first Grisham novel. There was no doubt that it was a page-turner, but I don't think I'll be reading another of his for a while. There are too many other new authors I want to try first.

• Story of my Life - Jay McInerney
  More white punks on dope. Very funny in places but it was hard to give a damn about any of the characters.

• Moonraker - Ian Fleming
  The books are nothing like the films. The plots are simpler (and in this case dated - it was written in 1955). Bond gets hurt a lot more and doesn't always get the girl at the end. For this one, I actually watched the film (with Roger Moore) after I'd finished the book, just to see what, if anything, was the same. Virtually nothing. The villians name, and an oblique reference by M to having played bridge against Drax.

  The film does have that classic innuendo from Q at the end though, which partly makes up for the rest of it.

And finally four more books of famous plays:

• Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
  The original film version of this is superb.

• After The Fall - Arthur Miller
  I've never seen it, but this play must have been a bitch to put on in a theater, in it's original form. Of course, you can always just totally change it.

• The Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw
  The book also provides notes on the meaning of the more obscure words and phrases, plus a "what happens next" section.

  It looks like there's going to be a remake of My Fair Lady, the musical version of this play, and guess who is rumored to be wanting to play Eliza?

• The Comedy of Neil Simon - Neil Simon
  Seven of his plays. I loved The Star-Spangled Girl. Laugh out loud funny. It was also good to read the original play of The Odd Couple (as opposed to the TV series), and confirm that it would be impossible for a slob and a neat-freak to continue living together in harmony.

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Now that I've nicely got my book collection under tellico, I thought it would be interesting to see how well each book rated, and what were the ones that garnered the most stars and number of reviews on Amazon.

This Python script will read in my book collection data on standard input, extract out a list of ISBN's, and for each one will look up the average Amazon customer star rating and the number of reviews. It then sorts the data (by star rating and then by customer reviews) and prints out the results to standard output.

The script processed 2604 books. I have more books then that, but it had problems reading the ISBN numbers for some of them (see notes below). Of those 2604 books, the star ratings break down as follows:

    Number of stars  |  Number of books
  -------------------+------------------
       5             |        370
     4.5             |        644
       4             |        629
     3.5             |        241
       3             |        104
     2.5             |         14
       2             |         12
     1.5             |          2
       1             |          6
       0  (unrated)  |        582

Nice to know I haven't got too many low star rating books in my collection.

Here are the top ten entries with a 5 star rating:

      Title                       |   Number of reviews
----------------------------------+----------------------------
'Lonesome Dove'                   |    374 
'The Complete Calvin and Hobbes'  |    305 
'Truman'                          |    271
'Boy's Life'                      |    254
'The Code Book'                   |    248 
'The Simpsons'                    |    210 
'Cosmos'                          |    150 
'Black Holes and Time Warps'      |     82 
'A Pattern Language'              |     76
'My Family and Other Animals'     |     72 

Here are the top ten entries with a 4.5 star rating:

      Title                       |   Number of reviews
----------------------------------+----------------------------
'Harry Potter (Book 7)'           |   3102
'Ender's Game'                    |   2475
'Memoirs of a Geisha'             |   2462
'To Kill a Mockingbird'           |   1736
'The Golden Compass (Book 1)'     |   1435
'Animal Farm'                     |   1137
'A Prayer for Owen Meany'         |   1055 
'Dune'                            |   1024
'The Lord of the Rings'           |   1000
'Pride and Prejudice'             |    870

And here are the top ten entries with a 4.0 star rating:

      Title                                         | Number of reviews
----------------------------------------------------+------------------
'The Catcher in the Rye'                            |     2742
'The Time Traveler's Wife'                          |     1610
'Freakonomics'                                      |     1520
'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' |     1400
'The Poisonwood Bible'                              |     1395
'The Road'                                          |     1392
'Fahrenheit 451'                                    |     1242
'The World Is Flat'                                 |     1118
'The Great Gatsby'                                  |     1111
'Guns, Germs, and Steel'                            |     1045

Note that I've already read most of these. My tellico data doesn't (yet) differentiate between read and unread books.

For those interested in taking this script, and munging it to do something with similar book data, here are a few more details:

It uses PyAWS, a Python wrapper for the latest Amazon Web Service by Kun Xi, to get the average star rating and the number of reviews for each book. Thanks to Xun Xi for not only writing this, but also for helping me out with a problem on my script over the weekend.

Note that you will need to adjust:

amazonAccessKey = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

to your own Amazon Access License key.

tellico allows me to export my book collection data in XML format. I wanted to extract out all the ISBN's. When I initially tried this with BeautifulSoup (BeautifulStoneSoup to be exact), it didn't like processing the XML file. Here's what I tried:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
import sys

if __name__ == "__main__":
    xml = sys.stdin.readlines()
    soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml)

and here's the traceback I got:

$ python rate_books.py 
    soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml)
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1058, in __init__
    self._feed()
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1082, in _feed
    smartQuotesTo=self.smartQuotesTo)
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1705, in __init__
    u = self._convertFrom(proposed_encoding)
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1735, in _convertFrom
    markup)
TypeError: expected string or buffer

I'm not sure if it's a bug in tellico or in BeautifulStoneSoup.

In the end I decided to just roll my own getISBNs() routine, that looked for any lines in the tellico XML data that start with "<isbn>" (after stripping off leading and trailing white space), and then extracting out the ISBN number in between and adding it to a list.

Even then, there were lots of malformed ISBN numbers in the tellico data. I suspect they are all for books that pre-date when ISBN numbers were introduced, but it still seems wrong that this bad data is there.

I suspect I'm never going to read all the books I've got. There's always new good ones coming out and I'm discovering other already published ones that are good (especially when I find a new great author). I'm not quite at the point yet where I'm no longer buying green bananas, but with these rating results, I'll now know which books I should consider reading next. For a while, I'm going to focus on the ones that many others found enjoyable (i.e. the ones that are near the top of the list when you take the number of reviews and multiply it by the number of stars, or some other similar formula).

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Here's a list of the books I've recently read, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

• Florentine Finish - Cornelius Hirschberg

  Won the Edgar for best first mystery in 1964

• The Drowning Pool - Ross Macdonald

  The second Lew Archer novel from 1950. Another hard-boiled P.I. story.

• Ripley's Curioddities - Ripley Publishing

  See a previous post on this one.

• Shake Hands For Ever - Ruth Rendell
  
• Speaker of Mandarin - Ruth Rendell
  
• A Guilty Thing Surprised - Ruth Rendell

  Three more Inspector Wexford novels. I'm usually pretty good at following all the clues and having a fair idea who the villian is by the end of the book, but I totally missed the ending for Shake Hands For Ever.

• The Atlantic Abomination - John Brunner
  
• Entry To Elsewhen - John Brunner

  Two minor works by John Brunner.

• Playback - Raymond Chandler
  
• The High Window - Raymond Chandler

  Two more novels by Chandler. I just have one left to read now. Playback was his last (if you don't count Poodle Springs that Parker finished). Both Marlowe and Chandler were just going through the paces at the end. Weary. Burned out.

• Dead Famous - Ben Elton

  "One house, ten contestants, thirty cameras, forty microphones, one murder...and no evidence."

  This was a real page-turner. I lost a lot of sleep on it. If you can get past the continual swearing and the too-hip language then you are going to love the classic murder mystery "you're probably wondering why I invited you all here" ending.

• The Full Catastrophe - David Carkeet

  What happens when a linguist moved in with a married couple to help them with their troubled marriage. Very funny at times and unerringly accurate.

• Rumpole of the Bailey - John Mortimer

  You've probably heard of the Six Degrees of Separation. Well there are only two degrees between me and this author. My step-mother's first husband taught art to the daughter of John Mortimer. How about that! Almost like family.

  I loved the old TV series with Leo McKern. Time to read the books as well.

• Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut

  I see the Vonnegut Estate has swung into action and released a thin expensive hardcover of some of Kurt Vonnegut's previously unpublished work. These are stories about war and peace and are mostly fiction.

• Down And Out In The Year 2000 - Kim Stanley Robinson

  I find Robinson hard to read. There's no doubt he's an excellent writer (and some of the stories in this collection, like The Blind Geometer really show that), but because I struggle with him, I still haven't read his Mars trilogy. I was hoping that I could ease myself back into his style with this book. It didn't work. Red Mars has been shelved again.

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In the evening my wife and I take turns reading to Duncan for 30 minutes each night just before he goes to bed. He's almost ten now. His preferred choice of reading material for us would be Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield if we let him choose, but instead we try to stick with chapter books.

We've had mixed success with this, so we are now going to try working off the list of Newbury Award winners and honor books (the honor books are the "o" indented ones for each year).

What I'm looking for are recommendations of books you think he might like. Either from this list or other junior page-turners. Not only for us to read to him, but for him to then continue reading on his own, because the story is exciting. To give you some idea of his reaction to three of the recently read books, he liked The Tale of Despereaux, really liked The Phantom Toll Booth and initially liked The Wrinkle in Time but didn't want us to finish it (it started to get "to scary").

Growing up in England about forty years ago, I had the Famous Five and Biggles books inflicted on me. It wasn't until I discovered the juvenille Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov books, that I really started wanting to read for myself. We are trying to find the modern day books that will make Duncan do the same thing.

Recommendations greatly appreciated.

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See a previous post for the background on this one. As mentioned yesterday and the day before, pyamazon no longer works, so the script in this post had to be rewritten to use pyAWS.

Here's the new version of check_los_altos.py. If you want to use this, you'll need to adjust the amazonAccessKey, amazonWishListIDs and libraryURL variables for your specific values.

That's all my Amazon Python scripts converted now. Onto other things (maybe even checking out BeautifulSoup).

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See a previous post for the background on this one. pyamazon no longer works, so the scripts had to be rewritten to use pyAWS.

Here are the new versions of make_book_list.py and cheap_books.py. If you want to use this, you'll need to adjust the amazonAccessKey, amazonWishListID and emailAddr variables for your specific values.

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See a previous post for the background to this one. As I previously suspected, all my simple Python scripts that used pyamazon, stopped working on April 1st.

Time to fix them. Gene Kim at Tripwire contacted me last week, and gave me some great pointers on how to use pyAWS, the replacement for pyamazon that Kun Xi is working on. Thank you!

Last Sunday, I sat down and started converting my old check_books.py script. In short, I found a bug with pyAWS and reported it. Kun Xi has fixed it and given my permission to included the modified version of ecs.py with this blog post. Thank you too! You should also check back to the pyAWS web site, to get the fix in the official 0.3 release coming soon.

Here's the new version of the check_new_books.py script. If you want to use this, you'll need to adjust the amazonAccessKey, amazonWishListID, emailAddr and libraryURL variables for your specific values.

I note that it doesn't always seem to have an Author attribute for some of the book Item's that are returned after a specific ASIN search. I need to investigate this some more. For now I just catch the AttributeError and move on.

I'll hopefully soon post revised versions of the other Python Amazon scripts I've created.

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This was a $5 buy in the remainder bargain area at the local Borders store in Sunnyvale a couple weeks ago.

It's a huge collection of interesting facts (some of them are indeed seriously weird). It contains extraordinary feats accomplished by many committed people (and in some cases, by people who should be committed). I initially bought it thinking in might be of interest to Duncan, but there are a few things in there that I reckon might give him nightmares so I ended up reading it myself and then pointed out all the safe ones I thought we would be interested in.

Running at over 500 pages, there is a lot of stuff here. Typically each double page has between 1-3 pictures and a short story to go with them. The rest of each page is filled up with other facts but with no pictures. I initially found this frustrating, but by googling around, it's possible in a lot of cases, to find images and a much more complete story, to go with the ones that really fascinated me.

Here's a sample of three; all related to blind people.

• Russian Michail Lasjuv learned to read braille using his lips after losing his hands, vision and hearing during world war II.

• Mike Newman of England became the fastest blind driver of a car in the world when his Jaguar XJR averaged 144.7 mph (232.8 km/h) over two runs at an abandoned airfield in 2003. The 42 year old bank official, who has been blind since he was eight, was guided via a radio link with his stepfather who was travelling in a vehicle four car lengths behind. [link]

• British artist Gary Sargeant lost his sight -- but still manages to paint. He visits the scene of the picture and with the help of his wife, measures dimensions, either with his blind stick that is marked in finger-length notches and walking out distances between objects, or feeling textures by touch. By measuring and using masking tape, he builds up the canvas and then starts work. As the paint builds up he "reads" it, and from his many years of experience painting as a sighted person interprets what the picture should look like. [link]

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Here's a list of the books I've recently read, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

First a load more graphic novels:

• God Save The Queen - Mike Carey
  A very strange book.

• The Saga Of The Bloody Benders - Rick Geary
  
• The Fatal Bullet - Rick Geary
  
• Jack The Ripper - Rick Geary
  
• The Murder Of Abraham Lincoln - Rick Geary
  
• The Mystery Of Mary Rogers - Rick Geary
  
• The Case Of Madeline Smith - Rick Geary
  That's the rest of the Rick Geary series. A fun way to learn history, albeit for the very specific sub-genre of Victorian murder mysteries.

• Fables : Wolves - Bill Willingham
  
• Fables : Sons Of Empire - Bill Willingham
  I've now read all of the currently published entries in this series and am patiently waiting for the next one to be available.

• Flight : Volume 1 - Various Artists
  
• Flight : Volume 3 - Various Artists
  
• Flight : Volume 4 - Various Artists
  Three anthologies of graphic short stories (or comics depending on how you look at them) of varying quality and appeal.

• The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen : Volume 1 - Alan Moore
  
• The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen : Volume 2 - Alan Moore

And the rest.

• The Goon Show Scripts - Spike Milligan
  
• More Goon Show Scripts - Spike Milligan

  These two books have been sitting on my bookshelves unread for over 30 years. It was about time I read them.

  The Goon Show was a radio comedy program from the 1950's that was way ahead of its time. Checkout their web site for lots of goodies. If you've never heard of them before, spend 2-3 minutes watching listening to this clip. Don't look at it. Just imagine you were listening to it in front of the wireless radio over 50 years ago. It helps to know that the character of Eccles (played by Spike Milligan) is an idiot and Bluebottle (played by Peter Sellers) is another idiot (with a cardboard fetish).

  From there, (and assuming you find it funny), go to The Last Goon Show Of All - 1972 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].

• Bones Of The Moon - Jonathan Carroll
  An early Carroll novel and slightly disappointing. I guess he was still honing his writing skills.

• Gideon's Fire - J. J. Marric
  J.J. Marric is really John Creasey. Won an Edgar for best novel in 1962.

• Sleeping Dog - Dick Lochte
  This has to be one of the best mystery books I've read in a long time. Great plot, very funny and told alternatively by the two main characters in the first person. It doesn't hurt that it's set in California with a lot of places where I've been. As the Library Journal says:

  Lochte's novel snagged the Nero Wolfe Award and was nominated for an Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Award when it debuted in 1985. Not bad for a first novel.

• Free Fall - Robert Crais
  The last of the Elvis Cole books that I hadn't read.

• Looking For Rachel Wallace - Robert B. Parker
  If you haven't read any of Parker's Spenser novels, this is a great one to start with.

• The Iceman Cometh - Eugene O'Neill
  Another classic play. At a 4-1/2 hour running time, I'd prefer to read this rather than watch it. If it's still too much, then there's always The Gasman Cometh by Flanders and Swann, superbly recreated in LEGO.

• Absolution Gap - Alastair Reynolds
  This was a slog. I put it down many times, but kept coming back to it so I could get closure. I ended up reading it in short bursts. I loved the first two books in the series, but this one was a struggle. The ending is very disappointing too. It just fizzles out. Maybe Reynolds got fed up with it. I certain did.

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Yesterday was a sad day. We saw the passing of the last of the Big Three of Science Fiction with the death of Arthur C. Clarke. When I started reading science fiction about forty years ago, it was with his juvenile novels (along with similar works by Heinlein and Asimov).

As Katu.com reports:

"Clarke was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits."

And so much more. He wrote some damn good stories too.

I can still remember seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey when it first came out in 1968 and not understanding it at all. It wasn't until I went and read the original story that it was based on, that it started to make sense.

I keep a record of when I read books, and looking back, I noticed that I stopped reading his books in 1988. Then in December last year, I read a book of his that he co-authored with Stephen Baxter. Now he's gone. Same story with Kurt Vonnegut. I read his books when I was a teenager then stopped reading them in 1994, then started again in 2006, and he died in 2007. Hopefully these are just ugly coincidences. I want to go back and re-read some Jack Vance, but I'm having second thoughts now.

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For the last couple of weeks, Lynea and I have been reading this book to Duncan at bedtime. Duncan has also been reading from it too. We are working from a copy that uses green and red text to show the two different worlds, which is kind of cool.

It's a book I'd never read before, and to be honest I still haven't. I'd guess I've now read about a third of it. It's not easy to pick it up every other night and try to work out what's happened while your wife or son has been reading it in between.

Duncan has decided to use this book for his next school book report. This time the book report needs to be in the form of an advertisement for the book. To give him an idea, I showed him the trailer for the film that's on YouTube. It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.

We also watched the movie last night. Spoilers ahead (if that's possible for a movie that's almost 24 years old). This was the first time that Duncan had read a book and then watched the film of it. If he's anything like me, he was probably hoping for something that was "just like the book". He was mildly surprised to see where it differed and what parts they left out. When it ended, he asked "where's the rest of it?" For those who haven't seen it, the film ends roundabout when Bastian renames the Empress. That's about a third of the way through the book. We mentioned that there are two more films. Oh, he replied. We'll now have to borrow those from the library too.

No doubt if they remade Neverending Story nowadays it would by jam packed with CGI rather than large "puppets". That didn't really spoil the story though. I have to wonder what 24 years would do to the fact the father just left the boy to go off to school on his own at the start of the film, and there was no concern that the boy didn't come home from school again afterwards. But then again, when I was a kid his age, that wasn't a big deal anyway.

Times change.

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Here's a list of the books I've recently read, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

• The Moccasin Telegraph - W. P. Kinsella
  
• The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Sherman Alexie
  Two books containing Indian Native American stories written by Indians Native Americans. The first is very funny in parts, but overall, they are just variations on a theme and I found them more depressing than enjoyable. The (fairly) high star ratings are because they are well written. They are just not what I really want to read more of.

• Jeeves in the Offing - P. G. Wodehouse

• Plum Lucky - Janet Evanovich
  If my library didn't have them, there is no way I'd buy these thin expensive hardcover books. But it does, and they are mindless candy, so I read them quickly, grumble I'll never read another one because it's the same story over and over again. And around we go again.

• The Best of Morecambe & Wise - Eddie Braben
  Morecambe and Wise were two of my favorite comedians when I was growing up. (Although rather dated now, there are numerous sketchs of them on YouTube if you are interested). This was a 25c purchase at a recent library book sale. It contains several of their best scripts written by Eddie Braben.

• A Man Called Spade - Dashiell Hammett
  Book of short mystery and detective stories by Hammett (containing three featuring Sam Spade).

• The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams
  My on-going effort to educate myself by reading some of the all-time classic plays.

• The Crack In Space - Philip K. Dick
  One of the lesser known works by Dick.

• It Was a Dark And Stormy Night - Ed. Scott Rice
  Many of the selections from the first Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Some very funny entries, mixed with a lot that weren't.

• Walking Across Egypt - Clyde Edgerton
  Absolutely hated the ending.

Two more from the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century list.

• Aunt Dimity's Death - Nancy Atherton
  See a previous post for my thoughts on this one.

• Devil In A Blue Dress - Walter Mosley
  I wish I'd read this before seeing the movie about 12 years ago. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have understood it better. Great book!

Then there were a load of graphic novels. See here for my thoughts on most of the ones I read. Plus four more:

• Top 10 Book 2 - Alan Moore
  
• Top 10 Forty Niners - Alan Moore
  Two more from one of my favorite series. The art work on Forty-Niners is exceptional.

• Tom Strong Book 1 - Alan Moore
  

• The Borden Tragedy - Rick Geary
  This to me is a poster child for graphic novels. Beautiful black-and-white line artwork. The writing is precise and complete. Great story-telling. If I'd bought this (as opposed to borrowing it from my local library), the back cover -- where Geary spells out the reasons why O. J. Simpson is the Lizzie Borden of the twentieth century -- would be worth the price alone. I will definitely be reading more books in this series.

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