First book in what is called the Century Trilogy.

Yeah, I know, but it's fast moving, and a nice counterpoint to "The Blind Watchmaker", which I just finished reading.

Just finished reading "Blood Orchids" by Toby Neal as my purse book. I haven't yet decided what my next purse book will be, though.

I highly recommend her (so far) three mystery novels that take place in Saudi Arabia. She was married to a Saudi for a while and actually lived in the country for a couple of years. She shows the absurdities and Catch-22s that arise when, for example, you're trying to conduct a police investigation in a country where 1) The official line is that only foreigners commit crimes, 2) All the women are fully veiled in public, making identification hard and disguise easy, and 3) Men are not supposed to talk to women outside their families, 4) Women are not allowed to drive but may take taxis or use chauffeurs, as long as their husbands or fathers allow it, 5) Marriages are arranged and adultery is severely punished, 6) Servants and other low-status workers are lured from Third World countries with promises of high wages and glamorous jobs only to be kept in slave-like conditions and forbidden to leave the country without their employer's permission.

Ferraris also captures the ways that Saudi women cope or fail to cope with a society that educates them but sharply limits what they are allowed to do.

I'm sorry that she's written only three books so far.

YA Steampunk.

Just finished the last in the Jim Butcher's Alera Codex, _First Lord's Fury_.

Current audiobook _Shadows in Bronze_ by Lindsey Davis, Marcus Didius Falco #2. Falco is a "private informer" during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian. Interesting, too, since in takes place in and around the Bay of Naples in CE 71, eight years before the famous eruption of Vesuvius and my wife and I are also watching a series of lectures from the Teaching Company about Pompei. Serendipity, I guess.

This is the second in a planned trilogy that started with the World War I-based Fall of Giants. Winter of the World is set before and during World War II.

You have to chuckle. Here's a country of maybe 300,000, and it seems that there is a disproportionate output of crime novels. I'd always wanted to visit Iceland, but with all that crime , I'm not so sure.

(Of course, the same can be said of Oxford, England after you read the Morse novels.)

Gun Machine is the second novel by a graphic novelist/artist, Warren Ellis. It's basically a police procedural with the most dysfunctional people you could imagine, which is what sets it apart from your usual police procedural. If you take your usual off-beat forensic techs from, say, CSI New York, and multiply the nutting ten-fold, you have the techs in this book. The detective is an equally off-beat NYC history buff who just wants to be left the fuck alone to do his job, which, of course, the supremely insane police higher-ups won't do. It's weird, but it's a fun read. I just got his first book out of the library.

Then there's Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, which I'm listening to. I'm surprised that this hasn't been the subject of any discussion here, as it captures, I think, the essence of the left/right, rural/urban, educated/un- (under?) educated divide. It's a bit tedious and pedantic in parts, but it's worth the time. I'm about 2/3 of the way through, and I don't know how it's going to turn out, but to this point it's more than a little frightening to think that Kingsolver is right about the conservative end of the spectrum. Nothing we don't already know, but still an eye-opener in some ways.

Even though I have to read some sentences twice. Ellis uses more than "cop" language, he seems to have invented another one. Can't see he can solve all the crimes in one book.

I'm almost done with Ellis's first book. You can't help but keep asking the question, how does he come up with this stuff? But you definitely won't be disappointed. I doubt I'll take on the graphic novels, but I will remain alert to the non-graphic ones.

Haven't read it yet, have you?


(In Gun Machine, where our Detective is visibly tiring of a witness's beating around the bush , the guy says, "Stay sat." and then tells him more. Never heard that one before.)

The gist is that the White House Chief of Staff - the book was written in 2007, so we know what regime he's talking about - hires a two-bit NY private eye to recover a secret version of the Constitution, in the form of a book that has the unique power to return America - all of us - to the path of moral correctness. Hilarity ensues.

The private eye tracks the book from NY to Columbus, OH, to Texas to Las Vegas to LA to Beverly Hills, with each stop weirder than the one before it, though I think Texas and Las Vegas were pretty weird.

The book's a riot.

Best sentence so far:

"The adagio called for delicate and subtle phrasing, and it called in vain."

Any othe Aubrey/Maturin fans on DU?

Just passed through the series again last fall. Well, everything except 21.