Smith turns all his stories into (almost) mawkish postcards of place. Fortunately for me I manage to retain interest, and don't (quite) find them too cutesy. But sometimes it is a near thing. He also wrote the NO. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, about a female detective in Botswana. But here we spend a lot of time wondering how the Kantian Imperative applies to everyday life if you have a bit more money then you strictly need...in this case, Isabel Dalhousie lives life and solves a bit of a mystery of why a man would fly off the balconey at the concert hall in Edinburgh.

...is great. When one is having particular challenges, say in their work, it is good to read Crutcher and have things made more clear. Catharisis and all. And I had some recent challenges, and obsessive reading kept my sane.

I read or reread _Iron Man_ and _Athletic Shorts_, and Stotan, and Running Loose, and some other things as well...

2/11/2005

Brent also wrote Geography Club Where do you go if you've caused trouble in foster homes? You end up at the last chance for gas before the empty desert of reform school and worse. At Kindle Home... Date unknown...fall 2004?

Once before I tried to read this, but became bogged down. And then we went to Italy, including Venice, the scene for the story, and my interest was called forth anew. After our renew I asked Richie Partington of Richiespicks.com for a copy and I read it to Maddy and Spencer. It took us a while, but they loved it. Dec 2004

I loved the Giant's Books, and Inherit the Stars, and Entoverse, etc. The multiplex man's hook is 'He had a stranger's face and a dead man's memories.' The problem is that the book started with a protaganist who ends up cruelly cast aside. Now, that protaganist was not all that sympathetic, but I was hoping for a nice story arc in which the character recognized the error of his ways and all was made right in the world. Instead I was given four protaganists living in one head, none particularly symptathetic, and three of them doomed to the irrelevancy of a passing mist. 2/12/2005 or so.

Jane Langton writes a series of mysteries based on the character Homer Kelly and his wife Mary. He is a former homicide detective, current professor, and he travels about professing and running into murders.

I started with _The Dante Game_, in which our hero spends a year in Florence. Since I spent four days in Florence I felt a certain attraction. "It was true that Homer Kelly was an exaggerated person, somewhere at one end of the curve of human possibility." I then moved on to _The Shortest Day_, in which a jealous academic murders people he suspects of flirting with his wife. Fortunately everything ends all right. Etc. And again...these 'reviews' are for my benefit, not 'yours' (unless you are me). Feb 2005