All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Titus is the new sheriff, the first black one, in a backwater Virginia town that is still steeped in Southern racism. What started as the shooting of a beloved white teacher by a young black man turned into something much different, something more heinous. A serial killer is on the loose and Titus and his small department must tackle the case.

I read this author’s earlier work Blacktop Wasteland and rated it low. I found the thick southern black dialogue clumsy and hard to follow in print, and the characters not likeable, so I was reluctant to try another of his but this had good ratings and reviews. I listened to the audiobook this time and and found the excellent reader to sound natural and understandable with similar dialog. I was also impressed with both the literary nature of the writing and the author’s knowledge of police procedure and terminology. I’m a former FBI agent as is Titus. It’s nice to read a police procedural where the FBI is not depicted as case-stealing suits with no street smarts. There’s a good mystery here, and I wish the author had stuck more with that and spent fewer pages harping on white racism. I know it’s real but I’m looking for entertainment not social commentary in a police thriller. In any event, I got both in this one. I recommend it, at least in audiobook form.

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The Wedding People by Alison Espach
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I only made it about halfway through. The writing was witty at times, but Phoebe was an unattractive character – suicidal, self-doubting, intellectually lazy, drank too much, smoked, was too forward toward Gary, rude to Lila, etc. The rest of the wedding people were pretty unappealing, too, but the main problem was the lack of a discernible plot. I just couldn’t stay interested after 50 pages or so.

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I have continued to seek out new music to add to my playlists. I have been looking primarily at stuff from the early 20th century. You’ll see some ragtime, blues, and gospel in these latest additions. Here’s the list of additions:

I also removed some songs I got tired of, or at least I removed them from some playlists to reduce the frequency I hear them. Here below are few of these (not a complete list).

I actually reduced my lists quite a bit, especially reducing the piano solo stuff, mostly boogie woogie and blues, while adding a couple of new ones. I didn’t reduce the classical pieces I have in there, and I think I’ll try to add a few more short pieces the next time around.

Out of Your Mind: The Biggest Mysteries of the Human Brain by Jorge Cham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This exploration of our brains by two scientists turned out to be more entertaining than I expected. I expected it to be informative, but not as much fun. The chapter titles tell you the gist of the contents: “Where is the Mind?”; “Why Do We Love?”; “Will AI Take My Job?”; “What Is Addiction?” etc. One of the scientists is also a cartoonist and the book is illustrated with his cartoons throughout. At first I almost rolled my eyes at that, but I came to enjoy the cartoons. They always made the point in the text well and usually with a touch of humor. The book is clearly intended for a lay audience, but there is some interesting science in every chapter. The book is a quick read.

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The Women by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frankie is a naive 20-year-old nurse from Coronado Island, home of the U.S. Navy base in San Diego. The time is during the early days of the Vietnam War. Her brother is killed in action and she joins up to serve her country. The first half of the book is much of what I expected, the story of the naive girl becoming battle hardened and a highly skilled surgical nurse. She learns to smoke and drink, loses her virginity and bonds with her fellow surgical nurses. The war turns bad and the government lies to the public about it. A lot of it is M*A*S*H like. I thought that part was exciting and well-written.

[Spoiler alert] The second half of the book focuses on how she was treated, mistreated, or ignored after she came back to the U.S. The book went off the rails at that point. Every bad thing that could happen to her did. Her family was ashamed of her and hid the fact she’d been in Vietnam. Strangers spit on her if she wore her uniform. No one, even the VA, believed that she was a Vietnam veteran because “there were no women in Vietnam.” She developed a drug and alcohol problem, etc. It became too Dickensian to be believable. If no one thought she’d been in Vietnam, why would so many people spit on her? Her nurse comrades, now stateside, rescued her several times but she kept self-sabotaging. Her family stuck with her, but neither parent approved of her service. They had envisioned her being a nurse, meeting a doctor, and marrying and producing grandchildren, not serving in a war zone. The author couldn’t seem to make up her mind. As the book progressed, more and more time was spent on Frankie’s romantic life and clothes like a typical chick lit novel then much more on anti-establishment politics of the day – anti-war protests, feminism, and then switching back to Frankie’s nursing career. It bounced all over the place and couldn’t settle on a theme. I’d give the first half a solid four stars, the second half two stars, so I’m rating it the average: 3.

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Today I did a small experiment. I was looking for a list of modern day performers who record music from the early 20th Century, i.e. 1910s-1930s. I pasted that query into Google and got a response labeled as “AI Overview.” I’m not sure if this is the same as Gemini. When I’ve clicked on the Gemini icon in the past, I’ve been asked to create a paid account. Copilot (Microsoft’s AI) is free. So I’m comparing free AI to free AI.

Google produced the following:

Many contemporary performers, particularly those specializing in genres like jazz, blues, and swing, often record music from the 1920s and 1930s. This includes tributes, arrangements, and even reinterpretations of classic songs and styles. It’s a common practice within the music world to both preserve and celebrate the sounds of these decades.

It went on longer, but it did NOT name any performers, which I specifically asked for. Copilot, on the other hand, not only had a similar response, but it went on to name half a dozen or so modern performers that do music in the style of that era, including The Hot Sardines and Postmodern Jukebox, both groups I hadn’t heard of. I bought a song of the latter and put one of the former on a streaming favorite list. I pasted the exact same query into both, so I give Copilot the clear win in this case. I’ve also found it to be superior in other searches. It may be time to stop using Google as the default search engine.

I’m dismayed at the need for some of my W3W posts, but it seems like this one should be mentioned. If you follow the news you will have heard that Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education for the United States, was at an education summit meeting in San Diego last weekend. In particular, the events took place at the San Diego Convention Center. That’s where she repeatedly referred to artificial intelligence (AI) as A1, like the steak sauce. So I took a look at some of the W3W combos there.

The very first one that pops up when you enter San Diego Convention Center into W3W is brain.factories.vanish. It seems our brain factories, i.e. schools, are vanishing under McMahon whose mandate from President Trump is to eliminate the Department of Education (DOE) altogether.

I’m sure she would excuse the A1 error as a slip,terms.forgot, also there at the center. But she made this mistake multiple times. She just has no idea what she’s talking about. This is insulting to good teachers who put all their effort into giving the kids a good education, and the center does say they teach alone with zest. But McMahon’s ignorance is a school.actor.slap in the face.

Perhaps the elimination of the DOE is a good idea if people like her are in charge of it.

James by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn’t give this a fair chance at first for several reasons: don’t mess with a classic; an accusation against all white people, etc. But I set those biases aside because my book club chose it and I had to read it. I soon realized it had little to do with Huckleberry Finn and was just an imagined story of a black slave escaping pre-Civil War Missouri on a raft with a white boy (at first) but then departing from Twain’s narrative. It’s implausible, but probably not much more so than Twain’s story. It’s an easy enough read, so I just flowed with the story and enjoyed it.

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Here’s another of my signature What3words.com (W3W) bits about the recent illegal ICE enforcement action. In case you’ve inoculated yourself from MAGA news (quite understandable), the Trump administration (Marco Rubio this time) revoked the student visa of a Turkish student at Tufts University.The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, had entered the country legally on a student visa and had violated no laws either in Turkey or here. Rubio revoked the visa because she had led some peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Tufts, alleging that constituted support for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. The worst part, though, is that a federal judge ordered the government not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts but they moved her to the federal jail listed above. That’s a brazen defiance of a judicial order.

I spent too much time trying to find a killer W3W link to the place, but I came up with only one full-length combo that applied: sociable.uneducated.respite, which is probably how ICE would describe it, where the poor unwashed masses can relax while waiting for the plane home. I’ve seen references to the facility as “notorious” and “a hellhole.” It’s a privately-owned detention facility under contract to ICE.

While I didn’t find any great 3-word combos, there were several 2-word combos within the longer ones including:

• viciously deputies grape (maybe the A was intended to be an O)
• migrations rodeo
• independence transferred
• whites solution
• resounding crackers

One other 3-word combo there that might apply to ICE: cherish paid airways.I’m sure they’d like someone else to prove free transport. There’s another fun one about 20 miles away that would be perfect for this facility: crackers.peacekeeping.hill in Ville Platte, LA.

Blood Test: A Comedy by Charles Baxter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Brock Hobson is a mild-mannered insurance broker and Sunday school teacher. He makes an impulse buy of a blood test that will allegedly tell him what the future holds for him based on his DNA, and his questionnaire. It says he will commit a felony. He scoffs, but he suddenly feels empowered to commit a crime. He buys a handgun. Things get more serious after that. His ex-wife Cheryl is shacking up with a musclebound lout who calls Brock and Cheryl’s son a homophobic slur. Violence appears in the offing. That’s about as far as I go into the plot without spoilers, but this really isn’t a plot-heavy book. It’s supposed to be a comedy. Kirkus reviews calls it “riotously funny” which is funnier than anything in the book. Another reviewer calls it wry. I’ll buy wry and add tongue-in-cheek. That’s enough to get three stars, but it was less than riveting and had a lot of filler. It was mildly amusing and filled in some time, so I’m not really complaining.

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I just discovered this old recording I made back in 2008. I really like the recording. Unfortunately since arthritis robbed me of the ability to play well now, I can’t even fake a play-along video, so I’m just posting this photo of me playing back in the day.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The blurb on the cover says Suarez is “A legitimate heir to Michael Crichton.” That’s an insult to Crichton. I only made it 40% through this book because I couldn’t stomach all the sadism and long graphic descriptions of cruelty. One of the first scenes is a drawn out description of what can only be described as child sexual exploitation. The author seems to really enjoy describing it. I was disgusted, but pushed past it hoping that was just intended as an exciting hook and a depiction of how bad the bad guys were, but things just got worse so I stopped. When he’s not writing something offensive, the author blathers on about network protocols and hacking methods that 99.99% of the reading public won’t understand. It’s nothing but a boring ego trip.

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There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish by Anna Akbari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was fascinating in the way a train wreck is in real time. It’s horrible but captivating. Three intelligent, educated women fall in love with someone going by the name Ethan (“E”). They meet on dating apps but only texting at first. E provided pictures, but no live video chat. E was witty, articulate, responsive to texts and emails, and good-looking in the photos. Of course the photos were of someone else. E is indeed a sick, manipulative person who victimized these women. The author, a professor, confesses her own obsession with E despite weeks of canceled dates or other in-person meetings, broken promises, implausible excuses, and other red flags. It took guts for her to put her own vulnerability out there.

The book was fascinating to me in another way. Through it I experienced a sample of online dating, which is something I’ve never done IRL. I’m a senior citizen and married (45 years now) long before personal computers even existed. Reading how people do this is like an explorer coming across a new civilization in some remote island with a bizarre culture. In fact, I envied the author and her fellow victims in a way because I had a very hard time dating as a young person since I don’t drink or smoke and couldn’t stand being around those activities, so that barred going to bars or parties. I literally went for year-long stretches without a date at one point when I was transferred to a new city three times in three years and didn’t know anyone in each. Still, this book does not make it seem appealing.

I loathe the idea of victim-blaming and I don’t blame these women, but I still find in hard to get my head around how they fell down this rabbit hole. The elderly women who fall for the scammers imitating their grandsons stuck in jail and needing bail money are also true victims, but you can’t help but think of it a bit as a Darwinian process. Still, those victims were of diminished mental abilities, whereas the victims in this case were sharp and accomplished and at the top of their game. One of the victims was obsessed for years. Men also get catfished as we know from the football player case mentioned in the book, but I don’t buy the idea that it can happen to anyone. Some women reading this review will probably be outraged at that. Oh well.

The author writes well and overall I enjoyed the book, but it is quite repetitive, consisting mostly of quotes or summaries of long online chats between E and the victims and the disruptions to their lives, e.g. taking leave from work, spending tons of money on international texts or calls (E was in Ireland at times), staying up late for hours, flunking classes, etc. I skipped liberally and recommend you do, too. Best of all, though, is that E is eventually identified and forced into a sort of atonement and real-life consequences. I was very surprised to find out the real identity of E. The ending is mostly satisfying, though not entirely so.

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Baby X by Kira Peikoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book is set in the future, perhaps 50 years or so, where genetic engineering and designer babies is the way most people have children. The story is told from the viewpoint of three different women: a professional surrogate (a woman who carries babies for others), a scientist who works for a rock star, and an aspiring writer tracking down a story about “Selected” children (ones chosen for their genetic attributes) and the class discrimination against the “Unforeseen” (all others). The author has devised a clever suspense-filled plot centered around celebrity genes and how that could be used for extortion and other forms of misuse. The author knows her stuff with regard to the bioethics and the process of surrogacy and making embryos in the lab. I was impressed with that and how she used that not only to build a good plot, but also to highlight both the positive and negative aspects of genetic engineering, i.e. the utopian as well as dystopian aspects. I know something about this and see the recent scientific breakthroughs as a positive.

My own extended family is good example of why you should not fear the technology. I have a female relative who donated her eggs to a gay male couple. She was a penniless grad student who had just broken up with her latest boyfriend and was despairing of ever being married and having children, although she wanted them. She was in no position to raise one on her own, but her donation was successful and two beautiful baby girls were born to the gay couple. My relative did not carry the babies, that was done by surrogates, but the girls, years later, met their biological mom and hugged her, calling her mom. She is FB friends with the parents. Fortunately my relative did later marry and have a daughter of her own, although it turned out she was only able to have one. So the process allowed her to have three healthy beautiful children. Of course the clinic did DNA testing on the embryos to make sure they were free of horrible diseases, but they were not screened or selected for traits. Rather, the gay men chose my relative to donate the eggs based on her traits, not the embryos’. She was a beautiful blond, an excellent athlete, and a Phi Beta Kappa grad student in a technical field, i.e. brilliant. The men became fathers of two great kids they couldn’t have any other way. It was a win-win.

Another family member with his wife had a baby boy, but he died soon after birth. Sadly, the mother underwent an emergency C-section that rendered her unable to carry another baby. Although that was heartbreaking, they later used an IVF clinic and a surrogate to have another son, a beautiful, healthy little guy. The surrogate, although geographically somewhat distant, is part of their family now, and even expressed a desire to have another child of theirs. As a lawyer, I followed the process of both surrogate and couple selecting each other and writing a contract that protects them both. A bio-escrow agent is used to make sure everyone’s rights are protected. The couple chose the sex, but that’s the only “selection” they did of the embryo. The doctors screened out the embryos that had undesirable mutations but that’s all. The boy is not a “designer baby.” So here again, happiness for all and healthy babies are the only products of the IVF process.

Despite my approval of the clever plot and the attention it brings to the IVF issue, I was disappointed in the too-frequent clunky writing (e.g. “The lock unclicked.” unclicked?) The technological timeline is murky and contradictory. The biology described is on our doorstep and technically available now, yet she has it set decades in the future. Her understanding of tech outside of the bioethics realm is poor; or at least the tech in the story is often ludicrous. People don’t carry devices. They access the internet through their contact lenses. Somehow, despite these incredible electronics packed in wafer thin lenses, they are transparent. They blink the website they want and blink messages to each other. They can be tracked through their retinas by ubiquitous camera drones. What happened to sunglasses and hats? Although I can’t give it five stars, I can recommend this book. I did NOT foresee the ending.

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The Extinction Trials by A.G. Riddle
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This book was a big disappointment to me. It resembled an early video game, only one played by survivors of a global apocalypse. These survivors must solve a series of nonsensical puzzles and challenges in order to survive and get to a safe place. There are warring factions they must avoid, androids, strange drugs and technologies, and so on. I could have accepted it as such I suppose, but the end became absolutely ridiculous, completely laughable in fact, but I wasn’t in a mood to laugh by that point.

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It’s that time again to share my recent music additions. I’ve been exploring older American music such as ragtime, boogie woogie, early swing, gospel, and blues. My main source recently has been Freegal.com, but I’ve found stuff through Free Music Archive and YouTube, among other sources. Most of the modern, i.e. recorded in recent years, music is new recordings of old music. I removed some things that I got tired of, too, but I won’t bother listing those. Here’s the recent list I just added.

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anna is the recent widow of a successful novelist. She resents much of what has happened to her in life, but now she’s wealthy and independent. She has no particular plans, but decides a writers’ workshop might be a fun break from the New York hustle and bustle. She didn’t actually intend to write while there, but she thinks, how hard can it be? Not that hard, it turns out, at least, not for her. Not with her rich life history of tragic loss. We soon find Anna to be a successful writer herself. Her book tour goes swimmingly … until it doesn’t. Someone appears and spitefully reminds her of her past, a past when she wasn’t Anna, literary widow.

That’s a great setup and the writing matched the concept. Anna feels herself undervalued and badly used; she is not one to suffer maltreatment lightly, or at all. I really enjoyed Anna’s dogged pursuit of those trying to take away her newfound happiness … until I didn’t. I should say, I still enjoyed the book, but the ending devolved quickly into a disappointing mishmash of absurdly unbelievable scenes of “justice” being dispensed. Overall, it kept me guessing kept me anxious for the next chapter, and wrapped things up tidily, if more in the realm of satire than fiction.

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Rough Trade by Todd Robinson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Boo and Junior are bouncers/security specialists for a tough bar in the Boston area. They and a couple of their friends bonded when they were together in a group home. They like to get in fistfights and swear a lot. That’s about all there is to this book. The author likes hyperbole and obscene insults, the more offensive the better. No plot. All the characters make stupid decisions. I only made it halfway through.

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The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This fictionalized biography of the very real person Mila Pavlichenko, a female Russian sniper during World War II, follows real life fairly closely, or at least the version described in Mila’s own autobiography as well as other historical sources. With over 300 confirmed kills, she was the darling of Washington when she came as part of a “goodwill tour” designed to bring America into the European theater at a time they were only fighting the Japanese. My book club chose this book, but I had read the author’s recent book The Rose Code and greatly enjoyed that so I was among those voting for it, and I’m very glad I did.

It reads very much like a novel, not a biography, with plenty of action scenes and romantic entanglements. While I’m not much of a fan of romance, that part was not forefront in the writing and in any event was largely based on Mila’s autobiography. Do bear in mind that Mila’s book was probably passed by Soviet censors during the Cold War so take it with a grain of salt. Quinn also admits to combining some real-life characters, creating one or two out of whole cloth, and swapping timelines and locations for some events. There is a rather fantastical action scene near the end that defies credibility (and is totally fictional) but doesn’t ruin the story. Don’t nitpick the history; just enjoy the story.

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Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book contains several true stories of innocent people who were framed by police, prosecutors, “expert” witnesses, even judges. The stories are interesting and the writing is good. But I could not finish it or give it five stars because the content is just so depressing and misleading. I have no doubt the facts in the book are true and that these innocent people were framed, not just accidentally caught up in the criminal justice system by happenstance. But the book gives the impression that all police and prosecutors are corrupt and no witnesses should ever be believed. My 26 years in law enforcement allows me to know this is a false impression. The vast majority of police, sheriffs, and others in law enforcement are honest and give defendants their rights. The real danger from books like this is to sow seeds of doubt in the public such that criminals cannot be convicted and crime has no consequences.

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