The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is as advertised, a fantasy novel for young adults. It’s set in an alternate universe where England is in a weird mix combining gothic and modern elements, but technologically behind the real world by a few decades. I would not normally read something in this genre but a friend has taken a liking to the HBO/MAX series now playing which combines all three of the books in the trilogy His Dark Materials. We’re watching it for the spectacular CGI and production values but it’s hard to follow at times. I got the book to explain some of the fantasy world and characters better. The book was good for that, but I found it juvenile and not particularly well-written. It reads as though the author just started writing and when he came to a block in the story like an unsolvable peril for the main character, Lyra, he just invents some fantastic character or suspension of the laws of physics – an armored bear, a witch, a companion animal/daemon who can change shape to fight, fly, etc., to get past the jam. Since it’s fantasy, anything goes and nothing makes sense. This book, the first in the series, was made into a movie starring Nicole Kidman but it bombed at the box office, so the trilogy wasn’t completed then. HBO picked up the baton and did the whole trilogy from scratch. The book is harmless enough, an easy read, and I suppose would be okay for a twelve-year-old girl, but I can’t recommend it for adults.

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The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth by Martin Wikelski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author is a wildlife biologist and Director of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. He and his colleagues have devised the concept of an Internet of Animals as the title calls it, which is essentially a global tracking system for animals both wild and domesticated. They have worked for decades toward this goal and partially implemented it through Project Icarus jointly with Russian scientists. The system consists essentially of three parts: a tagging system to put on animals, a satellite to receive signals from the tags, and a database to record and analyze the information. The satellite was mounted on the ISS and began operation, but the Ukraine War ended the cooperation of the Russians and the program was short-lived. But it has since been restored to life with a new plan to launch a new satellite later this year without the need for Russia or the ISS. Although this is a lifelong dream of the author and his inner circle, I’m not sure the scientific community as a whole, or the general public at all, would consider this quite as lofty an achievement.

Nevertheless, the book is fascinating throughout, at least most of the time. It details the author’s many expeditions and biological discoveries, anecdotes of meeting helpful (or not) local people all over the world, and some often amusing stories. The descriptions of the obstacles involved in fashioning tags and how those have been overcome especially intrigued me. The tags alone are a truly incredible engineering feat but it also has to be combined with a range of protocols for how and where to install them on a wide variety of animals from elephants to dragonflies. You may think it’s impossible to make a small electronic tag that will fit comfortably on a bird and yet be powerful enough to collect and transmit data to a passing satellite, but it has already been done.

The book centers on Icarus, but is more than that. Much of it is about how the author connected with others who have been instrumental in the project, and described their many unrelated clever research triumphs (and not-so-clever failures). The author tends toward the egotistical, but can be self-deprecating such as when he describes how he got a horrible case of poison ivy climbing a tree because he is so bad at plant identification. Anyone who enjoys wildlife stories or field research will enjoy this book.

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Phantom Orbit by David Ignatius
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ivan Volkov is a Russian scientist knowledgeable about satellites. In the 1990s he studies in China with a scientist named Cao Lin. In their discussions they figure out a way to disable a whole satellite guidance system, like the American GPS. Volkov also meets a young woman named Edith Ryan who turns out to be a spotter for the CIA. Sparks fly between them, but ultimately he realizes she’s using him and he returns to Russia. Cao tries to get him to return to China, but the FSB (KGB with a new name) keep him home. Skip ahead to modern day and these three characters’ lives interact once again while the U.S., Russia, and China are on the brink of war in space involving satellites. China is helping Russia in the Ukraine war.

I was hoping for better than this book delivered, but it wasn’t bad. It took almost 200 pages to get to the present day, which is where the suspense kicks in and things get complicated. Be prepared to read about years of personal history on these characters. There was surprisingly good detail on satellites and how they work, which I enjoyed. The spy tradecraft and cold war type action are less than credible in places, but I liked how they brought it right up to the present day, even working in the Ukraine War and oblique references to ex-president Trump. The ending was mostly predictable thus diffusing the suspense. The writing was good enough to keep me reading, but I don’t have a desire to read another of his books.

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Followers of this blog know that I like to find three-word combinations that are linked in the What3Words.com (W3W) website or app in an interesting or amusing way. The shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, however, is not something to joke about. It is a serious reflection of how cavalier or at least accepting Americans have become about violence in general and political violence in particular. But I don’t want to digress into politics or gun control.

I will refrain from treating the matter lightly, but I think it is still poignant to note some ironic word combinations at that site. All of the following W3W combos are real and in or around the rally/shooting site.

The Podium Area

• codes.crucial.fenced
• distracted.hunter.appear
• targets.wonderfully.linked
• targets.porch.aura
• rooftop.mortal.newsprint

That last one seems prophetic. Crooks, the shooter, climbed on the rooftop, proved to be mortal, and made it into newsprint. That seems to be his only motivation.

The shooter’s Rooftop

• speech.apprehend.unusual
• celebrate.schemes.impact
• enabling.investigate.yesterday
• refers.period.botch

These last two refer to the Secret Service failures and the forthcoming investigation, I would say. Conspiracy theorists will no doubt make hay with or without knowledge of these coincidences, and that’s all they are. Still, here are two theoretically ominous combos in the shooter’s area for them:

• conspire.residual.affirms
• conspire.seamstress.refrigerate

Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author is an astrophysicist originally from Austria who is now affiliated with Cornell University and the Carl Sagan Institute specializing in exoplanets. The book is written for the average reader, not scientists. Much of the beginning is taken up with a primer on how the galaxy and solar system and Earth formed, then does the same with the origins of life on Earth. Any long-time fan of the television show Nova has seen or heard it all before, but it is good background for the main topic of life on other planets. She peppers the book with digressions about her favorite rock songs or coffee or gushing over scenery at the conferences she attended. I could do without that. The meat of the book, a description of the various best candidate exoplanets along with their desirable characteristics, is saved for well into the second half, and is too sparse for my taste. Even so, I found that part worth the wait. Although there no great revelations, the style is very readable and the topic fascinating, so I enjoyed the book.

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From time to time I point out annoying trends in language. My bugaboo today is the phrase “step foot.” This term has only become common recently. See the graph from Google N-grams below. It’s only in the last 20 years or so that it’s been popular.

So what’s wrong with it? It’s redundant. The word step includes the meaning of foot. You don’t step with your head or shoulder or belly button. It’s like saying “bite teeth” into something or “think brain” of an idea. When I was growing up I often heard people use the term “set foot,” which is fine because you can set lots of things, so foot is needed. They might also use the word step by itself, e.g. “When I step into the room…” They mean the same and make grammatical sense. I suspect that some people with poor language skills got confused as to which to use and simply conflated the two to make “step foot.”

Of course, people know what you mean if you use “step foot” but you’ll sound more intelligent if you say set foot or just step. That’s my language lesson for today.

November Road by Lou Berney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book won a Silver Dagger award as the best thriller that year. I can’t agree. The plot is preposterous. Bad organized crime guys in New Orleans supposedly arranged for the assassination of JFK. Then they proceed to try to kill off every one of their minions involved in the deal. The person they send to clean up the mess in Dallas is a charmer named Frank Guidry. Then another thug is sent to take him out. The book becomes a long chase scene across the country. I hate crime books where the bad guys kill their own people. That just is so inaccurate it’s ridiculous. No one would ever work for them or join a gang. Yes, I have experience in law enforcement, so I know. It’s all about loyalty to the gang. No one is ever expendable unless they turn state’s evidence.

At this point in the plot I ran into another problem: from then on this book is too much like another Berney book I recently read, Dark Ride. I really liked that one, but I realize now it was mostly a copy of this one, at least the second half. The main character develops a kind heart for a damsel in distress with two kids in a perilous domestic situation and proceeds to disregard his own safety to make sure they are safe. Basically antihero becomes hero. In both books there’s plenty of bloodshed, which I don’t consider a good point, but its much more excessive in this one. If I’d read these in the other order I might have reversed the ratings, but I doubt it. I do like the author’s writing, but this plot is even less plausible than Dark Ride.

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Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a book club choice so I gave it a try. The first part is a lengthy detailed account of life in the Nazi death camps during WWII. I read as much as I could stomach, but it’s too horrible to read it all. If I was a Nuremberg prosecutor, I’d force myself to read it, but, fortunately, I have a choice, so I skipped to the second part. Frankl lays out his ridiculous theory he calls logotherapy. I won’t spell out the problems with it. You’ll either buy it when you read it or see the flaws for yourself.

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A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery by Lawrence Ingrassia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author is a member of a large family that has Li-Fraumeni Syndrome (LFS). That rare condition is the presence in the family genes of a specific genetic mutation on what is known as p53. The result is that many family members have cancers and die young. There are treatments for the various cancers that arise, but not for the presence of the defective gene itself. This book describes the discovery of the mutation and how it works, or doesn’t, to allow cancer. I say it this way because p53 is not a cancer-causing gene, but a cancer-fighting gene. The mutation prevents the gene from fighting any number of cancers that might arise in the body from other causes, such as environmental ones. There are many stories in the book of families with this syndrome and how the cancers brought about so much sadness and suffering, so it’s not for the faint of heart. The author is a former editor and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, so the book is well-researched and well-written. It is an easy read in one sense but a hard read emotionally. He is one of the family members who did not inherit the faulty gene, but he has experienced the loss of many of his family members and watched them suffer through the surgeries and chemo and radiation treatments. Apparently to this day, even many oncologists are unfamiliar with LFS. The book is worth reading for those with a curiosity about medical progress or cancer.

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I haven’t posted much lately for good reason: I just had surgery on my left thumb. I’ve had arthritis in both thumbs for the last five or so years. It has significantly limited my activities. I had to stop playing guitar, couldn’t use most tools (e.g. pliers, scissors), couldn’t button a shirt, etc. In February I had surgery on my right thumb carpometacarpal (CMC) joint. That’s the one where the thumb bone abuts the wrist bones. That surgery went really well with minimal pain. I was able to get by with only acetaminophen post-surgery and by day nine I could drive again. It’s about 95% back to normal, but there is still some pain with pinching or gripping.

My left hand surgery was 10 days ago and I’m having more pain than the first time. This is the first time I’ve been able to type more than a few words, and most of it is with my right hand. I got my cast off on day 7. I’ll get the stitches out on day 14. I’m using a stiff splint (or spica). The Physicians Assistant (PA) for the right hand told me I was very lucky to do so well with the right hand, so this left-hand experience is more normal. But I’m sure it was worth it. I was able to play guitar again for the first time a few weeks after the first surgery. Of course, I didn’t play well, but I did start to relearn stuff pretty quickly. Now I’ll have to wait a few weeks before I can start up again.

There are several variations on the CMC surgery which is called an arthroplasty. They all start by removing the trapezium bone (a trapeziectomy) . That’s the triangular bone in the wrist at the base of the thumb. The pain originates there where the cartilage has worn away and it’s bone on bone. The standard practiced by most hand surgeons is called the LRTI and uses a piece of ligament taken from your forearm to fill in that gap and the lower thumb bone is attached to the adjacent finger bone in the hand with a rod to give it stability. The newer method is called a suspensionplasty or suspension arthroplasty. It uses fiber to attach those same bones and leaves the gap unfilled, although eventually that gap fills with scar tissue. The advantage is that it’s not necessary to cut your tendon. The fiber may be secured with metal anchors (mini-Tightrope) or only by fiber (FiberTak). The former requires an incision between the forefinger and middle finger bones to place one metal anchor, while the latter can be done with only one incision. If you want details, do some online searches. There are plenty of videos of all these procedures. I recommend the FiberTak that I had after comparing it with the stories from others who had other CMC surgeries. Here’s a picture of my hand taken yesterday.

The Final Diagnosis by Arthur Hailey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hailey was a popular author for many years with hits like Hotel and Airport, both of which were made into major films. This is one of his earliest, having been published in 1959. Like his other works, it is based on an enterprise of some sort, a hospital in this case, and is thoroughly researched. Despite its age, it is still riveting, with one crisis after another cropping up. Some of it is literally life or death and not everyone lives. In addition to all the medical plots, there are romances going on, perhaps presaging television series more familiar to modern audiences.

In places it seems dated, even cringe-worthy, but that’s likely because it is dated. For example the sole black woman mentioned in it is referred to as a Negress and speaks like a “sho’ ’nuff” Amos and Andy character. The doctors all smoke throughout the hospital, mostly cigars and pipes, and the adult women are all called girls. The romances are all love at first sight with the women calling the man darling on the first date and the man proposing on the second. Still, Hailey was probably not a bigoted person. It was a pretty accurate portrayal of what it was actually like back then. I’m old enough to remember. At least he includes one female doctor, a surgeon, no less. Chalk that up to the passage of time and enjoy the drama and good writing.

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Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not a fan of history or history books but I found this one interesting. The author describes a Mongol empire I knew almost nothing about, one of wealth, a democratic, intellectual, and commercial mecca during the reign of Genghis Khan (GK). He sets forth Khan’s childhood and rise to power and his subsequent reformation of the Mongol lands from a bunch of squabbling and brutal tribes to a true nation with a vast government, schools, paper money, and extensive trade with foreigners where religious tolerance was practiced. It is clear the author admires GK’s achievements and his personal intelligence and abilities.

Having said that, he tends to minimize or excuse away GK’s brutality toward non-Mongols whom he viewed as barely human like herd animals, and whose main value was in their wealth, which he looted without mercy or compunction. Oddly, brutal as they were at times, the Mongols despised or feared the sight of blood, which they thought contained the human soul, so they often used bloodless, and exceptionally cruel, ways of killing rivals even within their own Mongol nation, like tying them up, wrapping them in blankets and stomping or crushing them to death with horses or even dancing on them. There was more of that in the book than I cared to read about. I’m not naive enough to believe Europeans of the age were any better, but I did not come away with an admiration for Genghis Khan’s benevolence. His vengefulness and egotism reminded me of an ex-president in the news, the main differences being that Genghis Khan was intelligent and honest in trade.

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The Knife Slipped by A.A. Fair
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I checked out this book as part of exploring the Hard Case Crime series since I’d read another one of those. I thought this would be a hard-boiled noir detective story like Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain used to write. The other Hard Case book I read was in that mold. Instead, it turned out this one is a spoof of that genre. It’s written by Erle Stanley Gardner under a pseudonym.

When I realized it was a satire, I was a tad miffed at first, but I found it silly enough to be mildly entertaining. There is a murder mystery buried in there, but 90% of the appeal is the completely ridiculous comic character of private eye Donald Lam and his boss Bertha Cool.

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The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This combination murder mystery and horror story isn’t really very scary or even very gory, but it is quite clever. The main character Clare is a tall, beautiful, blonde teacher at a British high school. She keeps a diary. Her best friend Ella is a similar beautiful blonde English teacher at the school. Both have been hit on by their boss, a married man. Clare is a divorcee with a teenage daughter, Georgie, who is secretly into witchy type stuff with a bunch of her friends and who also keeps a diary. Soon Ella is killed, murdered with a knife. A detective sergeant named Harbinder Kaur leads the investigation. Then there’s another death. Throughout this we are fed excerpts from a short story called The Stranger (hence the title) by an author named Holland, who, coincidentally used to live in the house that is now one of the buildings of the high school. Clare teaches that short story in her class. Quotes from it begin to appear in odd places.

The setting is suitably spooky and the various characters are all just suspicious enough that any could be the killer. The violence isn’t yet over and all of it centers around Clare. There’s a student who had a crush on Ella, a weird woman leading a class with him and Georgie, Clare’s ex-husband, Georgie’s boyfriend, a Mr. Sweetman who is head of the school, a professor who has a thing for Clare. The author does a good job of making them all seem plausible as suspects, but they all seem to have alibis or lack of motive, or both.

As an American I had some fun and some frustration with all the Britishness of the story. The educational system seems so different with a 6th form college (?), GCSE’s (?). It seems quaint that the nation is so London-centric and people still travel by train. In the U.S. anywhere but the east coast, Washington, D.C. and New York are irrelevancies to most people, almost as esoteric as London and Paris. And we drive our cars everywhere. I thought I knew most British terms for things due to a lot of reading British mysteries and working the Guardian Cryptic Crossword every night, but I had to look up quite a few, including more than a few geographic locations. I enjoy that sort of thing, but where it got to be a pain is when cultural references were made such as product names or when television shows or radio stations were referenced. These were even important for establishing alibis, but I had no idea when they came on. Another British ambience thing I’m used to is the prevalence of Indian culture and frequent mention of getting curries over there. I’d never had curry until I studied in Japan and I grew to hate it. Here there are a growing number of Indians in the high-tech field and Indian restaurants are popping up, although it certainly isn’t treated as a fast food option the way it is there.

I liked Harbinder Kaur, a rather angry and dark bulldog of a character, largely for the contrast with the snooty school atmosphere. She had a partner who was irrelevant to everything. I have a quibble, though, in that the story switches from Clare’s first-person voice to Harbinder’s at several points (and to Georgie’s, too) for no purpose. I generally enjoy hearing the story told from two or three different perspectives, e.g. The Embezzler, but only when it it sheds a different light on things. Here, Harbinder mostly either repeats what Clare has already related, or just continues the story narrative in a way that could have been told equally by Clare or an anonymous narrator. The same is true for Georgie, although to a lesser extent. It almost felt like padding to get to 300 pages. I really enjoyed the original idea of teasing us with the short story throughout and then finishing it in the epilogue. It’s a great, creepy story. Much of it, like the main story, takes place on Halloween. Overall, the book kept me in perpetual suspense and eager to read the next chapter. The ending was somewhat predictable but hidden to very near the end and, importantly for a mystery, “fair.”

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An Honest Man by Michael Koryta
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book started rather normally for a murder mystery, introducing Israel, the main character, a convicted murderer in Maine now out on parole; he’s also serving as an informant or source for Jenn Salazar, a state police agent, but we are not clued in as to what she is investigating or how he’s helping. We meet his uncle, a corrupt local cop who hates him. It all went downhill from there. Israel finds a yacht floating with seven dead bodies in it, including rival U.S. Senate candidates. (Eye roll) I only made it halfway through, but if a book hasn’t garnered my attention by then, I rarely see fit to spend further time on it. The characters became both cliched and unbelievable. Israel is a trite overused unreliable narrator although he is supposedly the honest man of the title. Salazar seems out of her depth and on some sort of a vendetta. Worse of all, though, Israel’s father (the one he murdered years earlier) and his uncle are unspeakably evil and equally ridiculous, almost comic book villains. There is another character, Lyman, introduced early, who hides from his equally cruel, abusive father and is confronted by a hatchet-wielding girl. Apparently no one in the state of Maine is a decent human being. Halfway through the book we still don’t know how Lyman and all these characters relate to each other. I’m retired law enforcement and nothing in the police actions (or non-action) made sense. The murders were on a boat in navigable waters and the victims were candidates for national office; the FBI would have swarmed all over this case and pushed all the locals aside including Salazar and the uncle, but they’re nowhere to be seen. I got bored and found the subject matter borderline offensive so I stopped reading.

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A Null cipher, at least in American Cryptogram Association (ACA) usage, is a type of concealment cipher. The idea is to write normal sounding text but use a secret key or “rule” that tells the recipient how to extract the true message hidden inside. The rules used can be imaginative and, ironically, there are no real rules about what the rule can be. As a simple example, if the key is 123, the word ‘jog’ could be enciphered as ‘just too big” taking the first letter of just, second letter of too, etc. The key repeats throughout the length of the plaintext.

Just for fun I decided to try to write a program that would generate a null cipher given a plaintext and a numeric key like the example. My first attempt was to load in a large list of English words and then randomly choose words that fit the rule, followed by several rounds of substituting words that fit more naturally with its neighbors. When I tested it, the first step worked instantly, but it produced a meaningless jumble of words. It tended to choose long words simply because there are more long words than short, but in natural speech or writing we use many more short words. This method might produce ‘justification polemic signatory’ to encipher the above example. The subsequent rounds did tend to make it replace these words with shorter, more common, words, but it took forever because testing pairs of words for how frequent they are is a very time-consuming computing task. I never let it run to the end and the intermediate ciphertext was still not natural-sounding.

So I changed my strategy. Instead of using word lists, I sought a source that already had common words in a natural sounding order: literature. I had a large file of plaintext books, mostly classic novels downloaded from Project Gutenberg. This file had already been processed to have no punctuation, exactly one space between words, and be all lower case to facilitate computer searches and comparisons. This second version of my program reads a few dozen lines at a time and scan them to find N words in a row that met the criteria. I found that it was usually easy to find passages that would satisfy a four-word stretch at a time, and often a five-word stretch, but no more. Keys using smaller digits were more productive than  keys with eights or nines in them.

For example, when I enciphered ‘hail to the chief’ with the key 2141 my program produced, “What a delightful lazy stream of that history we could gather if we focused.” This is actually a patch of three 5-word outputs and I had to modify a couple of the words. It’s quite normal-sounding, but doesn’t make much sense. If I were to submit it, I’d be looking for better words, most likely for “lazy stream”. The program produced 13 passages for the first five letters ‘hailt’. I extended one of those to “The average individual likes stories of what he….” The program runs very fast and can be modified to fit other rules, not just numeric keys.

I don’t plan to submit any Null ciphers from this program, but I wanted to share it to show how ciphers in general and especially the ACA are a rich playground for recreational computing. I invite others to write a better null cipher generator and share their results here.

Five Decembers by James Kestrel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joe is a detective for the Honolulu PD right before Pearl Harbor. He’s assigned to a double murder; the victims are a Japanese girl and an American man, the nephew of the local admiral, in fact. The trail of the murderer leads him on a chase through the Pacific until he reaches Hong Kong. Then December 7 happens. The story follows him through the war years and after. It’s replete with blood and romance and some very unlikely scenarios.

The book is published by Hard Case Crime and that tells you something. Expect fists, guns, and knives. I like the throwback noir style. The pacing is good, constantly tempting me to read a few more pages. It kept me hooked to the end, but I wasn’t entirely thrilled with it. The characters and events were so overdone that they were almost more like a superhero comic book than a novel. The bad guys aren’t just bad, they’re nazis of superhuman size or sadistic cruelty or both. Joe is inhumanly resourceful and intelligent, learning a foreign language fluently almost overnight and winning every gunfight. The women are all young and beautiful and Joe can have any of them – but will he? The final scene is both predictable and ridiculous. Still, it’s action-packed and a fun read.

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We all see plenty of complaints about various business we deal with. Today I’d like to cite one for excellent service and integrity. Residential Heating and A/C of Campbell deserves kudos. Here’s the story:

Residential replaced our aging gas furnace in December last year, right before the new emissions standards were to take effect. This saved us a lot of money since California’s new (2024) rules would have required a different furnace type that is more expensive to install and has high maintenance and repairs. I would not have known this unless they had pointed it out to me during a routine repair earlier in the year, a repair that was fast, efficient, and low cost. Unfortunately, when they did the replacement, which was in the attic, they cut or dislodged the wire to our doorbell. We did not notice this at first, but several days later someone pointed out our bell wasn’t working. I wasn’t sure it was related to the furnace replacement and I had some other work that needed to be done, so I hired a contractor to take care of all of it. He discovered what had happened during the furnace replacement; he had to saw up some of the base plywood the furnace was on and replace the wires and transformer for the doorbell. It wasn’t cheap to fix. I made a claim against Residential for the cost. I fully expected pushback because most contractors don’t admit fault in my experience. They sent out one of the workers who had done the install; he verified what the contractor had told me and took pictures. His manager approved the claim on the spot, although it took a few days to provide documentation, including checks, correspondence from the contractor, etc., but they sent a check for the full amount. Thank you for being honest. The furnace works perfectly; so does the doorbell now.

From a Far and Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is at least my fourth No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency book. I’ve enjoyed them all but you have to be the right mood for them. I’m going to repeat my review of the last one I read because it fits this one equally well:

This is yet another charming addition to the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series. Nominally mysteries, they are in reality musings on life and human foibles, written with humor and keen insight to human nature. The author has an obvious love of Botswana and depicts it as an easy living bucolic place where the simple things in life still dominate. Farming. Family. Friends. Not the hellhole where everyone lives in mud huts and has AIDS as one high U.S. government official has declared.

Those who are expecting action or even a real plot will be disappointed, but if this is read with the right mindset it can be enjoyed by anyone. It helps to be familiar with the characters. I believe the first few books in the series were better, with more of a plot line. This is not the best one to introduce yourself to the characters. The BBC/PBS series starring Jill Scott was absolutely wonderful. Hearing the accent and speech curiosities of Botswana sets the mood. Reading them on the page can seem a bit odd.

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I have a new grandson named Maxwell, nicknamed Max. I wanted to see how popular (or not) the name has been over the years. I didn’t update my data past 2020 but I think the trends are clear.