Burglars Can't Be Choosers, by Lawrence Block

This book was 6 hours and 34 minutes long, and was narrated by Rick Ferrone.

I eagerly snapped up this one from NetLibrary because I recognized this as the first book in the series about the bookish burglar, Bernie Rhonebarr. I have read some of the other books in this series, and found them to be entertaining with likable characters. They were light fare, written well.

I was pretty disappointed. Not only was this one a bit raunchier than the others, but the solution to the crime was pretty implausible and unsatisfying. This came out originally in 1977, so maybe the Disco Era was having a bad influence on everyone, even crime writers.

Others may like this more than I did, largely because I had higher expectations. I give it 1 star, but you may give it 2.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

This was yet another free audiobook download from NetLibrary. It was 11 hours and 16 minutes long, and was read by Donal Donnelly.

One of the great things about audiobooks is that you can get some of those intimidating "classics" of literature and listen to someone else read them. I seem to recall finding a copy of Joyce's "Ulysses" in my father's bedroom (Mom would never have read this), opening to the first page, and closing it after about ten seconds. I was worn out already. I went back to the comics.

This is the kind of dense and thoughtful reading that gets assigned to students because it is believed that it will do them some good. And I believe it does. The character development is quite vivid and deep. You really get inside the head of Stephen Dedalus, an autobiographical shadow of the author who appears in some of Joyce's other works. This book is also very philosophical and critical of the Catholic Church, although it is not without its sentimental side.

Personally, I enjoyed the book. But I also have to admit that it probably goes down better as an audiobook. Reading this Irish accented prose and dialog and preachy monologues off the printed page might be a different story. That said, the narration was very good and contributed to the good quality of the overall experience. This is the first 3 and a half star review I have given.

Violation, by Darian North

This book was written in 1999, was 10 hours and 16 minutes long, and was narrated by Ed Sala.

A cautionary tale about chat rooms and the power of clever people to manipulate others in the online world. However, this story fails to get inside your head in a holistic way. It attempts to jumpstart that process periodically by trying to shock you, but it keeps sliding back into the same droning story about people who just aren't real enough.

A woman who was raped and suffered a brain injury 14 years earlier is now raising a son in another part of the country with the son she conceived on the night she was raped. She has been hiding this from her son, who knows his mom is lying to him about his father.

Their landlord is a retired LAPD detective who is idolized by the boy, and he tries to help the woman find her son after the kid runs away with the help of a man the boy met online. However, the woman and the landlord discover this separately, so mom thinks the ex-cop is the culprit. It's a cross country chase, which would have been a better story if the characters were better written. I give it 2 stars.

Her Own Place, by Dori Sanders

This is from Net Library, is 6:33:12 long, and is narrated by Kim Staunton. It was published in 1993.

Taking a rest from crime and history, I got this because I was looking for a literary respite. This was a good place to find it. Dori Sanders lives the life she writes about: growing up on a farm in South Carolina in the same ara as her slave ancestors.

This is not a book that dwells on the tragedy of racism but on the triumph of an ordinary life lived well, with all the ups and downs of the people of her times. It is easy for any person to identify with someone who is not scanning the horizon for someone to blame; not even the man who abandons her main character, Mae Lee, with 5 children after World War Two.

Her Own Place begins at the start of the war and moves briskly, yet without missing the details. This is quite an accomplishment, and it marks Ms. Sanders as a great storyteller. I rambles through the civil rights era, Viet-Nam, and desegregation while seldom leaving the farm she bought as a young wife with the money she earned at a munitions plant.

I really enjoyed this and will look for books by this author again when I am looking for a real escape from the tensions of my life. 4 stars.

Act of Treason, by Vince Flynn

This novel was published in 2006, was downloaded from NetLibrary.com, and is 11:06:34 long. It is narrated by George Guidall.

If you are a left-wing zealot who has issues with the US military, take a pass on this one. Or upgrade your Prozac. The hero of this anti-terrorism novel is Mitch Rapp, a CIA undercover-opps assassin who burns through red tape and legal procedure when that's the only way to achieve a just result.

Our story begins when a Democratic Presidential candidate's motorcade is attacked with a bomb blast that kills 19 people, but misses the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates. Although this was clearly the work of a professional, it seems like he got the wrong limo, the one that contained the wife of the Presidential candidate.

After the widowed Democrat is elected, Mitch Rapp manages to find the bomber, collect the evidence, get a confession (the hard way), and is then faced with new hurdles as the news leaks out and the new President-elect wants the man put on trial. Well, that's not gonna happen. But there is still another problem: finding out who really put this hit on the Liberal Democrat candidates.

I give it 3 stars for being fast-paced and well-written. I won't weigh in on the politics. :)

Loot, by Aaron Elkins

This novel was my first time experience with this author. I downloaded the audiobook from NetLibrary.com. It was 11:03:39 long, and was narrated by Paul Hecht.

A pawn shop owner buys a painting from a mysterious Russian visitor, and it turns out to be a very rare painting that was part of the looting of the Jews by the Nazis. During the last gasps of WW2, a truckload of art was seized by a Russian patrol, and then it all disappeared until after the fall of the Soviet Union. And now this painting has made its way to Boston.

The owner calls in a friend, Ben Revere, who is an art expert who has done some contract work for the police. Ben, who is our main character, believes this is a rare Valasquez, and tells his friend that they should get the police involved. After Ben leaves, his friend is beaten to death in his shop, but the painting is still in his safe, providing a good bit of evidence to begin his search for who killed his friend, and where this masterpiece came from.

Although this book is not a masterpiece, it was a well-paced, easy read with good characters and an interesting background story: the ever-circulating treasures of the Holocaust. It gets 3 stars if you just want to be entertained, 2 if you wanted violence and bloodshed.

The Cheating Culture, by David Callahan

This book was about 11 hours and 50 minutes long, and it is a rather damning indictment of everyone who has a lot of elasticity in his or her integrity.

Unfortunately, what begins as a very compelling account of the moral malfeasance of everyone from accountants to Little Leaguers begins to degenerate into a politically motivated hit piece that blames most of our current trend toward dishonesty on Republicans. To be sure, that party's stone needed to be unturned. But when the final verdict is one that is sure to leave partisan Democrats feeling smug and vindicated, it loses some of its own aura of integrity. And that is too bad, because the criticisms are largely valid, and the warnings need to be heeded.

Callahan's central premise seems to be that there are two sides to America: tough America and fair America, and that the toughies have made our society so competitive that it has goaded us into cheating. Whether it's a family perpetrating a fraud to allow their 14 year-old son to compete against 11 and 12 year-olds in Little League, or bookkeepers who embezzle the money they think they deserve, people rip off the system because they are feeling ripped off.

Overall, I give this 3 stars for being a must read on the subject of integrity, because it is hard not to find yourself in it. But I lower it to 2 stars if you don't balance it with something like Steven Covey's Seven Habits series.

Grant Comes East, by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen

Call it "speculative history" or "active history", this novel is based on the idea that the South wins at Gettysburg, and what could have followed such an event.

This book attempts to be faithful to historical events insofar as real people from the Civil War are given roles that are as consistent with their real characters as possible. For instance, Union General Dan Sickles is a self-aggrandizing egotist who very well could bring about the disasters of this story. They are also slaves to the same weather and other real-time conditions that prevailed at that time.

Best of all, this book is fast paced and engrossing as the authors create a Civil War story in which you don't actually know the ending. Unfortunately for me, that will not be so when I finally get book one of this series, Gettysburg. But I will get it! If it's as entertaining and fun as this one was, I won't mind at all. This is a 4 star story!

Double Tap, by Steve Martini

I am a longtime fan of Steve Martini, so when I found I could get his latest novel in audiobook format for FREE, I was quite excited. This recording is 13 hours and 45 minutes long, and is read by George Guidall.

Martini's legal thrillers are the best I have ever read, leaving Grisham in the dust, with lots of outstanding courtroom drama. Make a point of picking up The Judge, The Jury, The Arraignment, or any of his other titles that seem lawyer-oriented. Feel free to avoid Critical Mass. Recurring characters include Paul Madriani, a smart lawyer with a daughter named Sara whose wife has died of cancer, and Harry Hinds, a curmudgeonly legal sidekick who provides most of the comic relief in Martini's books.

In Double Tap, a woman software executive is killed in her home, assassination style. The weapon and silencer are found, separately, outside her beach home in a somewhat botched attempt to dispose of them. The weapon belonged to a previously employed private security detail member with whom she had been fooling around. The dismissed security man, Eliliano Luiz, is a former Army special forces member, and he is now in jail as the chief suspect.

Madriani cannot believe that this man would have left such an obvious trail of breadcrumbs back to himself, and starts looking for other reasons why someone would want this woman dead. As it turns out, she has connections with the Pentagon and had a falling out with them over a security program that she has been providing for Homeland Security.

This is a well-written story with a twist. It's also very well researched and somewhat alarming. I look forward to more just like it,and it gets 4 stars.

The Whistling Season, by Ivan Doig

Not only could you let your school-aged children read this book. You should. It's hard to find a gem like this that will so artfully penetrate our own layers of cynicism to experience a childhood of simple pleasures and the normal agonies of life before radio and television.

A rural Montana homesteader is widowed in 1909, and within a year he is ready to hire a housekeeper for himself and his 3 boys. He hires one from Minneapolis, sight unseen, even though the ad in the paper says, "can't cook, but doesn't bite".

The housekeeper is not the frumpy matron he and his boys imagined, but is instead an attractive brunette named Rose who comes with an unexpected escort: a somewhat eccentric and erudite brother Morris. Both of the new Montana residents are hard workers. Rose is a domestic dervish, although it is unfortunate that her cooking is as non-existent as advertised. Morris cuts wood while discoursing on all manner of subjects with the eldest son, Paul, who attends a one-room school house where he is one of only two seventh graders.

Due to an odd turn of events, the school teacher running off with an itinerant tent preacher named Brother Jubal, the school is hard up enough to offer the job to Morris. This turns out to be wonderful turn of events. Morris, though a novice teacher, brings all his passion and zeal for knowledge to the task.

There is a lot going on in this book, and I don't want to give anything away. But it was a pure, grinning pleasure to listen to. The writing is transporting and uplifting while the story is just plain fun. The early 20th century was a hard place to live, but it's a wonderful place to visit. This gets 4 stars.

The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford

This audiobook was 10:06:45 long and was narrated by Robert Ian MacKenzie. I downloaded it from netlibrary.org.

This was an excellent read by an economist who has both his feet on the ground. He discusses the reasons by economies, large and small, either succeed and fail, whether they are street gangs selling drugs, or large national economies rising from the ruins. It is written in a lively, sometimes humorous, style and leaves you feeling like you really learned something. I know it's affected how I look at my own business, and I am already taking measures too implement what I've learned.

Because economics is such a huge component in anyone's politics, there will be something here to offend almost anyone's sensibilities. That is because Mr. Harford says it doesn't matter who owns the means of production; what matters is what you do with them. And truth often collides with ideology. Economies of the mind don't have to put food on the table and pay for medical care. Real cash and credit economies do.

Voters and politicians alike should read this, as well a readers who are merely looking for some sugar on their enlightenment. This was a pleasure to listen to, and I give it 4 stars.

My Palm T/X

I've had one of those frustrating weeks where my tech stuff has been letting me down. First, my mp3 player is 8 hours into a 13 hour audiobook when I try to pause it and accidentally restart it. (I have discussed this issue before.) Now it has to be started all over again. I did it, and when it got to about 9 hours, the battery ran out and restarted it again. So, I am listening to that book in bits and pieces on my PC, which makes me crazy.

Next, my Palm T/X, which is a marvelous device with plenty of storage, stops synching with my computer through it's USB cable. I think it's because the prongs are all exposed and sensitive little buggers which are persnickety at times about making a good contact. I consider this a serious design flaw. My previous, cheaper and less capable, Palm Zire 21 at least had sense enough to have all its sensitive parts covered, as do we all.

The Palm will still synch with my computer, but it has to do it through the wireless network. This is a great trick, and I love it for this, but adding sound files to your Palm though the network, for some unknown reason, takes forever. Why is it that I can download a 46 MB podcast over the wireless network and the Internet, but it takes about 50-100 times as long to get it from my own computer? This is infuriating. I suppose I could create a workaround by buying a cheap card reader, taking the 1 GB memory card out of the Palm, put it in the reader, transfer the files through that device's uncomplicated, simpleminded cable, and then just slip the card back into the Palm.

Another drawback on the Palm is that it's default music player, pocket tunes, will not play WMA files of any kind. So, when I rip stuff off a CD, I have to remember to set the options for mp3 output so I can play it on the Palm. I can get an upgrade of pocket tunes, but I will NOT pay $40 for an audio player on my Palm.

I got my Palm T/X, a $299 device at Best Buy, for $198 + about $6 shipping (more than offsets the no-sales-tax) from gizmos2go.com. For another $40 bucks I got a total replacement warranty, which is a good bet for me that I just might destroy this device in a year. I did it to my mp3 player, so it was a good investment.

It's not all downside for the PalmT/X. I am just put out with a feature or two right now. It has a great calendar, contact management, imports Word docs, has a calculator, memopad, virtual keyboard that pulls up on screen, so when you don't need it, it give you more screen for games, web surfing, email, video (mpg support, but not wmv). The wireless network scanning is a snap. I can find open wireless connections at the library branches (I pull into the lot and get my email right there in my car!), and in many neighborhoods where people decided to skip password protection when setting up their wireless routers! (Thanks, guys!)

All in all, this is a 4 star device with a couple of 2 star drawbacks. As usual, it depends on what you got this for. If you dig audiobooks and podcasts, it will be hit or miss. If you have a wireless network at home, and you like to get your email on the road without having an extra paid account though a smart phone, this little beauty will make you very happy.