So far this year I have read 119 books. That’s more books that I read during the years of 2004 and 2007. That’s an average of 11.9 books a month.

Pretty good.

Switching back to mysteries, another series I’ve thoroughly enjoyed recently is Donna Leon‘s Commissario Guido Brunetti series. The books are set in Venice, where Brunetti lives with his wife and two children, and is a vice-Commissario of the Venice police.

First of all, Brunetti loves Venice, so we get lots of descriptions of the city, from someone who recognizes the many flaws of his home, but loves it anyway.

Second of all, Brunetti loves to eat, so we got lots of descriptions of meals and food.

Third, Italy is a very different place from the US, and corruption that would astonish Americans is par for the course. Bribes are the way to get things done, and who you know is often far more important than what you know and what your abilities are. As such, these stories are often quite different from American mysteries, in that we may learn who the criminal was, but it is rare that true justice is served.

This is not, however, as depressing as it sounds. Brunetti is a good father, a good husband, and a good man. He recognizes that he lives and works in an imperfect state, but does his job anyway. Additionally, Donna Leon writes with a light touch, and subjects that could become overwhelmingly depressing are lightened up to a small degree by Brunetti’s love for his city (and for his family).

And of course the mysteries are good. In the first book in the series, the murder occurs at La Fenice, the world famous opera house in Venice. (This setting became even more interesting after reading John Berendt‘s City of Falling Angels, which looks in some detail at the fire that burned down La Fenice and the reconstruction afterward.

But one of the best things in the stories is Brunetti’s relationship with Paola. Despite having teenage children, Guildo and his wife remain in love with each other. Not to say they don’t have their ups and downs, but it’s nice to read a mystery where the marriage is one of the strengths of the books, even while that relationship is not idealized. (Both Paola and Brunetti can be difficult and irritate each other, but it never lasts.) And I think that relationship makes the resolution (or lack there of) of the mysteries easier to take.

Commissario Guido Brunetti: Death at La Fenice (1992), Death in a Strange Country (1993), Dressed for Death (1994), Death and Judgment (1995), Acqua Alta (1996), Quietly in Their Sleep (1997), Friends in High Places (2000), Uniform Justice (2003), Doctored Evidence (2004), Blood from a Stone (2005), Through a Glass, Darkly (2006), Suffer the Little Children (2007)

I’ve been working on the graphics for my book blog, and also added the new design to the rest of the books portion of my site (which is not WordPress).

So there should be a mostly seamless transition between the WordPress portion of the site and the pages I created. The only issue is that there is a small margin/padding issue I cannot for the life of me work out, so the side border is just a teeny bit off. Humph.

ADDENDUM the First:
I also changed the color schemes to match the images.

ADDENDUM the Second:
And IE 6 or lower doens’t render png images correctly, so the header image will look wonky. Too bad. It works fine in all my other browsers, so you’ll just have to live with it.

Well, I didn’t bake much, but I have finished seven books.

And the night is still young. I could still bake or read something yet this evening!

Found some more books to add to the great book giveaway. And Michael decided to add to the pile.
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One of the nice things about taking two weeks off over the holidays, is that towards the end of my vacation I’ve realized what a mess the house is, and am rested up enough to actually do something about it.

About Friday afternoon reached that point, so Saturday was spent not just putting away Christmas ornaments, but also organizing the disaster area that the living room had become.

One of the things I am hoping will be a huge help is I got a bin into which Michael can put his stuff. He tends to leave things all over the end tables, which in turn makes them useless as end tables. So he got a bin.

The second thing, which you probably noticed from Saturday’s posts, is that I went through the book shelves. Not only could I no longer put pictures and elephants and other things on most shelves, but most shelves were double stacked so you couldn’t even see what books where there.

Since the whole point of having the mystery shelves in the living room was so grandmom could peruse the shelves and find something to read, this was no good.

Hence the book cull.
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It’s once again Banned Book Week.

Here is the list of the most challenged books of 2007

1. “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
2. “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
3. “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes
4. “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman
5. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
6. “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker
7. “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle
8. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou
9. “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris
10. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky

Here are the top 100 challenged books 2000 to 2007. (Books I’ve read are bold)

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So yesterday I insisted that my website was about more than my weblog–and then proceeded to talk about little but the blog.

Let’s move on today.

A major part of this site is my book blog and book pages.

This started as a way for me to keep track of books I’d read–especially after I’d sold them back to the used bookstore–and to remember what happened in a book–especially a continuing series.

It reached it’s current incarnation several years ago, although the amount of change it’s gone through seems to say that things may again change in the future.

But maybe not. It’s a lot of work to modify those pages.

First thing I’ll note is that when you go to the genre pages, you won’t get the full deal if you’re using IE. I’ll leave the rant for later, but suffice to say, IE doesn’t bother to follow the rules every other browser follows, so some of the really cool stuff I’ve done doesn’t work in IE. This doesn’t mean you can’t view the pages–everything works fine, and I have a style sheet JUST for freaking IE that ignores the really cool stuff I did. It just means you don’t get the drop down menus, which are really the heart of all the work I did.

So if you go to, say, the Fantasy page or the Mystery page, the menu at the top of the page contains various drop down menus listing every author I’ve read and reviewed. Yes, there are a lot names there. That menu stays with you as you browse the book pages, so you can quickly jump to another author.

There is little in the world that made me as happy as getting that menu system to work right, and making it easy to update.

So what if you’re using IE? You just jump down the page and can peruse the authors from there. Clicking on an author name will take you to the page. Everything works, but it’s just not as cool and useful.

Also, if you click on a book title or image, it will take you to Amazon, and I’ll get pennies for the purchase, that will eventually become a gift certificate which will eventually become a free book.

There is also a link to my on-line book database. This was my project for learning php and MySQL, and I was rather pleased with the way it turned out I must say. Unfortunately, my web host made some server changes in the past months, and my admin pages stopped working, and I haven’t had the time to try and fix them. So the database is about a year out of date. But still, it’s nice for trying to remember who wrote a book. And one day (HA!) I’d like to enter character names.

We’ll see how that goes.

So there’s another section of my site you may never have known existed.

This is the final list:

Plus Terry Prachett’s The Truth which I just found while cleaning out my backpack.

ADDENDUM the First:
And Capacity, by Tony Ballantyne, which I’ve been trying to read for a year.

In fact, I am a winner! A winner in Todd Wheelers reading contest!

And I didn’t just get bragging rights, no! I got LOOT!

Hopefully Todd doesn’t look at my library post, or else he’ll realize just how much trouble he could be in!

I came home from work today, and found UNEXPECTED LOOT! Early birthday loot from my brother! YIPPEE!

Dingo by Charles de Lint
Territory by Emma Bull
Double Feature by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly