France, 1815: Young sailor Edmond Dantes returns home to Marseille, about to marry his fiancee Mercedes and be promoted to ship's captain. Unfortunately, three jealous friends conspire to get him arrested as a Bonapartist and he becomes a secret political prisoner instead. On the prison island he begins a friendship with another inmate, an Italian priest and scholar, who over the course of the following years provides Edmond with a comprehensive education and also information about a great treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo.

Edmond finally escapes and uses his new-found fabulous fortunes, combined with endless patience and merciless determination, as well as thorough knowledge of the world, its peoples, and its languages, to put into motion an elaborate plan for revenge. Using a number of fake identities, most notably as the Count of Monte Cristo, he seeks out the trust of his unsuspecting enemies and arranges their downfall.

The novel is available in its entirety from Project Gutenberg, and thanks to Youtube, many television and movie adaptations are readily viewable online, too (at least in parts), so that it is easy to take a look and see what got translated to the screen and how. From what I have seen I can recommend the French 1998 miniseries with Gerard Depardieu and Ornella Muti (which seems to introduce an additional major character), and the Japanese anime Gankutsuou (which presents the tale as a space opera)

Stanley Yelnats, whose name reads the same backwards and forwards, is cursed by his family's history of bad luck, which started when his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather did not actually steal a pig, but broke a promise to a one-legged Gypsy. And so it does not come as too big a surprise when he is convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to a juvenile detention centre in the desert, where he has to dig a hole every day, five feet deep and five feet across. This is supposed to be just a character building exercise, but the Warden takes a strange interest in what the boys dig up.

What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1-13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers. I also added an explanatory note before or after each story, depending on which seemed the more fitting position. Next collection: selected by Tarot.

A collection of fourteen short stories (ranging from about twenty to about eighty pages) about undergoing an autopsy while still alive, meeting The Man in the Black Suit, a travelling salesman contemplating suicide, gangsters in the Thirties, escape from a torture chamber, vampires in the West, occult symbols that can kill, a theory of pets, a scary painting that keeps changing, a crazy restaurant waiter and his big knife, the feeling you can only say what it is in French, a haunted hotel room, hitchhiking with the undead, and a lucky quarter.

Alan has just sold his shop and purchased a house that he plans to write his story in. He spends the rest of his time helping Kurt with his project to set up a free neighbourhood Wi-Fi network. Adam's peace is destroyed by visits from his younger brothers Eric, Fred, and George, who are a set of Russian nesting dolls (Alvin comes closest to human in his family: his father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, the other brothers Ben, Charlie, and Dean are a psychic, an island and undead). As children, they have jointly murdered Daniel, who was intolerable in the first place and is now really angry, apparently planning to revenge himself by killing his brothers.

Sometimes billed as science-fiction, I would rather call Someone a fantasy or a horror novel. I really liked the part about Albert's family (and hope to see a future short story based in that world). The real-world subplot about the Wi-Fi network felt out of place, however. I see the need for showing how he interacts with humans, but it just felt like a lecture. It would have been more interesting to for example follow Aaron's house remodelling efforts, or maybe have him open another shop.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

One of the best-known horror short stories, The Call of Cthulhu is presented in documentary style, as a series of notes found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston. Mr. Thurston himself has been pulled into the mystery by stumbling upon notes left behind by his late grand-uncle, who in turn had been piecing together reports about outlandish rituals and outbreaks of mania, as they happened around the world, while still strangely connected to each other.

Marcus is a high school student in San Francisco. He is smart and tech-savvy enough to outwit his school's surveillance systems (keystroke loggers on the classroom laptops, RFID on library books, gait recognition cameras), so that he can chat and surf during classes and leave the school grounds unnoticed. Then terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the Department of Homeland Security takes over control of the city, implementing all kinds of security measures. Marcus' attitude towards authority, combined with his technical skills, do not go over well with the DHS and they give him a hard time, which motivates him to put his energy to sabotaging the war on terror, trying to show the insanity and futility of that campaign, while putting him and his friends at a much greater personal risk than he could ever have imagined.

Needless to say, this is a very political book, trying to raise awareness about how Western democracies are quickly turning into police states. It is also spiked with interesting technology pieces, all of which seem much more science than fiction, most of which are probably already in place. In fact, reading it alongside with real news articles is more than a bit scary.

Gibson and Sterling collaborate to create an alternate nineteenth century, where Babbage's Analytical Engine has actually been built and the Information Revolution coincides with (and propels) the Industrial Revolution. Power in Victorian England has been seized by the Industrial Radical Party, with hereditary lords and Luddites alike being pushed to the sidelines.

The book is a mostly atmospheric piece with several vignettes (translation: it is a bit in want of a coherent story), that detail episodes in the lives of Londoners at the time: A prostitute who gets caught up in political spheres, a palaeontologist who stumbles upon a stack of Engine cards and into a violent riot, and a diplomat/spy who is plagued by visions of an all-seeing Eye.

In spite of the shift from cyberpunk to steampunk, the genre's typical topics are all to be found: The subculture of the tech-savvy clackers that know how to program the steam-powered Engines (using punch-cards), the dystopian view of the ever-watchful, data-gathering surveillance state, the mysterious and dangerous artefact that serves to drive the story (in this case a stack of cards created by the Queen of Engines, Ada Lovelace), even the fascination with Japan (which here has just opened itself to the world and is about to have its own Industrial Revolution).

An O'Reilly book without the popular animal cover design that collects essays where leading programmers explain how they think and present examples of elegant solutions to hard problems.

Author	Subject	Programming Language
Brian Kernighan	A regular expression matcher	C
Karl Fogel	An internal data structure of Subversion	C
Jon Bentley	Quicksort	C
Tim Bray	Web server log file analysis	Ruby
Elliotte Rusty Harold	XML verification	Java
Michael Feathers	The FIT Framework for Integrated Test	Java
Alberto Savoia	JUnit	Java
Charles Petzold	On-the-fly code generation	C, C#, CLR Intermediate Language
Douglas Crockford	Top-down-operator-precedence parsers	JavaScript
Henry S. Warren, Jr.	Counting the number of set bits in a word	C and circuit diagrams
Ashish Gulhati	Secure web-based email	Perl
Lincoln Stein	Data visualisation for bioinformatics	Perl
Jim Kent	A genome analyser web application	C
Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek	Libraries to solve linear equations	MATLAB, Fortran
Adam Kolawa	The CERN mathematical library	Fortran
Greg Kroah-Hartman	Linux kernel drivers	C
Diomidis Spinellis	Layers of indirection in the FreeBSD filesystem drivers	C
Andrew Kuchling	Python's dictionary data structure	C, Python
Travis E. Oliphant	Multidimensional array iterators	C, Python
Ronald Mak	A highly reliable information portal for the NASA Mars Rover Mission	Java
Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat	Enterprise Resource Planning	Python
Bryan Cantrill	Thread synchronisation and prioritisation in Solaris	C
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat	Map-Reduce	C++
Simon Peyton Jones	Software Transactional Memory	Haskell
R. Kent Dybvig	Macro expansions	Scheme
William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt	A networked logging service	C++
Andrew Patzer	REST (as opposed to SOAP) for integrating business partners	Java
Andreas Zeller	Systematic debugging	Python
Yukihiro Matsumoto	Brevity and human-readability	Ruby
Arun Mehta	A one-button user interface for Professor Hawking	Visual Basic
T.V. Raman	Emacspeak (auditory output from Emacs)	Emacs Lisp
Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald	The Seven Pillars of Pretty Code	C
Brian Hayes	Computational Geometry	Lisp

I quite enjoyed the Golden Compass movie and immediately ordered this boxed set of Lyra's adventures (the Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass) from Amazon. It is being marketed as a Young Adult book, probably as a result of the main characters all being teenagers, but it certainly tackles more serious topics than, say, Harry Potter, and there are also a number of rather shocking plot developments.

When the Catholic League called for a boycott of the Golden Compass movie, they said it was less about the picture, but more about keeping children away from the books. And indeed, Pullman is quite aggressive in his attack on the concept of organised religion, to the point where one has to wonder if he is actively trying to offend.

Hardcore fans of the novels also disparaged the movie for watering down the controversial content to make it more commercially viable. I do not think that this actually happened, and the religious themes are not all that prominent until the later volumes anyway, but the movie does deviate from the source material in other ways, most notably in that it cuts off the ending (an anti-Happy-Ending if there ever was one) and reverses the order of the two main events before that. Apparently Pullman approved of these changes, though.

HarperCollins has released another free MP3 recording of Neil Gaiman reading one of his stories, which he does very, very well. A letter-form story set in Cthulhu-Victorian London (and narrated in wonderful Victorian English), A Study in Emerald follows the protagonist, who shares lodging in Baker Street with the city's foremost consulting detective, as he assists his friend in the case of a murdered German noble.

Ten years after Ringworld, and after having received many letters with feedback apparently mostly about the mathematical assumptions and implications of the construction of the Ringworld, Larry Niven revisits his best-known creation.

Almost thirty years after their original exploration of the Ringworld, Louis Wu and the Kzin Chmee are abducted by the recently deposed Hindmost and forced to go there again. They find the Ringworld knocked off-centre and about to collide with its sun. Louis embarks on a quest to try and prevent the catastrophe and learn more of Ringworld's secrets and its elusive builders. In the process he gets to know (quite often even in the biblical sense) a few of the various humanoid species that populate this most stunning artifact in known space.

From the Hugo-Award-nominated-short-story-department. Both audio (read by the author) and text versions are available for free download from Gaiman's web site.

Hockenberry and the Trojan Women have tricked Achilles and Hector into an uneasy alliance, and at least for the moment all the Greeks, Trojans and their moravec allies follow them in their war against the Olympian gods. But both camps are far from united: Menelaus is still trying to kill his stolen wife Helen, and seize control of the Greek armies back from Achilles. The only thing that keeps the gods from banding up against each other is the ultimate authority of Zeus, who himself must be careful not to offend the Titans of Tartarus.

Back on Earth, things are going badly: The few remaining old-style humans are being slaughtered left and right by antisemitic robots, by Caliban, and by Caliban's god Setebos. They have to hope that help will arrive from Odysseus (either the old one that lives among them, or the young one that has just been kidnapped away from Mars), or from combat moravecs, or from any surviving post-humans, or from Prospero and Ariel. Or from the Quiet.

The book makes for an exciting (if confusing) read, but in the end, most of the plot lines are not resolved in a satisfactory way. There is no epic showdown, just a couple of last-minute super-sudden ex-machina turns of events, and some major threads are just dropped completely. Maybe Simmons is planning on a third volume (or a second dilogy) to wrap things up.

The Trojan War has been going on for nine years, prolonged and complicated by the meddling gods, who from their seat on the terra-formed Olympos Mons on Mars use Greeks and Trojans to play out their private feuds. In the midst of all this is Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first-century literature professor, who has been transported there to confirm if everything plays out according to Homer's epic. But then Aphrodite orders him to kill Athena.

Meanwhile on Earth, the last few hundred thousand humans spend their lives of exactly one hundred years each in blissful ignorance (which includes watching the Trojan War for entertainment). Who needs to know how to read when everything is taken care of by helpful machines? Only Savi, the Wandering Jew, who has been around for more than a millenium, remembers the (not so good) old days. And then there is Odysseus, the Wandering Greek, who quite enjoys hunting dinosaurs.

Mahnmut is a sentient submarine robot, who spends his days exploring Jupiter's moon Europa and discussing Shakespeare's sonnets with his friend Orphus, who has a similar job on Io, but is actually more fond of Proust. Both of them are sent to Mars on a mission to investigate the recent, strange and quite possibly dangerous activities on the red planet.

As with most other of Simmons' books, the story is split into two volumes, and after Ilium comes Olympos, which I already placed on the night-stand.

A motley crew of explorers (two human, two alien) is sent to the mysterious ring world to find out if the unknwon, yet unbelievably advanced Ringworld Engineers who built the place are friendly. Unfortunately, their spacecraft crashes and leaves them stranded on what seems to be a mostly deserted world, whose inhabitants are few, far in between, and, having devolved back to a pre-technological stage, unable to help them to get back home.

The air-plane book. Previously published under a pseudonym, this political thriller is set in the months leading to the first Gulf War: A low-ranking CIA analyst uncovers hints that Saddam Hussein could be preparing for a major military operation, but her superiors do not want to hear about it, because it does not fit into their own scheme of things. At the same time, a small-town Iowa Deputy Sheriff (and great admirer of Sherlock Holmes) investigates the murder of a foreign exchange student and stirs up a great deal of attention in Washington and in the Middle East. The plot and setting is not too exciting, but Stephenson's witty writing style is well worth your time.

Oh, and if anyone was wondering, I did finish the Baroque Cycle, and it was great. I started to blog about it, but trying to come up with something special to match the extraordinary books turned out to be too ambitious and I could not finish the posts. It would have required continuous note-taking throughout (which did not happen), or a page-by-page revisit (and pages there are plenty). Well, maybe one day. It was a concept.

Tsutaya hands out an annual handbook with descriptions, rankings, and pictures of their rental DVD. It's nice. There is a chapter for every genre (Drama, Love Story, Comedy, Musical, Classic, Literary, Documentary, Mystery, Action, SF, Horror, Asia, TV drama), each with an Editor's choice, several top tens, and a long ranking compiled from customer's recommendations. For every title, there is a picture of the DVD cover, a plot summary, topical icons, a checkbox for you to tick off, information about cast, crew, runtime, languages, picture and audio formats and so on.

Here are my coverage ratios for the top tens:

• Drama: 20%
• Love Story: 80%
• Comedy: 60%
• Musical: 40%
• Classic: 40%
• Literary: 70%
• Documentary: 20%
• Mystery: 20%
• Action: 60%
• SF: 90%
• Horror: 10%
• Asia: 0%
• TV drama: 20%
• Social: 20%

There is also a funny little mix-up with the original movie titles. The following films are all listed as Clear and Present Danger:

• For Love of the Game
• Seven Chances
• Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
• Runaway Jury
• Air Force One
• Miller's Crossing
• The Island

Things are not going well in and out of Hogwarts: Lord Voldemort has managed to gain control of the Ministry of Magic, turning it from the already unpleasantly Orwellian organisation of the previous two books into a downright fascist regime. Harry Potter has been named Undesirable Number One and has to live in hiding. Not that he would want to return to Hogwarts, now that his least favourite teacher Snape has been named Headmaster there. The quest to find and destroy the remaining Horcruxes, upon which Voldemort's power depends, is not going too well. Maybe the mysterious three Deathly Hallows could be of help?

And this is how I spent the weekend. Quite necessary, really, in order to defuse the danger of someone spilling the beans about the ending.

The second half of the Hyperion duology directly picks up where the first book (rather abruptly) ended. But in addition to finishing the story of the pilgrimage, the story expands to include dramatic events beyond the planet of Hyperion, mostly narrated through the eyes of a cybrid recreation of early 19th century poet John Keats (who has been very inspirational for Simmons, right up to the naming of his books). It is a little sad that the focus shifts away from the pilgrims, and both the more metaphysical and the more artistically involved parts are a little less readily accessible than the first part was, but Simmons again posits interesting topics, mainly about the relationship between Creator, his Creatures, and the rest of Creation: What happens if the Creatures try to depose the Creator? How trustworthy are Artificial Intelligences once they become sentient? Should mankind in its expansion across the universe be allowed to reconstruct the natural environment according to its needs, thereby destroying other forms of life? Or should man adapt to new environments, evolving itself into something that may no longer be considered entirely human?

Terrorised by a heat wave and a violent street gang, Gotham City is as bad a place is it ever was. Ten years after Batman's forced retirement, Bruce Wayne is pushing sixty. But despite of his age and his best intentions (and his efforts to drown his dark side in alcohol), despite butler Alfred's complaints and Commissioner Gordon's warnings, the Dark Knight breaks free again. Unfortunately, he is not welcome anymore. Police and politicians refuse to put up with his brand of vigilante justice, and the violence gets worse, especially after his comeback stirs The Joker out of catatonia. To make things worse, he is not twenty-nine anymore, and only gets out of some fights by luck, and badly bruised, too. Nevertheless, he continues to slug it out. Eventually Superman is brought in to put Batman away for good.