Walk the World's Rim Betty Baker In 1527, five ships set sail from Cuba to explore Florida. "Florida" vaguely referred to essentially everything north of Mexico. Spain laid claim to all of it. Of the 600 men and women aboard, only four survived: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and an African slave of Dorantes', Esteban. For seven years they were held prisoner by Gulf Coast Native Americans. They made themselves valuable by curing sick people through prayer. After seven years they escaped and fled into the interior of what is now Texas, where they found a home for a while with a group of friendly "Avavare" people -- aside from the writings of Cabeza de Vaca, the name Avavare is now unknown. Eventually leaving the Avavare, they journeyed northwest, and then eventually south to Mexico. Walk the World's Rim  by children's author  Betty Baker  is an account of that journey. It is told from the point ...

Cave of Bones Anne Hillerman On reading this paragraph on page 6 of  Cave of Bones , Chee planned to be away in Santa Fe for a few days, for intensive training at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy. Bernie’s sister, Darleen, had been invited to attend a program for prospective students at the Institute of American Indian Arts, a college in Santa Fe. Even Mama would be gone. Her mother felt so well she planned to go to the Crownpoint rug auction with her weaving student, Mrs. Bigman. I thought to myself, "Subtle,  Anne Hillerman ! You want to give Bernie a story of her own, and so you have unceremoniously hustled her family off-stage!" I expected therefore, that this would be a novel focused almost entirely on Bernie. That was not unwelcome. I like Bernie, as I believe does everyone who reads these novels. But  Hillerman  is smarter than me. It turns out that Chee and Darleen, even off there in Sante Fe, have important roles to play. It begins when Bernie is invit...

Mara, Daughter of the Nile Eloise Jarvis McGraw ** spoiler alert ** Good news first:  Mara, Daughter of the Nile  is a fun, light-hearted romance/spy novel with an appealing heroine -- that would be the slave-girl Mara named in the title. Now for the bad news: it is utterly conventional. The love story is one you have read dozens of time if you read romance novels: rich and powerful man falls in love with plucky poor girl. She, of course, loves him for himself, not his money or power, and in the end they marry and live happily ever after. Examples that come to my mind are  Daddy Longlegs ,  Jane Eyre , and the film Pretty Woman (although I hasten to clarify that Mara's profession is not that of Vivian Ward -- everything here is relentlessly PG-13). I could keep listing such novels forever -- you have probably thought of a few more even while reading the previous very long sentence. It's a very old story and not in itself a bad one -- it's Cinderella. This particular ...

The Magnus Archives: Season 1 Jonathan Sims, Rusty Quill The Magnus Archives is a free podcast from  Rusty Quill .  Season 1  consists of 40 episodes (I think that's true of all five seasons), each about half an hour long. Most of the episodes consist of the author,  Jonathan Sims , reading reports into a tape recorder, in character as Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute. The Archivist's name is also Jonathan Sims. I will refer to the character as "Jonathan". I began  The Magnus Archives  by looking for a way to  read  it, rather than listen to it. I did not find one at the time, and thus ended up listening to Season 1. After finishing Season 1 a further exploration of the  Rusty Quill  web site led to a solution.  Transcripts of all episodes are available free from Rusty Quill  in PDF form. You can download all 40 Season 1 transcripts, combine them into one big file on your computer (e.g., using acrobat or ghostscript), and...

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known Seanan McGuire Mislaid in Parts Half-Known  is book 9 in  Seanan McGuire 's  Wayward Children series . It follows two seriously serious (I meant to do that) books  Where the Drowned Girls Go , in which we saw the inside of the Whitethorn Institute, a a seriously depressing opposite to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, and  Lost in the Moment and Found , in which Antoinette (Antsy) Ricci escaped a seriously awful home. Thus we are due for a lighter touch, and we get it. Antsy and the Whitethorn escapees Cora and Emily are now at Eleanor's along with old friends Christopher, Sumi, and Kade. Antsy has the much-coveted gift of finding Doors. Escaping a couple of girls who want to make use of her, she finds herself trapped in Kade's attic with the students named above. She finds a Door in the back of the attic that allows them to escape. This is the beginning of what I'm calling their school outing, although in fact it is not the w...

City of Bones: Updated and Revised Edition Martha Wells City of Bones , published in 1995, was  Martha Wells ' second published novel.  This book  is an updated and revised edition, and is  Wells '  preferred text. Now, I have a confession to make: I have not read the earlier edition. Thus I do not know how it changed to make this one. (And while I'm in a confessional mood, let me also admit that I don't know why the book is called " City of Bones "-- bones play a very small role in the book.) Like many of you (your turn to confess!), I became interested in  Wells  through  Murderbot . If that is you, well, if you were hoping for something a lot like  Murderbot , this is not that. City of Bones  is one of those novels that avoids commitment to either Fantasy or Science Fiction. It's a postapocalypse novel. The seas of the world on which it takes place (which could be a future Earth) have been replaced by volcanic wastelands. Prior to the...

Creatures of Light and Darkness Roger Zelazny I remember my first encounter with  Creatures of Light and Darkness  vividly. I was browsing the Science Fiction shelves in a bookstore. I had already by that time acquired the habit of heading to the far end where the Z's were shelved to see what was new from  Roger Zelazny . I opened  Creatures of Light and Darkness  to a random page in the middle to see what it was like. I saw lines of something resembling poetry about characters called Set and the Steel General, spoken by someone called "The Prince Who Was A Thousand". As story, it did not make a lot of sense. I shuddered a bit and put it back on the shelf. It was not what I wanted at that moment -- a simple story, simply told. But I did later read it -- it's a wonderful book, and more narratively straightforward than my brief dip into the middle of it had suggested. Zelazny  did not initially intend to publish  Creatures of Light and Darkness . He wrot...

Locklands Robert Jackson Bennett In this corner we have Crasedes Magnus, the immortal heirophant -- oh, Heck, let's just call him a God -- who wants to enslave all of humanity for their own good. BOO!! HISS!! In the opposite corner we have Tevanne, which is the name we now use for the entity that came into being when Gregor Dandolo allowed the Artificial Intelligence known as Valeria to take him over, and together the two of them took control of all the scrived rigs of the city of Tevanne. (This, more or less, is analogous to taking over all the electronic devices of a modern real-world city.) Gregor's goal was to thwart Crasedes. But, alas. Valeria's intentions for humanity make Crasedes look like Saint Francis of Assisi. More BOO!! HISS!! In a third corner we have our heroes (OOO!! SIGH...) Berenice and Sancia and their good friends (not all of whom are dead). Tevanne has imprisoned Crasedes and has, for the last eight years, been making war on the collective Berenice and...

Song of the Lion Anne Hillerman Song of the Lion  is the 21st novel in the excellent  Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito mystery series  by  Tony Hillerman  and  Anne Hillerman . It is  Anne Hillerman 's third novel. It lives up to the standard set by both Hillermans for this series. All three of the series title characters, Joe Leaphorn, Jim, Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito, are important point-of-view characters in this mystery. Leaphorn is still recovering from the brain injury he received in  Spider Woman's Daughter . His speech is limited, but his friend Louisa bought him a laptop, equipped with a Navajo keyboard. Leaphorn, who was always a bit of a technophobe, is learning to love the way it allows him to function. I found this charming and entirely plausible. He contributes by digging up some relevant history. Bernie and Chee are more directly involved in investigating the central mystery of the novel. The story begins when Bernie, off-duty and a...

Holes Louis Sachar Let me start be explaining my review title. There are no literal dragons in  Holes . The title comes from this quote The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed. --  G.K. Chesterton I read  Holes  in 2000. At the time I was a professor, and one of my students, who had a young family, mentioned that he had been reading  Holes  to his young son, and that his son was upset by the violence. Well, I have always made a habit of reading Newbery Medal winners, but being at the time extraordinarily busy, I had fallen behind. This comment induced me to get a copy and read it. It is an extraordinarily good book. You probably know already that the Newbery Medal was just the first of the many honors it has been awarded. It was "was ranked number 6 among all-time children's novels by School Library Journal in 2012." ...

Rock with Wings Anne Hillerman Rock with Wings  by  Anne Hillerman  is the twentieth novel in the  Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito series of mysteries . It is  Anne Hillerman 's second novel -- her father  Tony Hillerman  wrote the first 18 novels. If you, like me, are a fan of  Tony Hillerman 's, you will naturally be wondering whether daughter  Anne  is equally good. On the basis of her first two novels, I would answer yes. Her novels are generally similar to  Tony 's in tone and in their portrayal of the Navajo.  Anne 's novels feel more in touch with modernity to me, and she brings forward a female point of view -- although Bernie Manuelito first appeared in  Tony 's later novels as the last of Jim Chee's romantic interests, she is far more central to  Anne 's novels. Spider Woman's Daughter  was told almost entirely from Bernie's point of view, with some small contributions from Jim Chee. In  Rock with Wi...

The Soul of a New Machine Tracy Kidder There are certain stories our world deems interesting to tell and to hear: stories of battle, stories about artists, stories about show business, stories about politics, stories about crime, and of course love stories. An author would have to be crazy to dedicate himself to the proposition that there is an engrossing story to be told about about building a house, or designing a digital computer. Tracy Kidder  is that author. His book  House  tells about the building of an ordinary family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. This book,  The Soul of a New Machine , tells the story of the design of a digital computer at the minicomputer company Data General in the 1970s. Before the 1970s a computer was a huge, honking machine, so expensive that an organization that needed to do computing, such as a university, would own exactly one mainframe computer, probably an IBM (AKA "the Evil Empire"), and use it for all campus computing. In the 1...

Numerical Methods That Work Forman S Acton This is a difficult book to rate, because it is so much an artefact of its time. For about ten years (1973-1983) it was my Bible. Now, in 2023, I'd have to call it virtually useless for the practicing software engineer. That it was reprinted in 1997 by The Mathematical Association of America is a tribute to its classic status in the field. But by 1997 it was, honestly, already obsolete. I have decided to give it five stars as the classic it is, although I don't recommend anyone use it now. In 1973 I started as a freshman at Cornell University, where I immediately joined a chemistry research lab. I did chemical kinetics research. We needed software to analyze results, and I wrote it. That was the way it worked then -- if you used software, you were more than likely going to write it. (Not everyone -- the other folks in the lab used my software. So I was that 17-year-old computer nerd, though we weren't called that then.) My copy -- ...