I just finished this book. It is awesome. It is about a young registered sex offender in Florida who due to the Florida residency laws can live in only one place in his county, underneath a causeway. He wears a gps ankle bracelet that lets his parole officer know instantly if he strays into a forbidden zone.

Also, thanks to an internet based sex offender registry, given his name anybody can get on the internet and find out his histroy. So for 10 years he is doomed to homelessness and despair and he never actually assaulted anyone. He was lured into what he thought was a liaison with a 14 year old but the girl’s father met him at the door. Lucky for the daughter.

The whole thing about sex offenders’ residency laws has intrigued me. Sex offenders don’t have any advocates so they are free game for any politician looking for a few cheap votes to make it harder to find a place to live. It has gotten to the point where some of the offenders have stopped registering their addresses and go underground which makes it harder to authorities to monitor them.

This book about more than sex offenders though. It is about the difference between shame and guilt, and the nature of belief and reality which is fancy way of asking how do we really know the truth about things. It is also about community and how we deal with outcasts.

The book is also about growing up without parents who care. Take my advice, care about what your kids and grand-kids are looking at online. It matters.

The book is extremely well written and kept me going to the end. I rate it four stars out of five.

More Information – Infographic on Sexual Predators

Via: MedicalBillingAndCoding.org

“Irma Voth” is a “coming of age story” about a teenage girl with that name. Her family are Mennonites who lived  in Canada but then went to Mexico in their continuing search of land where they will be left alone by the government. She has been shunned by her family for marrying a Mexican and then her husband leaves her. Women don’t do well in her family so she ends leaving her family with a younger teenage sister and an infant sister that her Mother gives to her.

The book is about her adventures as she finds her way in the world and encounters with others. Besides that the book is about escaping an old life and finding a new life and what that costs her and in a twist what her quest for independence cost others. It is about deep secrets and the costs of those secrets. I found the book amazing. It is 250 pages and I’m not a particularly fast reader but I zipped through in about three hours. It’s one of those rare books where the story is so compelling and the writing is so smooth that one loses the sensation of reading.

Besides being a great story the book presents Mennonites as three dimensional real people and not idealized concepts as portrayed so many times in movies and television.

I give the book five stars out of five.  I got my copy at the library. I recommend that you do the same.

I’m going to be reading more of Miriam Toews (pronounced tâves). She is Canadian of Mennonite descent. She may be the best author that I had never heard of. She also starred in a Mexican movie, “Silent Light.”  Must be nice to be talented.

The Graveyard Book is supposedly a children’s book. I hope that its okay with everybody if I read children’s books. I used to read them all the time to my son SuperPizzaBoy. Then when he was eleven or so he is was done with me reading to him. I still miss it.

The book starts with a man named Jack who has just killed three people in a home with a knife. He starts looking for the fourth, a toddler, but the toddler who has had elopement issues has gotten away again and leaves the house and heads for a long abandoned graveyard now turned nature preserve. Jack follows the toddler by following the smell of his pee soaked diaper.

The boy gets to the graveyard and is protected by a ghost. Another ghost convinces Jack that the kids isn’t there. The ghosts, which number in the thousands, most of whom are hundreds of years old decide after a fierce debate to extend the child “The protection of the graveyard.” They also give him the name “Nobody.” The rest of the book follows Nobody as he grows up and learns more about the graveyards and the ghostly life. My favorite parts are where he learns how to shimmer and manipulate human memories and other ghostly skills. That is how he can attend regular school and nobody really remember him at the end of the day.

Eventually though Nobody gets to the age where he has to leave the Graveyard and find out about that man Jack.

The book is wonderful and short. Get it at your library. I give it 3.5 stars out of 5 which is good. I’ll be reading more by Neil Gaiman.

I just finished a who dunnit by an author new to me, Benjamin Black, the pen name of John Banville. The book is set in Dublin, Ireland where Richard Jewell, aka “Diamond Dick” a rich powerful newspaperman is found with his head blown off by a shotgun. Crusty old detective Hackett calls in his friend Quirke a medical examiner to help solve the crime. Quirke, who is well named by the way, quickly gets personally involved with Jewell’s beautiful french wife, Francoise.

Detective Hackett and Quirke are crusty old guys with a few nicks and scrapes. The writing is superb and the  plotting tight. This was a great find and I recommend it highly. Get it at your local library, I did, save some bucks.

I rate this book 3.5 stars out of 5. It’s a great book.

This is my year for Teen Fiction I guess. I found the ones I’ve read so far to be good reads. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is the first book in a science fiction trilogy set in a not distant authoritarian future. The country of Panema is ruled by a city called the Capitol. At some point in the past the rest of the country rebelled against the Capitol and lost. As part retribution the various districts comprising the country have to select two random people called tributes to go the Capitol and and fight to the death in a televised series of games. There are eight districts, so 16 tributes.

Katniss is one of the tributes and the book follows her as he fights in the games. I’m not going to give the book away just to tell you that the book is very compelling and a very good read. The only problem is, and it is not really a problem, is that I can’t wait to read the other two books.

This book is four stars out of five. Get it, read it before your teenager can steal it from you. Or, what they hey, steal their copy.

The Hunger Games Trilogy web site has all sorts of cool stuff, author interviews and such. Check it out.

My friend Bill over at Tulsa Gentleman suggested this book, “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova. I saw it at a used book store and snatched it up, cheap. And what a find it was. I love this book. It is a multi-generational story set in eastern Europe. It’s got old old libraries and monasteries and crypts and all sorts of stuff. But mainly this book is about the hunt for a vampire. Not just any vampire but the granddaddy of all vampires.

Vlad the Impaler, a very mean dude, an actual historical character who killed tens of thousands of people. His favorite method, impaling a person on a pole and planting the pole in the ground. The Christian Church loved him though because he was good at fighting off the Muslims who were encroaching in Europe.

Anyway he turned himself into a vampire. An old school vampire right out of Bram Stoker‘s novel. Chasing him are a band of intrepid, shabby, scholars of medieval history who are trying to trace his whereabouts in the 20th century by searching for and examining documents and books more than a thousand years old. During their search they find romance and intrigue in the countryside.

I give the book four stars out of five. It is a great read. I took it on vacation and read it on the beach. Elizabeth Kostova is quite a story teller. I’ll be reading more of her.

I found a new fictional private detective, Alec Blume, of the Rome Police. He was born an American to two academics who moved to Rome temporarily when he was just a kid. While there his parents were brutally murdered. He doesn’t really have any family or friends in the States that will take him so ends up staying in Rome making his own way and eventually becomes a police inspector. Very interesting. The Dogs of Rome by Conor Fitzgerald is the first in a new series of books to feature Alec Blume.

The book starts with the very grisly, amateurish, murder of the husband of a prominent Italian politician. Alec Blume is called to lead the investigation and immediately runs into roadblocks put up by the upper management of the police. The result is a very gritty fast paced novel. It of course involves the Italian police and judicial system which is fascinatingly different from what we have in the US.

I found the novel fascinating. I read most of it on the beach on vacation on my Kindle. I rate it four stars out of five overall, five stars out of five for a beach read.

I have been reading “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift on my Ipod Touch for the last several months during the odd moments of time like waiting  in line. The book is a novel in four parts about the travels of Lemuel Gulliver to various parts of the world. The book was a real surprise for me. I had always thought of it as a children’s book. The classic scene is Gulliver tied up by the Lilliputian’s until they figure out that he doesn’t mean to harm them.

There is this vague sense that things are all great at the end.

Wrong! The Lilliptutan’s are a bunch of small minded people and Gulliver soon ends up in trouble. First he puts out a fire in the Queen’s castle by urinating on it, drenching the Queen. That makes her mad. Second, he helps the Lilliputan’s in their long standing war against the island of Blefusco but refuses to help make Blefusco totally subservient to Lilliput. He is sentenced to be blinded as punishment for this treason so he escapes.

Next he winds up in the Kingdom of Brobdingnag where instead of being twelve times bigger than the inhabitants as he was in Lilliput,he is twelve times smaller. He is found by a farmer who displays him for money. Gulliver ends up in the royal court and then the story gets kind of kinky. He is used as a kind of a sexual plaything and is molested by the women of the court, including a sixteen your old girl. Gulliver writes about how disgusting the giant naked women are. This part was a hoot. I wouldn’t read it as a bedtime story to your kids.

Gulliver leaves Brobdingnag and has several other adventures. His final destination is the Country of the Houyhnhnm. The Houyhnhnm are a kind of a horse shaped beings. Their are human’s there called Yahoo who are looked down upon by the Houyhnhnm as being base and menial and not good for much. The Houyhnhnm are very advanced and rational and listen with dismay as Gulliver tells them about Europe and how governments are run.

Eventually Gulliver has to leave Houyhnhnm and return to England. At this point he has been transformed from the happy go lucky adventurer to a recluse, disgusted by all contact with humans, even with his wife, whom can hardly stand.

The book is a great read. Swift is very imaginative and has a great writing style. I give it four stars out of five. It”s a classic. I’m going to miss it.

Does anybody have a recommendation for another classic for me to read?