This afternoon, we went and say the Tipsy Gypsy Trio, a gypsy jazz trio, at the Velo Rouge Cafe in San Francisco.

It was nice to get out to hear some live music, and the band was good. They are actually a four piece (violin, 2 guitars and bass) and had a singer sit in on a few songs. Everyone did an excellent job, playing some swing and gypsy jazz standards.

I actually know the violinist, Benito Cortez. He and I played together in a western swing class taught by Jack Tuttle and did one show, billed as the Silicon Valley Doughboys. Since then, he has gone on to be a professional musician, gigging in the SF bay area with a lot of local jazz groups.

Yesterday, I finished Compelling Evidence by Steve Martini.

Going through jury duty last week inspired me to check out a few legal thrillers. The first of these is Compelling Evidence, the first legal thriller by Steve Martini, and introducing his character, defense attorney Paul Madriani.

It's an OK thriller but nothing too special. The plot is pretty standard mystery stuff, with some legal procedural background added.

Last night, we saw Mike Marshall at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley.

The show had Mike playing with two bands - his Choro band Choro Famoso and his new band on new acoustic music hotshots, Big Trio.

The highlights of the night all belonged to the Choro music. Joining Choro Famoso on stage was Brazilian Choro hot shot Bandolim player Danilo Brito, an amazing player whose energy and enthusiasm seemed infectious.

The one complaint about the show I have is the sound mixing. I've never been a huge fan of the sound at the Freight but last night was particularly bad. In particular, the tamborine player in Choro Famoso was mixed much, much to loud. Admittedly, he was probably the best tamborine player I've seen, but the mix almost totally obscured the sound of the guitar player, and even overwhelmed the sound of Mike Marshall's mandolin playing at times.

I spent the last 4 days on jury duty. Before I was a citizen, I could blow off jury duty since I wasn't eligible to serve. Since I've become a citizen, I've only received one other jury duty notice, and I didn't have to go down and actually report.

This time, I did have to report. After all the prospective jurors gathered, we were split into seperate groups and sent off to court rooms. I was part of a group of 76 that was told we were prospective jurors for a criminal case involving a burglary of a house under construction. 12 people were selected to be the first set of jurors, and then the questioning started.

During the initial questioning, a few jurors were released "with cause", mainly for not having good enough English skills. This took most of the first afternoon. The second morning, we continued with the questioning and had a number of people released with "hardship" excuses. Then we moved onto the "peremptory" challenges, where the DA and defense can release jurors for any reason. By the end of the process, all but four of the original 12 jurors had been released, and the waiting prospective jurors were reduced by more than half. I was the last person selected for the actual jury.

As all the jurors figured out from the pre-trial questions, the trial mainly centered around the testimony of one witness, who claimed to see two people inside the house he was working on. His testimony turned out to be very detailed and convincing. One of the other witnesses was an accomplice who had already pled guilty to being one of the two perpetrators, and his testimony was much less compelling as he seemed to contradict himself a number of times. The rest of the witnesses were police officers whose testimony was used to establish various people's identities and various timelines of events. Ultimately, we came back with a verdict of "guilty" based on the evidence we saw.

Overall, it was a very interesting experience. The jury questioning was interesting for the first 15-20 people questioned. After that, it just felt repetitive and tiring for everyone involved. The trial itself, and the legal rules that were part of it, was very engaging. It was nice to see how the system works and I now have a better understanding of the various roles people play in a trial, and a better feel for some of the strengths and weaknesses of the American legal system.

This morning I finished The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives by James Blaylock, a collection of stories and two novels.

I've been a big fan of Blaylock since I read The Last Coin, which is still my favourite modern fantasy novel. Most of his books are in the modern fantasy vein, but the stories in The Adventures are actually very early steampunk.

The first of the two novels included Homunculus, has always been very hard to find and been out of print for many years, which is a shame since it's the best of the stories. I had read the second novel, Lord Kelvin's Machine, before and hadn't liked it very much. It's not a direct sequel, but it does help to be familiar with the main characters before reading it. In addition to the scientist St. Ives, there is his butler Hasbro, the toymaker Keeble, their friend Jack Owlesby and their nemesis Ignacio Narbondo.

Overall, these are some of the best steampunk books I've read. Blaylock has a very active imagination and a deft turn with descriptions and semi-surreal action. He's also not afraid of having serious consequences to his characters of their actions.

A few days ago, I finished The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

Subtitled English and how it got that way, it actually has a lot about language in general, the ways languages change over time and comparisons about language. While the book is quite fun to read, it seems Bryson's handle on the facts is a little looser than one might like. I did learn a lot about the history of the language, and hopefully that is mostly accurate.

We went and saw Coraline today, the new animated movie based on the Neil Gaiman book.

I haven't read the book, so I can't compare them, but it is an excellent movie. It's much darker and scarier than most children's movies, so I wouldn't recommend it for young children or easily frightened older children, but most adults will enjoy it.

We saw it in RealD 3D, which is a significant advance over other 3D systems. The glasses needed are unobtrusive and the effect is quite vivid. Thankfully, it wasn't used for silly jumping out of the screen shots, but just to bring the whole movie to a new level of depth. There were some obvious screen artifacts visible at times but otherwise no issues. The main drawback I can see is that the polarized glasses do dim the picture significantly.

I just finished Blood of the Fold by Terry Goodkind, the third book in his Sword of Truth series.

I wrote about the second book in the series here. Blood of the Fold is an improvement. First, it's shorter, and feels shorter. The scenes don't feel bloated and over-written. Second, it feels less derivative. It's still not innovative in any real sense, but it didn't feel as familiar to other fantasy works as the previous book. Third, the fact that it is the third book in a series gives the author a chance to develop more, in terms of making the world feel richer and more interesting.

Another strength of this series is becoming evident - instead of telling one long story, broken up at arbitrary points, like many of the epic fantasy series, each of these books feels like a complete story, even though there is an ongoing story going on as well.

Last night, we went and saw John Reischman and the Jaybirds, with opening act Kitchen Help at the Freight and Salvage as part of the SF Bluegrass and Oldtime Festival.

I have a bunch of friends in Kitchen Help, so it was nice to see them get to play in front of a good crowd at the Freight. They did a very good job - good song selection, good singing, good breaks and even a few good jokes.

The Jaybirds are an amazingly talented band, with a great selection of original bluegrass songs. They are more on the progressive side of bluegrass, which isn't always to my taste, but they do an excellent job of mixing new ideas in without giving up the core ingredients of what makes bluegrass work - the interplay between the banjo and fiddle over the rhythm of the guitar, mandolin and bass.

I just finished City at the End of Time by Greg Bear.

City at the End of Time is a little hard to categorize, within science fiction. Greg Bear is known as a hard science fiction writer, and there are hard science fiction elements in this book, but the way it deliberately avoids explaining in detail the things that happen, instead focusing on how it affects the characters, will bother some hard science fiction fans.

Whatever category it fits into, it's one of the most interesting, but difficult, science fiction books of the year for me. Interesting because of the new ideas, or at least new spins on old ideas, and the impressive scope of the book. Difficult because it not only has a lot of quasi-mystical unexplained events, but it starts with a splintered viewpoint that is slowly developed throughout the book. The relationships between the characters, when and where they are, and even what they are, is only very slowly revealed.

Like another of the best SF books of the year, Neal Stephenson's Anathem, it throws the reader in the deep end of the pool and doesn't wait for them to learn to swim before moving on. Also, like Anathem, (SPOILER ALERT), it involves alternate worlds and characters who can shift themselves between those alternates in order to manipulate events. Anathem does more to explain that ability, while in City it is taken for granted, an approach that applies to the rest of the book as well. Everything in Anathem is eventually explained, where things in City are left only partially discussed.

Last night I finished Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear.

Blood and Iron is the first of a series of urban fantasy books about an ongoing struggle between human magicians and faeries. Faeries have been losing, and their influence diminishing, and are trying to find a way to survive while the human magicians are trying to finish them off.

It also ties in a lot of fairy myths, centering around Tam Lin but including the Arthurian legends, and others.

It was just an OK book and I had a few problems with it. The first is that it is very talky - chapter after chapter would go by where the main feature is various characters discussing strategy with various legends discussed as illustration. The second is a lack of clarity. There were times after one of the long conversations where the characters have come to some insight, but often that insight is not well conveyed to the readers.

Not my favourite work by this author, I much prefered Dust.

Last night, we went to the last performance of Macbeth by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage.

My first time seeing a live performance of Macbeth and I enjoyed it. Seeing it live made the story hang together better than the film versions I've seen, and the director added some visual effects, like highlighting some of the soliloquy moments with a dark stage and a face only spotlight, that added the drama.

The costuming, music and minimalist set were all modern, something I don't usually like, but it didn't interfere with the story and did allow for some interesting musical cues. The performances were all very good, with a particularly strong actor playing Macbeth.

I also appreciated the fact that Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays, making it a nice, short night out, instead of the usual marathon of his longer plays.

Yesterday I finished Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.

Mortal Engines is a YA book set in a far future dystopia where cities have become huge mobile machines, travelling around looking for other cities to steal resources from, a process referred to as Municipal Darwinism. When the book starts, new cities to devour have become scarce and the leaders of London have hatched a dastardly plan to use Old Tech to conquer the last holdout non-roaming cities, called the Anti-Traction League.

The story is fun, if very off the wall, but the writing has some issues, particularly with point of view. Generally it follows one character at a time, but at time the author seems to forget where it is and will give us the inner thoughts/feelings of a character in the same scene before returning to it's proper place.

Over the weekend, I finished The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale, a non fiction book about a child's murder in 19th century England.

The murder was investigated by one of the first group of police labelled detectives - the first group to be allowed to move around in plain clothes and assigned to investigating important cases. In particular, it was Jonathan Whicher, the squad's most capable detective, that was sent. The case had scandalized the community and the evidence was ambiguous. Suspicion had fallen on the members of the family, but which one was the real murder?

The book does a good job of setting up the background of the death, and what happened subsequently when Whicher accused one family member but was unsuccessful in proving his case in court. It wasn't until years later that a confession proved who was right, and who was wrong.

The book also does a good job of showing how the detective story was developing in parallel to the actual detectives, and how this case influenced the new genre and mainly specific stories.

Last night we went with some friends to see Hot Club of Cowtown at the Little Fox Theater.

They are a modern western swing trio (fiddle, guitar and bass) and put on a great, great show - one of the best I have seen in a long time. I don't think there was a single song in either set that I didn't love.

All three members of the band were in good form and they did a nice mix of instrumentals and vocal pieces, including a blistering Orange Blossom Special at the end of the show.

Simply amazing, and a must see if they come by again.

I finished The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross this morning.

As is stated in the book in both the introduction and the postscript, The Atrocity Archive is a cross between Len Deighton and H.P. Lovecraft. It takes a fairly generic idea, a secret gov't organization that deals with the hidden magical nature of the world, but portrays it with the feel of a classic spy novel.

The closest comparison is Tim Power's Declare. Powers attacks it from a more historical point of view, illustrating the history of the cold war with a mystical component, while Stross creates new stories without many references to real events. Both are good books, but in very different ways. Stross has a more light hearted, almost parody, feel while Power plays it very straight and serious.

Yesterday I finished Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker,

This is a typical wild satiric ride from Rucker, starting off in an alternate version of Berkeley where some math PhD's figure out how to predict pretty much anything and ending up traveling through some wacky alternate dimensions created by jellyfish. And those are some of the more normal things that happen.

Overall, it's a fun book but the thinly veiled swipes at the Bush administration just seem weak and out of place.

I just finished The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, sequel to Old Man's War.

I thought Old Man's War was a good book, although it didn't add much to the classic military SF (Starship Troopers, Forever War) it seemed to emulate.

Ghost Brigades is better in that regard. The first book focused on the future's version of the infantry while this book focuses on the special forces, an elite group of soldiers created just for this purpose. It can also tell a more involved story, since it doesn't have to do as much as the first book to describe the background universe. This convoluted plot involves a human traitor that is working with a few other alien races against the human army.

It also avoids a lot of "sequelitis" problems - there are very few overlapping characters from the first book, so it tells a new story and advances the background story as well, rather than just repeating large pieces of the initial book.

I just finished The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr, a "further adventure" of Sherlock Holmes.

It's a pretty good Holmes story, involving Scottish nationalists, a hoax ghost (or is it real?) and some medieval siege equipment. The beginning and middle, where the atmosphere is developed and it is carried by Holmes and Watson's interactions, are stronger than the end, which is dominated by action sequences and less interesting conclusions.

One minor complaint - why do writers who want to do a new Sherlock Holmes story insist on throwing in references to the other stories, something that does not occur regularly in the Canon? It's a weird form of name dropping that doesn't really serve a purpose - we're already reading a Sherlock Holmes story - we don't need to be reminded of other ones, particularly given the fact that since they are the originals they are probably better than the story we are reading!

For some reason while reading this book I had the uncanny feeling that I had read parts of it before, while parts seemed new. The afterword mentions that it was originally a novella so it's possible I read that in a collection at some point.

I just finished Storyteller by Kate Wilhelm.

Subtitled "Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop", Storyteller is an odd hybrid, part writing advice book, part memoir, part history. The Clarion Writer's Workshop is a famous writing workshop that focuses mainly on short stories and mostly in the science fiction and fantasy genres. A significant number of Clarion graduates have gone on to be successful published authors, including Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson and Cory Doctorow. Wilhelm, along with her husband Damon Knight, was involved from the start of the workshop and helped shape it for many years.

The hybrid nature of the book means that there is probably a very narrow audience that will appreciate it - those who are interested in both the history of the Clarion workshop and those interested in the craft of writing.

As a voracious reader, the subject of writing often comes up, a subject I am ambivalent about. Over the years I have done a small amount of fiction writing but other than a few things I wrote back in high school, I've never been satisfied with the result. On the one hand, the idea of creating something as interesting as many of the books I have read over the years is appealing. On the other hand, I know from both personal experience and discussions with friends who are professional writers that writing is very hard work.

But even if I never do any serious writing myself, one thing I know I enjoy is reading about the craft behind art, whether it's writing or not. As such, this was an enjoyable book for me.