Invisible Enemies, by Jeanette Farrell

While aimed at young readers, this is an informative discussion for all ages of seven deadly diseases: smallpox, leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, and AIDS. The biology, treatments, cures, and social attitudes towards these sicknesses are handled in a casual style that makes for very readable coverage of what I usually find obtuse topics. The chapter on cholera was my favorite; the author covers the same pump handle story (cholera was being spread via contaminated water from the public pump) that Tufte does in Visual Explanations but from a different angle. Coming across this historical episode in a new context was quite rewarding. I also discovered that the gin and tonic was created as a way of making the bitter drug quinine used to fight malaria more palatable to the British tongue. While a sixth grader may not find that interesting, I did! If you are looking to cure your ignorance of the history of infectious disease without a heavy dose of science or biology then this is your prescription.

First Sentence:

When George Washington first felt the soreness in his throat on that cold December afternoon in 1799, he must have known that even he, master of Mount Vernon, first President of the United States, conqueror of the British Army in the war for American independence, could be up against a foe he might not defeat.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, by Michael Chabon

This is the tale of two boys—one a kid from Brooklyn and one a refugee from Nazi controlled Prague—that create a superhero that rivals Superman. While comic books have a prominent place in the book (my favorite scene has Stan Lee, Gil Kane, and Bob Powell discussing Seduction of the Innocent in a diner named the Excelsior Cafeteria) this is by no means a lightweight pleasure read. A Pulitzer Prize winner, we experience the struggles of two talented Jewish boys coming of age in the intolerant times before World War II. These boys (the Kavalier and Clay of the title) struggle for acceptance throughout: first looking for acceptance as artists in what is considered (even today to a large degree) a kiddie medium, then for acceptance in a society with strong anti-homosexual and antisemitic beliefs, and finally internal acceptance, seeking forgiveness and understanding from themselves. Significant themes told with humor, style, and grace made for a truly unforgettable read. I had a hard time putting this book down, and highly recommend it to anyone that enjoys a dramatic tale.

First Sentence:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

Black Cherry Blues, by James Lee Burke

Dave Robicheaux is an alcoholic southern ex-cop; one of those characters that is good at everything but has a tortured soul. He gets framed for a murder in Louisiana yet while on bail manages to get to Montana where he brazenly challenges a mobster he believes is responsible. I pictured him as a cajun Dirty Harry, albeit somewhat shorter for some reason. The movie Heaven’s Prisoners (based on a different novel in the series) starred Alec Baldwin as Robicheaux which doesn’t fit my mental image at all; perhaps that is why the only thing I remember is Teri Hatcher!

The plot is thin and the characters shallow, but the descriptions of mood and setting were almost lyrical. “Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water.” I love writing that shows the reader a sense of color and texture as well as the setting, and Burke gives that in spades. While Robicheaux is no Spenser, I expect I’ll be reading more of him in the future.

First Sentence:

Her hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window.

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development, by Mike Cohn

Every agile team is different. Team dynamics and synergy are key to a truly self-directed team, so every unique group of individuals will have to discover what works for them and what doesn’t. One thing on which most teams (regardless of how different they appear or behave) will agree, though, is that writing software specifications is hard. English is a notoriously imprecise language, and computers are meticulous to a fault; this combination is what makes requirements so difficult. The use of user stories and agile to combat this hardship is very effective, and Cohn does an excellent job of explaining these concepts.

The main idea behind user stories lies in the idea that a story represents a requirement, it doesn’t document it. The goal of a story is to encourage communication about what a feature is and how it should behave, not a treatise on the behavior that can be thrown over a wall to development. In the traditional software world, management will create a Product Marketing Document to define how they want every last feature to behave. Engineering will respond with a Functional Specification, which is a rewrite of the first document with a slightly different point of view. Development is then expected to go off for a year or so and create the product. Simple, right? Cohn discusses this approach, and sums it up with one of my favorite passages in the book: “Most of the times when I see two groups writing separate versions of essentially the same document I already know they are positioning themselves for the end-of-project blame sessions and for claiming to know the intent of the document. This type of silliness goes away with user stories. Along with the shift to conversations from documentation comes the freedom of knowing that nothing is final.” The phrase “nothing is final” frightens many executives with whom I’ve worked, but when you consider that all significant projects undergo changes during development (have you ever had a released application that exactly matched the original specification?) it really isn’t any different than reality, it just recognizes that change is inevitable and accounts for it.

Even if you are familiar with agile and user stories, this book is a great read. It is filled with examples both positive and negative and does an excellent job explaining not only what user stories are, but what they aren’t as well. These negative explanations in particular are quite valuable, as they compare and contrast many popular requirement gathering techniques such as Use Cases and IEEE 830. Looking at how these other approaches work helps clarify what the scope of user stories are supposed to be. I highly recommend this to agile teams, especially product managers and ScrumMasters.

First Sentence:

Software requirements is a communication problem.

One More for the Road, by Ray Bradbury

As a kid, I loved Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, R Is for Rocket, and more were often checked out from the library. When I got One More for the Road, a book of short stories, for Christmas I was pleased, looking forward to revisiting a favorite author. Unfortunately, with my hopes so high I found this collection uneven at best.

None of the stories here are truly bad, but a few (First Day and Heart Transplant) feel like they missed the mark—not quite melancholy and not quite maudlin, but told with a tone hints at those goals. As the collection progresses the stories get better; the final entry of The Cricket on the Hearth is an excellent look at how to shake a marriage out of the doldrums, and Well, What Do You Have to Say for Yourself? looks at a lovers argument as a microcosm of all relationships everywhere, with the best (and longest!) line in the entire book: “Men will go on being men, stupid, arrogant, strong-willed, stubborn, reckless, destructive, murderous, but sometimes librarians and poets, kite fliers and boys who see things in the clouds, nephew to Robert Frost and Shakespeare, but still not always dependable, soft-hearted under the skin maybe, capable of tears if the children should die and life be over, always looking at the next field where the grass is greener and the milk is free, fixed on a Moon crater or stationed on one of Saturn’s moons, but the same beast that yelled out of the cave half a million years ago, not much different, and the other half of the human race there staring at him and asking him to listen to the wedding rites with half a heart and half an ear, and sometimes, sometimes he listens.” Imagery like this makes this collection worth reading and hints at the greatness of which Bradbury is capable.

If you haven’t read any of his writing before I’d recommend Fahrenheit 451 or The Illustrated Man first, but if you already have a place in your heart for Bradbury then this might help you spend a pleasant afternoon.

First Sentence(from the Afterword):

Every year in Paris, coming from the airport I have my driver pause at the Trocadero, a vast esplanade that overlooks the entire city with a splendid view of the Eiffel Tower.

Killing Floor, by Lee Child

This book introduces Jack Reacher, a former Military Policeman that served with the Army’s Special Investigations Unit. After mustering out of the army, he spends his time exploring America, drifting from town to town with no real plan: Rambo without a psychotic break. The story starts with a bang: Reacher gets arrested on the first page for a crime he didn’t commit. The running commentary of everything the officers did correctly and incorrectly for the first couple of chapters was hilarious; it also served to demonstrate just how good Reacher is. The plot was interesting although not terribly complicated. It struck me as overly naive in a couple of places (“They couldn’t prove something had happened if it hadn’t happened.”) and the twist of having Reacher’s brother appear in a middle-of-nowhere Georgia town stretched reason fairly thin. That said, the action rolls along quickly and the characters are quite enjoyable. This is the first Reacher novel, but it won’t be my last.

First Sentence:

I was arrested in Eno’s Diner, at twelve o’clock.

A Meeting At Corvallis, by S. M. Stirling

This book ends the trilogy started with Dies the Fire in a fairly satisfying fashion. Ten years into this world without technology, we find that the air is thick with diplomacy and intrigue leading up to an inevitable war. The children of various leaders are alternately kidnapped and rescued, and bloody skirmishes set the stage for a final battle. Stirling finds a nice way to have most of the characters live through the war that doesn’t rely on the usual luck that heroes have in fantasy novels. One amusing passage revealed that Cardinal Ratzinger is the titular head of Catholicism there; of course in our world Ratzinger is now better known as Pope Benedict XVI. Details like this help keep remind the reader that this is alternate history and not a generic fantasy novel.

While not a huge problem, the book could have easily been edited down from its nearly 500 pages to remove some redundant sections. The main culprit was that references to the Society for Creative Anachronism come fast and furious; at times it seems that only SCA members survived the Change! I don’t remember this being so prevalent in the other books, but the plot was more intricate in those as well so it might not have been as obvious. All in all, this book provides a solid ending to the trilogy, wrapping up most loose ends while leaving room for further sequels.

First Sentence:

Norman Arminger—he rarely thought of himself as anything but the Lord Protector these days—stared at the great map that showed his domains, and those of his stubbornly independent neighbors; it covered the whole of the former Oregon and Washington, with bits of the old states of Idaho and northern California thrown in.