Title: Apples: History, Folklore, Horticulture, and Gastronomy
Author: Peter Wynne
Published: 1975 by Hawthorn Books
ISBN: 0-8015-0340-X

I've been considering planting a fruit tree somewhere on my property, probably in the front yard. Apples seem like a good choice. For one, they grow pretty well around here. With the cold winters we get, that's a pretty important feature. Plus there's a lot you can do with them. Pies, sauces, cobbles, juices, canning, even baby food. Oh, and I guess you can eat them plain too. So I picked up this book at the library to learn a little about apple trees and see if that's really what I want.

Title: Asterisk: The Future of Telephony
Author: Jim Van Meggelen, Jared Smith & Leif Madsen
Published: 2005 by O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-596-00962-3

I've been playing with Asterisk for about a year, and I've been interested in it for twice that, pretty much since I started working with proprietary PBX systems. First was a Nortel, and now a Vodavi and an NEC. I can't understate the symplicity of having a computer-controlled (especially a Linux-based one) phone system.

Title: The King of Torts
Author: John Grisham
Published: 2003 by Doubleday
ISBN: 0-385-50804-2

John Grisham is an excellent, and rich, writer so I was a little disappointed by the quality of this book. The last one I read was The Rainmaker and it was a lot better. It did finally end better than I expected, which I was grateful for, of course, but the middle of the book was rather lacking.

The story is about Clay Carter, a D.C. lawyer stuck in a low paying job as a public defender. It's a job he's been working for 5 years since he passed the bar, but not one that he's enjoyed at any point along the way. He has the bleak resposibility to deal with the worst part of society, and in a city where crime is a major occurance no less. To think that only a few years ago he had such grand plans of graduating from Georgetown and going into practice with his father.

Title: Have Spacesuit - Will Travel
Author: Robert A. Heinlein
Published: 1958 by Charles Scribner's Sons
ISBN: 0-684-14857-9

I have long meant to read some good science fiction but just never gotten around to it. My wife is out of town for 5 weeks so I guess now's a good time. TV just bores me to death any more and the Gamecube gets old after a few hours. So I dropped by the library and picked up a classic Heinlein novel. I figured I should start with a good one, and it definitely was.

Title: Dave Barry In Cyberspace
Author: Dave Barry
Published: 1996 by Crown Publishers
ISBN: 0-517-59575-3

Normally I love Dave Barry but this book left me lacking. The humor seems forced and it's severly out of date. Granted, part of that is my fault for not having read it earlier but I don't exactly have a time machine and neither do you. In the end, I didn't finish even half the book and felt a bit let down.