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Usually my choice of what to read is predetermined—I've seen a review, or there's been a recommendation, possibly from one of you. Very rarely do I go in a bookstore and browse; no way any budget could cover such a financially damaging activity. But, curiously enough, that's how I acquired Age of Consent by Howard Mittelmark. The cover art—a creepy house and a pair of blue eyes, reminiscent of The Village of the Damned—attracted me, and the cover blurb—"kids will be kids—even if it kills them"—sealed the bargain. Upon completion, the book turned out to be both better and worse than I expected it to be.

The story itself was part of the better. An only-partly-crazy-at-the-beginning-of-the-book professor of religion buys the Oneida House in upstate New York,a house near the college where he is to start a new teaching job. Historically the place has had two other owners: Joseph Smith of Mormon fame in the 19th century and a group of hippie, wannabe terrorists in 1971. The story bounces back and forth from the present to 1971, with one ghostly man appearing in pictures from all three times. It's pretty cool, moving into an attempt at meaningful when the religion professor has a breakthrough and discovers that evil exists because "God wanted man to suffer." (page 223) Following this insight, characters who had any degree of sanity lose it, and all three eras connect.

Now we're left with the worse side. While errors did not appear on every page, Age of Consent is one of the most poorly written books I've ever read. At first I kept thinking an editor should have caught most of the problems, and I was ready to give the author a break—until I noticed the blurb on him said he was both a writer and an editor. Gloves came off; here's the worst:

1) The son of the religion professor has lived all his life in Brooklyn. He'd been an overweight loner, ignored by his father and unpopular at school. Based on that thumbnail sketch, I found it really odd that he would recognize a small baseball club as "the kind fishermen use to bash in the heads of the spikier, nonedible fish they reeled in, the ones that were all bones and spikes." (page 95) Hello? I find it distracting when characters know things that seem totally outside their life experiences. (And I won't even make a big deal out of the fact that neither Word nor the online American Heritage Dictionary recognize nonedible as a word.)

2) "She turned to rejoin her friends in the living room and saw Phil coming down the hallway from the kitchen." (page 230) The next sentence describes Phil searching through a drawer in he kitchen. Three readings later I figured out "she" was the one "coming down the hallway." Gimme a break. It's junior high grammar. A diagram would have pointed out the error to Mr. Mittelmark, the author and editor. Insert a snort of disgust.

All in all, I can't say the book is bad. I kept turning pages, often appalled, sometimes amused, but always curious about what would happen next.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, a YA novel by Christopher Paul Curtis, disappointed me, but it wasn't the book's fault. My disappointment came from what I was expecting. When I bought the book, I knew 1963 was the year when the four little girls were killed in the bombing of a Birmingham church. Therefore I expected the book to center on Birmingham and, most likely, end with the bombing. My expectation strengthened when I noticed that the book was, indeed, dedicated to the four little girls.

But that's not what the book is about. The Watsons are a black family, composed of mother, father, two sons and one daughter, living in Flint, MI. The structure is episodic with Kenny, the middle child, narrating troubles with the cold climate, the family's aging and decrepit car, his classmates and siblings. During the last fourth of the book, the family drives to Birmingham where Kenny's older and rebellious brother will stay with their maternal grandmother for the summer. Their trip, not surprisingly, coincides with the bombing and there's concern that the youngest child, the girl, might have been among the victims.

All in all, it's not a bad story—just not what I was expecting.

Been There, Done That is a book about Eddie Fisher written by Eddie Fisher and Dick Fisher. And with that relatively simple sentence I start off confused. A book about a person written by that person and someone else. So is it a biography? An autobiography? I hate making that sort of decision.

Regardless, I enjoyed reading it. Eddie Fisher comes across as total slime, a sliminess only surpassed by that of Richard Burton. But then, since the book is sort of written by Eddie Fisher, his ranking Burton as worse than himself should not be a surprise. I think my first awareness of Eddie's sliminess came when I looked at his selected pictures. There are pictures from his childhood, pictures of him and Frank Sinatra, pictures of Liz, pictures of him and Liz, and one picture of him with an unidentified woman, Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon. Anyone notice who all is missing from that list? The mothers of his children perhaps? Right-o. Collect your ten points and move right along.

Actually the best moments of the book were sentences that for some reason or another made me gasp or laugh out loud. So:

1) On Debbie Reynolds as the girl next door: "… only if you lived next door to a self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony." (page 70) And that makes her different from most people in your business, how?

2) Once, out on a drive with Liz soon after Mike Todd has died, Eddie claims the following dialogue took place: EDDIE: "I'm going to marry you." LIZ: "When?" EDDIE: "Soon. As soon as possible." Eddie then comments that "if they had written dialogue like this for Bundle of Joy , that picture would have been a success." (page 141) Ah, Eddie, I wouldn't take any bets on that. Or: don't give up your day job.

3) "America was waiting for Eddie Fisher to get married? Fidel Castro had overthrown Batista in Cuba, the Chinese Communists were invading Tibet, and America was waiting for me to get married." (page 159) Gee, the times, they aren't a-changing.

4) At one point the producers of Cleopatra wanted to change directors. Liz was dead set against it. Eddie remarks, "She was tremendously loyal to anyone to whom she wasn't married." (page 179) Meow. But funny.

5) About John Kennedy, Fisher says, "…he was more interested in gossip than Russian missiles. Most people are, I've found. The only people who aren't are called Republicans." (page 239) Another good one.

6) Regarding the time when he was kicking drugs, Eddie says, "I was willing to try anything; I just didn't want it to be too inconvenient." (page 304) There's a bit of that in all of us, I imagine.

7) Toward the end of the book Eddie acknowledges he's been a bad parent and says, "I can't explain why. There were no obvious reasons. Maybe I was too self-involved, too selfish." (page 316) Ya think?

Anyway, it was a fun book to read. But you don't have to 'cause I've told you the best parts.

I liked Kathy Reichs' Break No Bones much better than I thought I would. The book is part of America's current love affair with forensic science; in fact the protagonist in Break No Bones, Temperance Brennan--love that name!—-is the main character in TV's Bones. The love affair, however, is one in which I do not share. Thus, I did not expect to enjoy Break No Bones, and I admit to skimming the paragraphs that had extensive descriptions of the bodies and what each particular meant. But I can't deny the book some very strong plusses. Specifically:

1) Ms Reich has some of the best chapter-ending cliffhangers that I've encountered since, possibly, the Nancy Drew series. I can't count the number of times I'd be stopping at the end of a chapter and simply had to read the first paragraph of the next one to see what was going to happen. That's writing I enjoy.

2) I quickly identified with the protagonist. "Some student's boom-box pounded out a tune I didn't recognize by a group whose name I didn't know and wouldn't remember if told. (page 5) Temperance and I bonded.

3) Occasionally I ran across a really well written sentence. "Silence roared between us." (page 169) Few words, great image. Can't get any better than that, IMHO.

4) Guess Ms Reich goes into the group of writers whose details I'll trust. At one point a character says, "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the hell that has crushed it." (page 185) She attributes the line to Mark Twain, but it didn't sound all that Twainish to me. Off to google I went. Yep. He wrote it. Now I wonder where. Clicked through one google page, but a specific source was not given. Anyone out there know?

I do have to admit to one of those niggling, I-can't-believe-I'm-this-picky moments. Tempe and her boyfriend have an argument and talk it out. "Startovers?" he asks. "Ollie ocean free," she replies. (page 173) Ollie ocean free? What I remember is "Ollie ollie oxen free." Back to google. Mine was there, and I actually found "Ollie ollie ocean free" as part of a song called "The Best Is Yet to Come" by Dennis DeYoung. So I'll acknowledge she's more right than I thought she was, but she's still missing one "Ollie."

Will I read any other Temperance books by Reich? Probably—-but I have my up-and-coming barnesandnoble.com order to read through first. Will I start watching Bones ? Nope.

I really, really liked the first two hundred plus pages of Lisa Scottoline's Daddy's Girl. I have dog-eared pages where I was going to point out good passages and moments when I thought the writer had presented an insight into our current world, but I'm not covering any of it. Why not? Because words cannot describe how much I hated the final hundred or so pages.

For over half the book the plot moves well, and the characters are interesting. And then there's a chase. The heroine is on the run because she's about to be arrested for a crime she didn't commit. The cops eventually catch her; she escapes. The cops catch her again, this time she kicks one of them in the shin and escapes. They catch her again, and then just when she's about to be shoved into the patrol car, she again kicks her captor in the shin and escapes. Give me a break!

There is one final plot twist at the end, but before it occurs around sixty pages are devoted to tying up every conceivable loose end and explaining everything the heroine has learned from her adventures. No one's going to read Daddy's Girl without getting any message Ms Scottoline wants to convey. So, at that point with everything wrapped up tighter than a Christmas present and every lesson clarified for me, did I care about a final twist in the romantic line? Not on your life!

Will I ever read another book by Lisa Scottoline? When hell freezes over, I might think about doing so—but I doubt it.

Just finished a book that I had originally thought a "gay niche" title until I saw it is on the L.A. Times best seller list as #4 -- Armistead Maupin's latest, Michael Tolliver Lives .

If you read Tales of the City or watched the excellent TV series, you will be familiar with the fact that Tolliver is "Mouse", one of the central characters of of the cast of characters first created in a newspaper serial.

The book shows Maupin has not lost his magical touch and updates the lives of the surviving characters into mid age. Altogether a wonderful read, few surprises and a few insights on aging that make it a worthwhile summer excursion.

I didn't need to read Shrub: The Short* but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. Let's face it: I already detest the man and his policies. Why throw gasoline on the fire? But I did read it, and there were amazing moments of insight.

1) Molly Ivins on Bush's luck: "The guy is not just lucky; if they tried to hang him, the rope would break. (page xxi) Yep. I used to think Reagan was lucky; Bush wins by a mile.

2) On big "bidness" hassles in Texas: "…an African proverb is sometimes cited: 'When elephants fight, the grass suffers.'" (page 101) People in the US? We're grass—if not toast.

3) On environmental protections in Texas: "The agency also began providing advance notice of 'surprise inspections' of large industrial facilities, thus lending a surprising new meaning to surprise." (page 113) Crocodile tears for miners? The thought came to mind.

4) Perot was involved in Texas's education reform. "The trouble with Texas schools, said Perot, is too much football. Pretty much the whole state flat fell down at hearing such heresy, bewildered as a goat on AstroTurf." (page 130) Damn. If I'd known Perot felt that way about football and education, I might have voted for him. Just kidding. I think.

5) The sad thing about this last quote is I read it ten minutes after Scooter Libby's not-a-pardon was announced. Timing is, as always, everything. The book quotes from a profile of Bush that appeared in a 1999 issue of Talk magazine. The interviewer asks if Bush ever met with any death row inmates who were requesting commutations. Bush said no, added that in addition he refused to meet with Larry King who was interviewing a woman on death row. Bush admitted he did watch the resulting Larry King Showwhere King asked the woman what she would say to Bush. Imagining how she might have responded, Bush answers: "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'" (page 153) When the profile was published, the Bush campaign claimed the interviewer misunderstood. The interviewer said he didn't. Whatever. My question is: When are people going to grasp that George W. Bush is not a nice man?

*Ivins now concedes she was wrong about "short." Too bad that she was.