Joe's One Man Book Club:

I finished Dan Brown's Digitial Fortress. Brown is, of course, the author of the mega blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, which I have not read. I've heard that it's interesting but a little overdone as a thriller (others have been much less kind). I found a used copy of Digitial Fortress for 3 bucks, and the subject matter looked much more interesting than Da Vinci.

Basically, it's a nice quick summer beach read. It's really two stories in one: an espionage story set in Spain, the other concerning code breakers for the US government running into what appears to be an unbreakable code.

The twists are fairly predicatble, but everything does make sense in the end. The characters and dialogue are fairly flat. I will give Brown credit--there's a lot of technical jargon but it doesn't bog down the book, not like it did in, say, Airframe.

It's not high art, but it doesn't want to be, so you can't penalize it in that regard. However, there's a really interesting question of whether it's OK to invade people's home computers and e-mail in the sake of national security that unfortunately gets completely glossed over in the name of plot.

Currently reading Franklin & Winston, a history of Roosevelt and Chruchill's relationship during WWII. I was looking for something to read after the attacks on England and came across this. Very interesting so far, and a reminder that towering leaders can also be deeply flawed men.

When I was in Barnes & Noble last Friday, there was almost a stampede of people getting braclets so they could be first in line for the new Harry Potter book. I'm so behind I never read Order of the Phoenix. Maybe I'll read that next and hopefully when I'm done I'll be able to track down whatever #6 is called with relative ease.