Books

It's always a pleasure to find that a book from which you expected little is instead a delight.  That happened with The Informationist (not great, but not at all bad; I liked the lead character a lot), and now it is happening again with The Jewels of Paradise, by Donna Leon, the author of the Guido Brunetti series (though this isn't one of them).  Both were on the discount table at Barnes and Noble, and both are a pleasure.  Well, the Informationist was, but the way Jewels is going, I think it will be, too.  The delight of Leon's writing style, very little of the frequent comments about political corruption that litter the landscape in the Brunetti novels.