Changes by Jim Butch­er

My rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars
I do not give out many 5‑star rat­ings, but for this book I could­n’t do any­thing else. That is despite the fact that Jim Butch­er did some­thing I hon­est­ly did­n’t think he would do to his legions of loy­al read­ers, some­thing that I absolute­ly detest. Some­thing that I will not tell you about, because I loathe spoil­ers.

Amer­i­can Gods by Neil Gaiman

My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars
I’m try­ing to remem­ber whether or not I’ve read any of Gaiman’s oth­er nov­els before, and I’m fair­ly cer­tain that I haven’t. I read Good Omens, but that was co-writ­ten with Ter­ry Pratch­ett, and the col­lab­o­ra­tion was genius. I know that the entire world seems to love Sand­man, of course, but I’m just not a fan of graph­ic nov­els. In fact, it took me a while to real­ize that the Good Omens co-author and the Sand­man author were one and the same.

I’m not even talk­ing about the rights of defend­ents or plain­tiffs, but those of peo­ple who are oth­er­wise present in a court­room who aren’t being dis­rup­tive. How much con­trol do judges actu­al­ly need in order to main­tain order in the court­room? At what point are they sim­ply being pet­ty tyrants?