• Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs – 5 stars

  Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series remains excellent, and this 5th book has all of what makes the series great: dead-on pacing, intricate (though never confusing) plotting, and effortless character development. If you’ve never read these books, I don’t know what you’re waiting for.

• Cast in Silence and Cast in Chaos by Michelle Sagara – both 5 stars

  These are the 5th and 6th installments in Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra series, which along with the Mercy Thompson series is one of my favorites. Sagara’s skill at world-building is among the best in the fantasy genre, and she effortlessly melds lyrical high fantasy with fast-paced adventure. Each book in this series has raised the stakes, and by the end of Cast in Chaos, the tension has risen to fever pitch—a reckoning is coming, and I can’t decide if I want it to come sooner, so I can find out what happens, or later, so that the end of the series remains far off. Great, great stuff.

It’s gorgeous, of course. And in accordance with the international laws of humor, existentialism and cellular service, the very first call I received on my spanking new iPhone…wait for it…dropped.

last weekend, and I gotta say that I really enjoyed the whole series: The Titan’s Curse (book 3), The Battle of the Labyrinth (book 4), and finally The Last Olympian (book 5) were all high 4 stars for me. The later books were better than the earlier books, and the whole series is addictive (I read all 5 books in the span of about a week).

If there’s one thing I have to complain about (this is what kept them out of the 5 star range for me), it’s that sometimes I felt like author Rick Riordan glossed over parts of the story to move between the main plot points faster. I felt like he could have gone into more detail in some not strictly essential scenes to help ratchet up the tension and bring you inside the characters, to bring you deeper into the story. The bottom line is that though I liked Percy a whole lot, I’m not sure if I loved him like I loved Harry.

That said, these books are highly entertaining and I strongly recommend them.

?!?! over iPhone 4, and I kind of am too^†, but I gotta tell ya, what’s really making me go ?!?! is Safari 5. Included:

• Safari reader, a feature that works much like Arc90′s popular Readability bookmarklet by detecting when the currently loaded web page has an article, and allowing the user to reformat the page in an easy-to-read, scrollable view that cuts the obnoxious ads out. What’s more, they actually go through every page of multi-page articles and concatenate them together for one seamless, easy reading experience. Say it with me: ?!?!

  Now, you might be thinking, “How are the content providers going to let this stand, when it could wreak havoc with their ad sales?” Well, grasshopper, its at least partly because when Safari is concatenating the pages’ content, it does a full HTTP request on each page, so the innocent kitten publishers who artificially split up short articles into 3 and 4 and more pages just to maximize ad annoyance views don’t have to worry about losing their accustomed number of ad-frame loads.

• A smarter address field, that no longer requires you to remember exact URLs; it searches within (rather than at the beginning of) the URLs and page titles in your history like Firefox has been doing for months (perhaps years) now. I’ve got two things to say to that: hallelujah, and about damn time.

• Never expected this, but sanctioned, easy to install, secure extensions, that can be developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. ?!?! Also, ROCK.

• Then, of course, is the improved HTML5 support and the ever more feature-packed web inspector, the icing and the cherry, respectively, on the sundae.

All in all, pretty ?!?! for me.

^† I gotta tell ya something else. Humble pie tastes terrible. Turns out my new cheapie phone doesn’t have much going for it other than its cheapness. I can at least get calls on it more reliably than the iPhone 2G, but text messages don’t work. At all. Seriously. All my friends have stopped sending me text messages, because literally more than half of their messages to me never get there. Not get there late, which sometimes happens too, but never get to me at all.

Then there are the times when I myself am trying to send a text, and the phone (a $*@#!^% Motorola i465) reports that the message was sent, though it actually wasn’t, and I’ll have no idea that the message never got out the door until I happen to reboot my phone days later, and all the recipients are asking me why they’re getting replies to their messages so late.

In fact, if I had an actual piece of crap the size of my phone, it’d be more useful, because then I could use it as fertilizer. This…thing isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of. So, well, iPhone 4. As much as I loathe and detest the idea of giving AT&T my money again, at least I’ll get a nice phone in the bargain.

Simply stunning. And the first in a series!