Holiday Reading

1. Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a darning indictment of an "intelligence" agency that has an unparalleled half-century record of failure: "darning" rather than "damning" because the author's obvious anger makes the book sound one-sided.
2. The Year's Best Science Fiction (25th and 26th editions): gems of all shapes and colors.
3. Freeman & Pryce: Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests. The heart of the book, a multi-chapter worked example, is the most accessible description of how to break applications along their seams to make them testable since Feathers' Working Effectively With Legacy Code.
4. Louis Bayard's The Black Tower is what Dumas would write if he were alive today (and not being paid by the word).