Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

At this time of year, 'best of year' lists start popping up all over the place. Any number of products that can be measured against easily defined and relatively objective criteria lend themselves comfortably to 'best in class' lists. Considering this, it's somewhat ironic that more 'best of year lists' are devoted to books than any other product that I can think of - ironic because it's difficult to imagine a more subjective topic than what defines a good book. Added to which, while it's quite possible for one person to test every toaster on the market, it's impossible for even the most prolific of readers to read more than a tiny fraction of the books published in a year - so are any of us in a position to opine on which are the best?

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Kim Kovacs, BookBrowse reviewer

I'm a hard-as-nails network administrator for a large company, and as such I strive to present a certain image - logical, unemotional, impersonal (yes, Star Trek's Mr. Spock is my hero). Much of my reading reflects this about me. I love high-tech science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and William Gibson's Neuromancer. I'm also a fan of well-written (and well-reasoned) mysteries and thrillers, finding myself easily immersed in their order and logic. I can often be seen at lunch perusing a technical manual just for the fun of it (really).

And yet...

I've unexpectedly found buried deep inside myself a - gasp! - ROMANTIC! Yikes! What would my techie co-workers think if they only knew?

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Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

By the time election day arrived, my election-habit had reach chronic proportions.  In the normal course of events I'm happy to catch up on the news daily at most, and find that the world gets along perfectly well without me following its every movement, but by November 4th this year I was an addict.  Not content with picking up the news every day or so, I'd moved to hourly, even minute by minute checks - keeping screens open to key sites and refreshing them feverishly every few minutes, just in case something, anything, had happened.

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Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Back in 2003, Alan Brennert published Moloka'i, set on the Hawaiian island of the same name which, for many years, was home to the isolated leper colony at Kalaupapa. The book was a sleeper hit, in large part due to the enormous amount of time and enthusiasm Alan put into reaching out to book clubs and spending time with them chatting about his book.

Now he's back with Honolulu, to be published in March 2009.

Honolulu explores the early years of Hawaii's capital city through the eyes of a Korean 'picture bride' who arrived in Hawaii in the early years of the 20th century. The term picture bride refers to a practice in which Asian immigrant workers (usually Japanese or Koreans) selected brides from their native countries via a matchmaker's photograph (a precursor to today's "mail-order brides" which, incidentally, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services estimate result in between 4,000 to 6,000 marriages between US men and foreign brides each year).

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Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

What's with Google and beta tests? A beta-test is supposed to be a short lived stage in between a product going live and it being declared sound enough to be offered to the general public. But four years after launch, with tens of millions of users, Gmail is still in beta (as are any number of other Google products). Surely, by now the bugs must be ironed out sufficiently so that Gmail can stand tall without having to hide behind the apologetic 'beta' tag?

Then again, perhaps Google's on to something. If their products can be in perpetual beta-test, maybe the rest of us can be too? Imagine, no more berating yourself for the silly mistakes you make. Instead, having made a mistake, fix it or learn from it, and congratulate yourself for ironing out one more bug in the great beta-test called life. After all, if a life in beta is good enough for Google, maybe it should be good enough for the rest of us?

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Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Our household is one of many pets - the dog, the hamster, a dozen or so fish, and an indeterminate number of worms.

The worms moved up the familial totem pole from organic waste disposal unit & free mulch-makers to family pets a couple of years back when husband refused to give up a handful for fishing purposes, claiming that worms were friends not food. With his close affection for our invertebrate friends it was a sad day last week when we lifted the lid of the worm bin to deposit a bowl of potato peelings, to find that the worms were no more - the delicate balance of moisture needed to keep them in health and happiness (wet enough to keep them slithering but not so wet that they drown) had gone awry and the whole bunch had shuffled off their mortal coils.

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