I've been doing some eclectic reading lately...

I finished James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? It's full of conspiracy theories throughout the centuries. Shapiro involves Mark Twain, Queen Elizabeth I, Sigmund Freud, and Helen Keller, among others in his anecdotes. He details the theories that Bacon, Marlowe, Edward de Vere, and others wrote the poems and plays attributed to the Bard. Some of the theories were based on ciphers, seances, and automatic writing. Shapiro presents a variety of theories and provides a great bibliography.

I read the roughcut of Jeff Levinson's Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010. The books is slated to be published in November 2010. It's good. If you're interested in automated testing, it's a great resource for Microsoft's new tool.

I also finished Blaize Clement's Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs. I like the pet sitter and how she weaves dogs and cats throughout the mystery. She's great at word play. I love some of her references.  It's part of a series, and I haven't read the earlier works. I would like more of the backstory up front. I wasn't sure about some of the character allusions until she explained them later. All in all, this is a fun, summer read.