Six months ago I walked into Borders on a saturday after breakfast, as I do on pretty much every saturday after breakfast, and was greeted with a huge table display. The display said

NEW PUZZLE CRAZE!!

And there on the table were about 50 books for this thing I had never heard of called Sudoku.

Well, I like puzzles. I like puzzles a lot. I’m not so great at crosswords (ironic for the english major, no?), and there are some 3D spatial things I’m bad at (I’m told this is a male/female thing). But mostly I think just about any kind of puzzle is pretty darn great.

I went to a party once and I had intended to be social, really, but then someone handed me one of those old blacksmith puzzles where you have to get the ring off of the hooks or the loops or whatever and I promptly became the least social person in the history of the entire known world. Just me and the blacksmith puzzle in the corner, responding to greetings with grunts or not at all and refusing to come out of hiding until I had solved the darn thing. Days later I emerged from the corner, hungry but triumphant. I don’t get invited to so many parties anymore.

Oh, and there’s Tetris. I have this problem with Tetris. We will conveniently skip over my really bad Tetris addiction in college and I will note that I got a PSP just recently (Sony is Evil, I know, I’m sorry) and they have this game called Lumines which is like Tetris only blocks instead of lines and they flash blinky lights and play loud repetitive dance music at you all the time. Like Tetris at a rave. Anyhow I’ve been playing that game a lot and having conversations like:

Eric: Laura?
Laura: not now.
Eric: Laura…..
Laura: not now.
Eric: Laura, your hair is on fire.

But I digress.

So I picked up one of the sudoku books in the store and I thumbed through it. I read the introduction. Sudoku, in case you haven’t been assaulted by bookstore displays in the last six months, is a simple logic puzzle involving grids of of numbers. The numbers are purely symbolic; there’s no math involved. They could use random symbols but the numbers are easy to remember. All you have to do is fill in the grid so that all the rows and columns and squares all contain numbers from 1 to 9.

The book I had in my hand, the Book of Sodoku, was only ten bucks, so I figured what the hell, I’ll give it a try.

This is my really long-winded explanation for why I have only read five books in the last six months. But I’m getting really great at Sudoku.

Olympos, by Dan Simmons. Last year I read Ilium, the prequel to this book, and loved it. As I posted back then, I’m not a huge traditional science fiction fan, but Ilium was complex and well-written and just really well put together. Unfortunately, it also ended in a huge cliffhanger, and OIympos was supposed to be the book that resolved everything.

Um. Well, its a big book, and it continues all the big and complex storylines that Ilium started. But its a big fat longwinded mess. It just spins madly out of control, there are too many plots, nothing much gets resolved, and I ended the book thinking “I have no idea what just happened here.” Bah. Plus there was this big time Heinleinian Stupidity Moment: there’s this beautiful female character central to the plot, and she’s been put in a sort of suspended animation for thousands of years, and the only way she can be awakened is if the virile male hero has sex with her sleeping body. My eyes rolled so hard they popped right out of my head.

Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Yes, if there’s anything that can drag me away from an incredibly addicting puzzle book, its a new Terry Pratchett book. This one involves a long-ago war between the dwarves and the trolls, and the seething resentments that have resulted since then. Now a dwarf has been killed apparently by a troll and the Watch has to deal with it before a new war springs up.

I was kind of surprised that this book came out so soon after Going Postal and kind of concerned about it; the last time Terry P. started writing books really fast the quality suffered. And alas although this book was fun I don’t rank it among his best. It just didn’t reach out and grab me…in fact it took me a week to read it which is positively unheard of. It is definitely no Going Postal, or Night Watch.

My Work is Not Yet Done, by Thomas Ligotti. I have gushed about Thomas Ligotti before. I love this guy. He doesn’t write horror, really, he more writes dread, or loathing. He’s just immensely talented at setting a really dark mood.

In this book there are three stories of “Corporate Horror.” In the first, the dread and loathing and darkness take place in a perfectly ordinary company. The first half of the story is terrific; like some sort of horrible lovecraftian “Office Space.” The main character is oppressed by his co-workers in various tiny awful ways. His boss and co-workers conspire against him, and drive him to madness.

And then there’s the second half of the book, which turns into kind of a supernatural Kill Bill. The main character is run over by a bus and becomes an avenging spirit, picking off in various nasty ways each of his former co-workers who betrayed him. I found this second part of the book kind of disappointing, less about the dread and loathing and more straight-up horror. Its good straight-up horror but I prefer the more moody and less bloody Ligotti.

The other two stories in the book are shorter. The first, “I have a Special Plan for This World,” is chock full of mood. Deliciously so. Unfortunately the plot is also kind of muddled and I’m not sure exactly what goes on here. The last story, the “Nightmare Network,” has a unique structure: its just a series of mostly flat descriptions of ads, videos, events. Its kind of a non-narrative and I admit the style does not grab me much at all. I could not get into this story and I couldn’t tell you what it was about.

Anansi Boys, By Neil Gaiman. I suppose if you made a list of Most Predictable Books Laura Must Have Read in The Last Half of 2005 this book would be on it. Well duh, of course I read it. It was a good, fun, quick read. Not as complex as American Gods. Not as creepy as Coraline (which, despite it being a kids book, creeped the living daylights out of me). It was fun, but kind of Average Fantasy I’ve Come To Expect From Neil. I’m still waiting for the Neil Gaiman fantasy magnum opus and beginning to think maybe Sandman was it. Hm.

Spook, by Mary Roach. Gushed about Mary Roach previously, too, when she wrote Stiff. Stiff is about human bodies and the things we do to them after people have left them. Spook is about the other side of the equation: its about souls and ghosts and spiritualism; about the search for life after death.

I’ve been trying to figure out why it is I don’t like Spook as much as I liked Stiff. Mary Roach’s writing style and humor are intact, the characterizations are terrific and brilliant long-winded off-topic footnotes are just as frequent. Perhaps because souls and ghosts and spiritualism are just less shocking than corpses the subject matter is just less interesting to read. But this book just wasn’t as as much fun as Stiff. I really wanted it to be, but it just wasn’t.

Five books in six months and none of them were even all that great. Boohoo. I need to find something to read now that will blow the top of my head right off with its greatness. I’m not sure what that book might be. If you had to make the list of Most Predictable Books Laura Must Read in the First Half of 2006 you might think Feast for Crows was on there given that I am a big fantasy reader…except um I haven’t actually read any of the other books in the series. So maybe I will board that ship for my spring books list.

Right after I finish 40 more Sudoku puzzles.

I’ve had this damn post sitting in my To Be Blogged list for months now, and I haven’t blogged it for no good reason at all. Its a post from stevenf’s blog entitled “weirdest moments in popular music history.”

It is really really funny, eg:

3. ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie

A nice little noodley, spacey bridge begins at approximately 2:43, but concludes abruptly when an apparently drunken tuba player barges into the studio 17 seconds later, and farts out four of the most incongruous notes in recorded history just before, I can only presume, collapsing onto the floor. Only Bowie knows for certain what really happened that fateful day.

And you know, I didn’t remember this farting tuba player so I had to go queue up Space Oddity on iTunes and swing the pointer over to 2:43. Now I’m never going to be able to listen to the song without giggling madly. Curse you, stevenf.

(I got it from ~stevenf.)

The Annoying Song, by the Weebls

Don’t click it. I’m warning you. Don’t. Really. DON’T. YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK.

And if you’re not permanently emotionally damaged from that one, try the Kenya song. Or rather don’t. You’ll be up all night.

I was in my local Borders Books this morning, and perhaps this sign has been there the whole time and I just didn’t notice, or perhaps its a new sign, but none the less, there is a “Popular Fiction” sign over the SF, mystery, and romance sections now.

I went around the corner:

This must be the unpopular fiction section.

I’m sorry. I do not have plans to see either Serenity nor Mirrormask this weekend. My deep abiding hatred for people in crowds just way outweighs my need to be geeky.

I am officially on vacation next week but could not get organized enough to actually go anywhere, so perhaps I will take in matinee.

4 8 15 16 23 42 – The LOST Numbers Reference Guide

An incredibly obsessive reference to the numbers on the Lost TV show.

The Faders, “No Sleep Tonight” [iTunes Music Store link]

Three or four times a year I discover some great new song and I have to listen to that song over and over again until I am so sick of it that I can’t stand it anymore. Its been that way since I was twelve; I am perpetually stuck in teenager listening mode. Woe betide you if you live in my household.

This is the current iteration of that song. Its a raucous punk-poppy little thing from a British teenage girl band. Very Donnas-like. I love it. Now that I have iTunes to keep track of my music obsessions I can let you all know that I have listened to this song 18 times in the last two days. Not sick of it yet.

I am told this song is in the iPod Nano ads, although I’ve only seen the one with the hands and this song isn’t it. Conveniently, I just bought an iPod nano (neat! new! toy!), so now I can put this song on it and listen to it everywhere I go.

BTW you link into the iTMS by control-clicking (or right-clicking) a song and choosing “Copy Music Store URL.” They use horrible weird web objects URLs that launch iTunes, but they work.

New Terry Pratchett discworld book out this week. That is all.

Here are a bunch of links I’ve been storing up for a while about self-publishing. Assuming one has experience in writing, editing, illustration, book design, and printing, or can outsource some or all of those tasks, the only hurdles one has to worry about with self-publishing are marketing and distribution. Unfortunately those are fairly huge hurdles. :/

What do you think about self published books? – Signal vs. Noise: 37Signals is working on its next book and poses this question. Lots of good advice in the comments. Especially noted that despite the general reputation of self-published books being somewhat inferior in quality, there is the tremendous exception of Edward Tufte’s books, which are brilliantly written and beautifully printed. And self-published.

What do you think about self-published books? – Tim O’Reilly’s response: Tim posted in the comments to the question above and then expanded his comments in this post to oreillynet. This is the point of view of a more traditional publisher, albiet one that grew from a self-publisher. Some discussion on distribution here, and packaging (where one does all the writing, design, and layout, and then hands over camera-ready copy to a publisher for printing and distribution).

How to be Your Own Publisher — NYT Review of Books: article with an emphasis on POD (Print-On-Demand) publishers such as iUniverse and XLibris. Also a strong note that self-publishing is vanity publishing and thus bad. “With all this democratic activity, self-published authors have essentially become the bloggers of the publishing world, with approximately the same anarchic range in quality that you find on the Web.” :/

Jim Minatel on self-publishing: Jim is a Wrox editor who I’m pretty sure I’ve met a bunch of times at author events but you know I’ve met 40 million people and my head is full so I’m sorry that I can’t remember you Jim. In this post he criticizes self-publishing as a whole lot of work and suggests that self-published books will be of inferior quality to that of a traditional publisher. But self-publishing might be “rewarding.” I can’t argue with the more work part. But given my experiences with his list of things publishers are supposedly good at I am not, shall we say, wholly convinced.

My Life as a Lulu: Erika Driefus discusses her experiences with lulu.com, a new and increasingly popular web site that does self-publishing print-on-demand, transactions, and fulfillment. She loves it.

Seth Godin’s Advice for Authors: This isn’t about self-publishing, its about publishing in general. I can’t disagree with a single thing here. I particularly like the part about publishing being like venture capital. Like investing, where most of the stuff you invest in goes horribly wrong.

I have no conclusion to this post. Carry on.

I don’t have the energy to do those incredibly long-winded book reviews anymore, and I’m sure you’re all glad of it. Here are some books I read recently:

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynn Truss. Man, is this one terrific book. Let it be noted: I like style guides. I like grammar and punctuation books. Being a writer and, even worse, an ENGLISH MAJOR it kind of comes with the territory. But this book isn’t like those other punctuation books that lists out all the rules for the use of the semicolon. It isn’t even like books like The Well-Tempered Sentence, which uses really funny examples to basically list out all the rules for the use of the semicolon. Nope: this book is a rant. A really great rant, fully of great insults for people (“thickos”) who use grocer’s quotes (“apple’s $1″) and other punctuation abuses. I cackled with glee. It also has a bunch of history stuff that’s actually interesting. There’s a reason this book was a monstrous best-seller. This is a great book for no other reason that it taught me the word “thicko,” which I now feel I must use at least once a day.

Harry Potter and the Half-Dead Prince, by JK Rowling. Er. That’s not quite the title, but close enough. There’ve probably been too many words written on this in the blogworld already, so I’ll just add a two comments: 1. Better than the last book. 2. WAHHHHH.

Jennifer Government, by Max Barry. I had read so much about this satiric novel of capitalism (or “capitalizm” as the book calls it) run amok, and I wanted so much to like it. There are some fun ideas in here — the US owns much of the world (and has recently acquired Australia), people take the names of their companies as surnames, and corporate competition is literally war. But that’s pretty much it for the ideas, the writing is kind of uneven — some scenes are completely terrific, others are hugely boring or eye-rollingly dumb — and I only read the book two weeks ago and I can’t remember much about it at all. There’s one amazingly great scene where the girl hacker character introduces a virus into ExxonMobile’s corporate computer system. That was a great scene. Other than that…eh.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I read this book when it first came out, in 1986, when the notion of a future with a radical far-right theocratic government that enslaves women for breeding purposes didn’t seem all that far-fetched. With Things the way they are, and the path down on which Things seem to be going, it seemed like perhaps it was time to read the book again. This is what-if near-future science fiction that was really defined by its age; in lots of ways it feels kind of dated now. The religious right of this book is the religious right of the Reagan era; the hypocrisy of the evangelist-style leaders in that book reflects the hypocrisy of that time as well. It doesn’t feel as scarily believeable, like a “this could really happen” scenario the way it did the first time I read it; Things may be bad now but they have diverged along a different path of bad. Which is not to say its not a good book; its a very well-written book and the world described in it feels very real and still very frightening. Good book.

Lance Armstrong’s War, by Daniel Coyle. Yeah, I know. I know, I know. Eric bought it and told me it was good, and I was between books, and the Tour was about to start. Actually, this was a good book. It wasn’t the fawning Lance-is-so-terrific-and-did-you-know-he-had-cancer? bio that I expected it to be; Lance wasn’t portrayed all that well, actually. More interesting than the Lance parts, though, were the profiles of the other pro cyclist teammates and competitors that probably make up more than half of the book: Hamilton, Ullrich, Vinokurov, Landis, Ekimov, and so on. There were a lot of stories in here I hadn’t heard before. Interesting stories. It was definitely worth a read if you follow pro cycling, even if you don’t like Lance.

A Place So Foreign and Eight More, by Cory Doctorow. After being dissappointed by Cory’s second novel but since his third wasn’t yet out I read this book instead. Its a collection of his short stories. I think perhaps Cory is best at his short stories. I really loved these, especially “To Market, To Market (the Rebranding of Billy Bailey)” and “Return to Pleasure Island.” Oddly enough although I SHOULD like it given its hacker-l33t-coolness, I’ve never particularly liked “Ownz0red.” It has a good tone and the right language (yup, geeky) but I found the plot, and especially the ending, kind of dissatisfying. Some good quotes, though. I particularly like “A tech writer. Why not just break his goddamned fingers and poke his eyes out?”

The Little Lisper by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. No really. I reread this book every few years for two reasons. The first is that its probably one of the most unique computer books ever, with a funky question-and-answer format that’s kind of like computer-based-training put down on paper. I read it as a writer just to examine the structure. The second reason is that I always forget how the Y-combinator works and this book has one of the more accessible descriptions of it. Not that I’m ever called on to explain the Y-combinator in, say, the checkout line at Whole Foods, or anything. Obviously I’m not doing any Y-combinating much at all if it keeps leaking out of my head and I have to re-learn it every few years. But its one of those things, like rebuilding cabruretors and making creme anglaise, that I feel studly for knowing how to do. BTW the Little Lisper is kind out out of date these days, having been revised and supplanted by the Little Schemer.

Next up: Olympos, the sequel to Ilium. And then I really will get to the big pile of computer books I have to read. Really.

A few years back I went through a phase where I read everything that Amazon told me to. Recommendations, “Customers who bought X also bought Y,” I ate it up. The experiment wasn’t a rousing success; although I was never pointed at anything completely inappropriate, I never found any books or music that really truly stuck with me. OK, there’s one exception: Flogging Molly, a Pogues-like celtic punk band, was an Amazon discovery, and I am nuts for them. I can’t remember why it was Amazon told me to buy them, because its not like celtic punk is high on my must-listen list. I only own one Pogues CD and Amazon doesn’t know about it. Kind of suspicious, actually (nervous look).

Anyhow, It was during this recommendations experiment that Amazon told me to read Bill Fitzhugh. At the time there were only two Bill Fitzhugh novels to read, Pest Control and the Organ Grinders, and I read them both. They were a lot of fun, very silly, very sarcastic, light reading, a good way to pass the time on an airplane, say. Pest Control, about an exterminator mistaken for a hit man, is the funnier and faster-paced of the two. The Organ Grinders is much more dark and satiric, involving an evil biotech company that is genetically altering baboons for the lucrative illegal human transplant industry. It was still a fast-paced read, but a very angry book, and kind of preachy in its anger.

I was reminded about Bill Fitzhugh the other week, and snagged his next book at the library: Cross Dressing. This book is another dark satire, this time about religion and poverty and advertising. It concerns two twin brothers: Dan Steele, an evil corrupt advertising executive, and Michael Steele, a catholic priest just returned from Africa and now working at a halfway house. Dan gets himself in deep financial trouble, and then midway through the book Michael dies. Dan is forced to assume his identity, and chaos and hilarity ensues.

There are two big problems I have with this book: A. Its pretty predictable. Evil Dan assumes the identity of his priestly brother. You will be astonished to find out that Dan has a redemption by the end of the book and turns to the side of good. He also saves the halfway house from being repossessed by the bank (even more evil than advertising) and finds romance with a nun. OK she’s not really a nun, but that’s OK because he’s not really a priest.

B. Its a really dark book. I mean really dark. Its supposed to be dark satire, and there are plenty of parts in this book that are deliciously nasty and funny. But there are a lot of other parts that are just dark and sad and not funny. There’s a difficult balance to strike when you’re trying to engage the sympathy of your readers for as difficult a topic as poverty and sickness and death while still trying to be funny, and I’m afraid Fitzhugh doesn’t have that balance here. He’s very good at being angry about his subject, and describing it in a way that is touching and painful — but it doesn’t feel like it belongs in this book. Its a strange mix and it doesn’t quite work.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I see from Amazon that there are four more Bill Fitzhugh novels I’ve missed, so obviously the guy’s keeping busy. But I’m not sure I need to keep reading; I like my light reading to actually be light.

So apparently there’s going to be a broadway musical based on Monty Python’s the Holy Grail. No, really. For reasons unknown to me, the musical is called “Spamalot.” OK, so I am really not that much of a Monty Python fan, but even I know that Spam didn’t have anything to do with the Holy Grail. The famous sketch was from the show, not the movie.

But besides that, and the uncomfortable realization that yes, really, they’ve made a broadway musical out of the Holy Grail, there is also a product tie-in: Spam. No, really. Hormel Foods has introduced the Collector’s Edition SPAM(TM) Golden HONEY Grail Now Available in Honor of Monty Python’s SPAMALOT.

And I quote: “SPAM(R) is the holy grail of canned meats,” says Eric Idle. “We’re thrilled to dine on SPAM(TM) golden honey grail at the round table of SPAMALOT.”

(I got it from Worthwhile.)

I admit it, I am having a lot of trouble getting into Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. So complex! So well researched! So ambitious! So …. Zzzzzzzz. I’m trying. Really I am. Part of the problem is that I look at it on the bedside table and I think, oh god, 600 pages of this, and then there are two more books. And I just know not a single one of these books will have an ending. Really, all I want from Neal Stephenson is an actual ending, but I don’t have much hope.

So anyhow, instead of digging myself further into that tome I read The Stupidest Angel (a heartwarming tale of christmas terror) instead. If you’ve read any Chris Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends, Practical Demonkeeping, etc), then this is basically Chris Moore writing in his sleep. Not that that is a bad thing. Not at all. This book is the distilled essence of Chris Moore (uh, that was intended to be a compliment, and not sound totally icky). This is pretty much Chris Moore doing what he does really really well, which is write hysterically funny, totally manic books with insane characters doing completely bizarre stuff. If you have read any of Chris Moore’s previous books, then at least some of this one will be familiar: this is like a giant reunion book. It takes place in Pine Cove, and its got a whole pile of characters from his previous books in it.

The plot goes like this: The angel Raziel (From Lamb) shows up in Pine Cove to grant a child a christmas wish. Except Raziel isn’t very bright (see the title), and picks the wrong child at the wrong time, just after the kid happens to witness Santa Claus being murdered via a shovel to the head. Chaos and hilarity ensues. Along the way there are also skewerings of women’s health clubs, O Henry short stories, 12 step programs (Molly Michon’s higher power is Nigoth, the worm god), wine snobs, and just about every zombie movie ever made.

Its a short book, and it reads fast. Its better than Fluke, but not as good as Lamb, but its funnier than Lamb. I must have laughed hysterically more than a dozen times. I loved it. I read it twice. Page-wise, that’s about 3/16 of Quicksilver, but I had much more fun with Chris Moore’s book. Go buy it, yay.

Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602 is out in trade paperback (or at least Volume 1 is). This is Gaiman’s retelling of the marvel comics universe 400 years back.

I missed this series when it was out in comics because I have massive unresolved guilt about buying comics and never reading them (I still have huge stacks of unread comics from years and years back. So guilty. So so guilty). I haven’t even read it yet. Adding to wishlist.

After I finished Going Postal I got to the book I had intended to read: Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach.

This is a book about dead people, or rather, the various things that human bodies are subjected to after we’re done with them. Its about autopsies, and putrefaction, and dissection, and execution, and cannibalism, and reanimation, and ballistics.

This is an utterly delightful book, and I am not being sarcastic. You would think that given the subject matter that this would be a dark book, tough to read, and very dry and clinical in its descriptions. These are human bodies, after all, and although we may decapitate them and shoot at them and run them into walls and boil them into goo and compost them etc etc they deserve respect. Death is a serious subject, she said, with a serious expression.

But no, Mary Roach’s book is a hoot. There are very few books that have made me laugh out loud this year — and this is one of them. Sure, it’s horrifying at times, with vivid descriptions that can be hard to take. But Roach’s writing style, the stories she tells, and the descriptions of the people she interviews in finding out about these stories are so fascinating and so brightly told that the balance between darkness and the light is just perfect. The more horrifying the subject, the funnier her writing gets. For a book about dead bodies, it is wonderfully alive.

For example, here’s a quote from when Roach goes to visit a funeral home to learn about embalming. She observes a body being “posed,” that is, arranged for an open casket funeral.

The last feature to be posed is the mouth, which will hang open if not held shut. Theo is narrating for Nicole, who is using a curved needle and heavy-duty string to suture the jaws together. “The goal is to reenter through the same hole and come in behind the teeth,” says Theo. “Now she’s coming out one of the nostrils, across the septum, and then she’s going to reenter the mouth. There are a variety of ways of closing the mouth,” he adds, and then he begins talking about something called a needle injector. I pose my own mouth to resemble the mouth of someone who is quietly horrified, and this works quite well to close Theo’s mouth. The suturing process proceeds in silence.

The book is also littered with random footnotes that lead to bizarre off-topic digressions. On the very next page from the suturing incident the Father of Embalming is mentioned, and there is a footnote that asks

Does everything have a father? Apparently so. A web search on “the father of” turned up fathers for vasectomy reversal, hillbilly jazz, lichenology, snowmobiling, modern librarianship, Japanese whiskey, hypnosis, Pakistan, natural hair care products, the lobotomy, women’s boxing, Modern Option Pricing Theory, the swamp buggy, Pennsylvania ornithology, Wisconsin bluegrass, tornado research, Fen-Phen, modern dairying, Canada’s permissive society, black power, and the yellow schoolbus.

At another point Roach apologizes for having stopped doing research about the weight of the soul because she was distracted by another article about the ancient history of medicine in the journal she was reading. But because of this distraction, she says, she can “hold forth at cocktail parties on the history of hemorrhoids, gonorrhea, circumcision, and the speculum.” And then there’s a footnote that starts “Since the odds of our meeting at a cocktail party are slim and the odds of my managing to swing the conversation around to speculums slimmer still, let me take this opportunity to share…” and then goes on for half a page on the history of speculums.

I love this woman.

But I will cease abusing the fair use part of copyright law at this point and tell you that you must read this book. I know, I have said this about every book I’ve reviewed here, but I mean it this time. (eventually I’ll review a book that isn’t that great.) It will probably spoil your dinner, but you’ll have a lot of fun going hungry. Go. Read it. Go.

Next up on my reading list: Quicksilver. Yes, I know, I am behind on my geek reading.