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Miss Pinkerton--Mary Roberts Rinehart
Assignment In Brittany--Helen MacInnes
Finding Serenity: Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly--Jane Espenson (editor)
The Moonstone--Wilkie Collins
Detour for Meg--Helen Diehl Olds
The Mona Lisa Overture--William Gibson
Snapshot--Garry Disher
A Murder of Quality--John Le Carre
Call For The Dead--John Le Carre

Neighborhood Happenings

Someone has walked up the street and spraypainted anarchy symbols on all the for-sale signs.

I went to the Lakewood Kar Kulture Show to look at all the old vehicles and take pictures. Beautiful, beautiful. I also walked most of the way there and back, so I'm quite pleased with myself.

The Life Of The World To Come--Kage Baker

It's so nice to find a book that reinvigorated a series and reminds you of why you were reading it in the first place. Kage Baker is a science fiction writer whose series about The Company and the people who work for it is one of the best combinations of satirical humor and thrill I've found. The Company's greatest achievement and revenue driver is that they've perfected immortality and time travel, along with genetic splicing and a few other assorted technologies. Unfortunately, the procedure only works on children. And you cannot change recorded history. Ah, but if you take children, (and so many children have just died or gone missing throughout history) and modify them into cyborgs and send them to gather items that would just be destroyed or lost, put it all in storage and either sell or develop future drugs or technologies off them--why, then you'd rule the world!

Which good ol' Dr. Zeus Corporation does. Up until 2355, anyway. No one knows what happens after that point. All recorded history stops.

Baker's first four books in this series were great--they centered on Mendoza, a cyborg and botanist whose first mission goes awry when she falls in love with a 16th century human who is burned at the stake. So when she encounters him again in the early 19th century, who can blame her freakout? When last we heard of her, she had been sent to solitary confinement in the BCE for a few thousand years.

Baker has great characters and a fabulous grasp on history, but in the middle of this series the books just started spinning like truck tires in the mud. Not enough happened to propel the story or my interest.

But Baker's back on track and clearing up details with this book, which charts the life of Alec Checkerfield, Seventh Earl of Finsbury, and a man not quite of his time and class. We've met Alec before--he's appeared in some of the short stories. He's not quite human. And a pirate. And he's got a connection to Mendoza.

The story is good, Baker really lets loose on her depiction of a nanny-state future, and finally I can finish the series and enjoy it!

Happenings

The geodome has been up for 5 days. Interestingly, it's just the PVC skeleton that is up. Its drab olive nylon covering has been taken down. I don't know, but if I was going to be using this as a home base structure in the Nevada desert for a week or two, I'd want a canvas cover, preferably white or stripey. Wouldn't that be cooler and more conducive to air flow? Hmm?

Jackass neighbor and his friend were out bullshitting at 1:30 am on Friday and woke me up. If I hadn't been sleeping naked because of washing my nightclothes, I'd have gone out and yelled at them.

Another good reason to spy on the neighbors? When you notice that a house for sale up the street is practically a mirror for your own, but sells for a low price of $112,000 (interestingly, over $20K less than Progressive Urban Real Estate originally priced it at 18 months ago, and they reused that price when the new owners put it on the market 3 weeks ago. Are they on crack?) you can cite that house when the county auditor tries to tell you the market value of your house is $124,000 for the new property tax figures. My house's official square footage is slightly less too. I am trying to wrap my heart around how deeply I fucked myself with homeownership.

Geodome Is Back

And has currently been set up all night on my neighbors' front lawn.

Offer up some adjectives to describe how I feel.

What Happened At The Andy Warhol Party

I thought it was a bit of a bust myself, but people seemed to have fun. The food was a big hit, especially the Creamed Honey Ice Cream. However, I cannot entertain in my home anymore because 3 cats+ vacuuming still leads to allergy problems for people. It ended early.

Read On, Genevieve!

I tried playing Reader's Advisor with Genevieve last Friday. For those of you non-librarian geeks, this is a big to do in library circles--imagine, back in days of yore the librarian would actually talk to you and tell you what you might like to read! Librarians are trying to revive this practice. I took a workshop on it last summer. Anyway, back before she moved I made a list of NY authors for Genevieve that I never gave her because I am lame. So here it is: (Incidently Genevieve, I really urge you to go over to the Brooklyn Public Library and ask a librarian. I think you'll get better recommendations than my list below. And librarians really like it when clean and polite people talk to them.)

• Damon Runyon--I read the collected works of Damon Runyon as a kid and loved the slangy language and humor. Plus, NY setting. Lots of references to gambling and booze. Probably dated, and you might not like it.
• Dorothy Parker--The first modern, dark, angsty girl. And funny. The Vintage collection has a awesome new cover, and consists of her short stories, reviews and poems--just the thing for an elliptical workout.
• S.J. Rozan--How much do I miss the Bill Smith/Lydia Chin series? Tons, tons, tons. For those of you who haven't heard of her work, Rozan wrote a great series of NY based detective novels (currently on extended hiatus) featuring these two detectives. Here's the setup--Lydia Chin is a first generation Chinese-American, living in Chinatown with her widowed mom and trying really hard not to bring shame on the family since being an unmarried 20-something female PI is not something her community looks upon favorably. She is trouble, but a necessary trouble, as she points out in the first novel Chinese people will not consult a non-Chinese for help. Bill Smith is more of a classic noir detective, older with a tragic history (military service, divorced, dead daughter). They work independently, but pull each other in on cases for help. The series is narrated by both detectives, each taking a turn for a novel. The snark is good, there's tinge of romance, and the mysteries themselves are compelling. So grab a copy of the first novel, China Trade and see if you like it.
• Bill Willingham--Fables: Legends In Exile: How much do I love Fables? Willingham Wednesday is practically a holiday for me. This comic book takes the premise that the famous characters from classic myths and fairy tales are real, and have been living in NYC. They've all escaped from their homelands, fleeing an invasion by The Adversary. They've set up a government and hide among the Mundy. The series starts with Bigby Wolf and Snow White investigating the presumed death of Snow's sister Rose Red in a noir homage. The books are funny, the characters well-fleshed out, the society real, and Willingham loves to torture his character and the reader. The cover art by James Jean is fabulous. And Willingham is expertly spinning out his story--he plants clues in the first issue that get picked out 20 issues later, and you smack yourself and say, "Of course! How could I not notice!" The second book (Animal Farm) takes place at The Farm, the upstate hideaway community of non-human Fables, where there's a bit of an insurrection brewing. We then get more revelations and complications in Storybook Love followed by an invasion in The March of the Wooden Soldiers. We then follow Snow's new life in The Mean Seasons, other characters return to The Homelands and new people come to town in Arabian Days (And Nights).