handful_ofdust

Still down with the sickness, though I feel startlingly better on a base level than I did for most of yesterday. Sleeping a lot probably helped, as did mainlining hot water with honey in it. By early evening I was actually able to have a shower, get dressed, go out for dinner and carry on a conversation, though people around me probably found my constant expectorations fairly obnoxious. We then went home, put Cal to bed and watched the first of Steve's Rogers selections, Superbad. It's funny.

(In case you're wondering, yeah, I suppose my movie consumption fast in support of the Strike has finally gone by the wayside. But at least I didn't break it over Christmas, peak buying time, and the last two--three, counting the previously-viewed Fido DVD--titles I got, I got for free. I'm an addict; I have to take my tiny moral victories where I can.)

In book news, meanwhile--

*Read enough of Jonathan Maberry's Dead Man's Song to figure out that A) it's the second installment of a trilogy which is really much more of one huge book broken down for maximum money-extraction from an unsuspecting audience, which means that B) most of the beginning of it is him telling me what happened two or three hours immediately before this book begins, and though C) he's a fairly good King pasticher, I'd rather re-read any given King than read the rest of this.

*Read White Devils by Paul McAuley, which is fast-paced like Michael Crichton, well-researched and -written like Greg Bear, and full of smart, sharp characterization/twisty plot/interesting anthropology like Jeff Long. Reduced to parts, it's a near-future thriller about rampant black market genetic engineering in post-plague, multinational-owned Africa, but it also has pertinent things to say about the human condition and what emotional drives may have been hard-wired in all our ancestors. Think ReGenesis, but with a massive, massive budget. Time well-spent.

*Today, I'm splitting my time between Blood Price by Jon Evans and Barbara Hambly's Renfield, Slave of Dracula, which I've (obviously) wanted to read for a while. Hambly's a consistently good author who once wrote (and later demolished, by extending into a series in which she felt compelled to torment all the characters until they broke and bent beyond recognition) one of my favorite fantasy books of all time, Dragonsbane. Evans, on the other hand, is a Canadian I.T. guy turned thriller-writer with a workmanlike, usually first person style--his books always remind me of extended movie treatments--and a great grasp on Lonely Planet tourism/international crime/post-millennial counter-culture/tricksy computer stuff. Nothing he's done thus far has completely lived up to the promise of his first book, Dark Places, in which his personal avatar sees someone get killed while scaling a Tibetan mountain, then realizes that this is just the iceberg-tip of a network of serial killers who pick off international tourists (one of whom, ie this one, also killed Mr Avatar's former GF during a trip to Africa). The last time I read one of his books, I felt compelled to skip to the end and then shuffle around inside of it in order to avoid getting jerked around by suspense; so far, Blood Price doesn't break this trend. But it's all good airport reads, and if I had a production company, I'd option his stuff in a minute. (No ruling on the Hambly book as yet, though it reads well so far.)

And those are the haps. I can only wonder what tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that are going to be like. Or how damn long it's going to be 'til I get over this crap/am fit to do much except recuperate. But there's no point in thinking about that now...