Books and wedding preparations

Last fitting for my sister's wedding dress this morning and I practiced lacing it up. She looks beautiful in it. Then home to finish painting the table letters. She's got everything so well organized I said we should go into business together. I'd deal with the people and she could keep track of everything and we'd both deal with vendors. However dealing with the suppliers is not high on her list of things to do. People are obnoxious little bastards apparently; they try to squeeze money out of people getting married and they don't return calls or they don't deliver on time. Well, it can be a fall-back plan.

I'm reading Nabokov and Jules Verne. I'm also trying to read Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule and he does not come off favorably in comparison. Not saying he's bad, mind you, just saying his writing seems very childish after a chapter of The Real Life of Sebastien Knight. U is for Undertow is a little too low-key for me but it's not bad and I'm only half-way through. Gail Carriger's Soulless I ended up putting down after the first 134 pages. It was touted as being supernatural steampunk and while the supernatural is there the steampunk isn't. Oh, and it's actually a romance in disguise. The speech she uses is jarringly anachronistic ("Gee", says the Scottish 19th century werewolf? I don't think so) and for any character she picks one joke and then beats it to death. The main character has a social disadvantage because of her large nose and tan skin inherited from her dead, Italian father. But she has a smoking figure. The American is constantly disparaged by the heroine as being American uncouth. Her friend wears silly hats. And on and on. The mystery takes a back seat to the fact that the heroine and the werewolf are physically attracted to each other and after they make-out in a public street that aspect takes over. It's not all bad, she has an interesting take on werewolves and vampires and I liked the secondary werewolf character Professor Lyall but not enough to wade through self-absorbed people sucking face. So, back to the classics. I'm almost done with Sebastien Knight.