Current read and rambling ruminations

Tasty bison burgers for dinner. Made some tip money. Tourists are coming out in full force. The cold is starting to feel like it will never lift. It will of course. If we're lucky maybe we'll get a week of spring before the temperatures shoot up into the 90s. Honestly though, I'm looking forward to the heat.

I'm reading The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin. A mystery story set in Moscow and London in 1876 featuring a charmingly fresh-faced detective named Erast Fandorin, it remains gently humorous while never quite letting go of a hard edge that runs throughout. Rather than being stomped on by superiors when he has an original idea he is encouraged to investigate on his own. They figure it will do him good. This is a nice change of pace from investigators forced to go rogue and work on their own in order to see justice done. Erast Petrovich is such a babe in the woods at times but this naivety seems to work for him, disarming those he's spying on. He's so without guile it's impossible to imagine that he's hiding anything. The plot is moving along at a nice pace. I think I'll keep Akunin on my list of authors to read.

And now for rambling writing time because I want to.

It's rare in the suburbs to experience true darkness at night. There's so much light pollution that the sky glows deep purple even at 2:00 a.m. When I was little however, the small town where our vacation home is had far fewer streetlights and it was possible to wake up to blackness like a veil. I would open my eyes real wide, turn my head towards the windows searching for just a little light to anchor me. Deprived of my sight I would feel almost trapped, incapable of something so simple that during the day I never even thought about it. My sister was sleeping in the next bed over but she may as well have been on a separate island. The outside world would be reduced to the sound of a train whistle coming from down the block and across the road. Then I would think about ghost trains rushing by in the night, passengers dark and dim in the windows with wide mouths and holes for eyes, fingers pressed against the glass. It always seemed to me that traveling was for the daytime and that deep dark was reserved for the others that came out after. The unknown is populated by the things we cannot see. It's one thing to be unable to see you own hand right in front of your face but something else to not notice the hand reaching out for you.

I would make a humorous obscure reference but I'm too lazy

Tenterhook: One of the hooks or bent nails set in a close row along the upper and lower bar of a tenter, by which the edges of the cloth are firmly held. OED.

A good word to know. To be on tenterhooks is to be stretched or strained like cloth hanging from hooks.

I handled very old and not-so-old books today and printed many pieces of paper. And I am thoroughly sick of winter.

I finished reading Le Clezio's Onitsha and I'm sorry to say but I'm terribly underwhelmed. It's not that it's a bad book. The writing is fine and he follows through on the plot but overall it's incredibly superficial. The characters are practically cut-outs. He has taken an outline of a person and filled them with vague personality traits. Reading about his characters is like viewing a person painted with broad strokes in watercolor. You get an idea of what they might look like but you wouldn't recognize them on the street. You could argue that Fintan, Maou, and Geoffrey are not as important as the setting. The town Onitsha is the main character except that mainly you follow Fintan and his parents and you actually see next to nothing of the people who live around them. There is nothing in this book that shows you that here, there is a community here of folk living their lives under colonial rule and they are human. They bargain in the market, the play silly games, they quarrel and throw tantrums and fall in love. They dream. None of that is here. They are broad strokes; gently laughing women and faded warrior men with faces like African masks and superhuman expressions. That last part disturbed me. This book has a whiff of the "noble savage" genre about it with its proud race of people whose traditions go back to the days when their ancestors left Egypt, who see gods in everything and eat funny, exotic foods. The mute woman who shows up in town with nothing becomes the embodiment of the river goddess, of the black queen who left her homeland to found a new one. Yeah, no. She was much more interesting when she was just a wary, mute woman learning to make friends with Maou. Turning the African characters into nothing more than the last remnants of a displaced people denies them of ordinary human expression.

Another problem I had with the writing was the way it never let things truly develop. In the beginning Maou doesn't like Onitsha. Then we read about Fintan learning about how to fit in, then suddenly we're back with Maou and she loves the place. Show some change don't just say "oh yeah, this happened." Everything was a little disjointed like that. Geoffrey's obsession with the "black queen of Meroe" comes out of nowhere and just muddles everything up.

A few small things:

- The role Sabin Rodes plays in the town is never made clear but he has a surprising amount of power. Maou's dislike for him is never explained and the reveal about him at the end made no sense. I'm probably missing something but I care so little for all of these rather vague characters.

- I know the French had colonies in Africa so why did this French author decide to set his story (which is ostensibly about colonial rule although it's more a back drop than a theme) in an English one?

- The book goes on too long. It starts with the journey to Africa and it should have ended with the journey back, not gone on to show where they are twenty years down the line. The story was about their stay in a country vastly unfamiliar to them. The foreign-ness of their surroundings lends the book a dream-like quality that breaks abruptly with the description of Fintan's later life in England. It also becomes surprisingly maudlin. I spent about the last ten pages rolling my eyes.

Maybe the river was the main character. It rolls on throughout the story as a great changeable but ever present beast. It sleeps just under the surface of everything the characters do and think. However, it would still be nice if the people could engage my attention.

So that was tl;dr but I'm glad to get that down. I'm trying to read "literature" and I've discovered that just because an author has won an award doesn't mean he's particularly good. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe Onitsha is one of his more mediocre books. At least he knows how to use quotation marks.

There is no title, I ate it

Boring day but that's alright. Good food today; I treated myself to a burger with jalapeños and hot sauce and there were home-made whoopie pies to celebrate a co-workers birthday.

Bandoline: "A gummy preparation for fixing hair." Can also be used as a verb. From OED.

I've never heard this used. I wonder if it's obsolete. Dictionary.com says it's "a mucilaginous preparation made from quince seeds and used for smoothing, glossing ,and waving the hair."

Other web hits seem to imply it's some sort of musical instrument but I wonder if people aren't just confusing it with something else.

Not much to say today. I finished When the Bough Breaks. I always forget how irritating Kellerman's books are. There's something aggressively bland about his main character. Alex is a psychologist and he's capable of drawing people out with his mad shrink skills but he kind of comes off as rather patronizing. I can't imagine his techniques working on real people unless they wanted to talk to begin with. I know the author is a psychologist but I can't help but feel he makes it a little easier for his character to allow him to show off and advance the plot. And then the rather bland character goes all Jack Bauer on the bad guy but fails when it comes to the actual rescue. In the end the police save the day, which is fine but for all his posturing it would have been nice if Alex had managed it alone. Also, dude, if you're in a car chase, dodging a guy on a motorcycle with a gun, put the brakes on sooner. He'll go right over your trunk and viola, problem solved. Well, the books aren't bad when gotten out of the library.

I watched the movie Pulse. A Japanese horror movie from the days of dial-up internet where a website shows...ghosts? There are red taped doors that lead to the Forbidden Room and there's not enough space for people and spirits and people merge with walls, leaving creepy shadows. Apocalypse! And it all ends on a boat. I think I missed something crucial to understanding the whole thing. Ah well.

I'm reading Le Clezio's Onitsha. Takes place in Africa in 1948. A boy named Fintan travels to Niger with his mother to meet up with her husband. I haven't quite figured out if he's Fintan's biological father or not. They've just arrived which is good because I was getting tired of them being on the boat. It's okay so far but the descriptions aren't very evocative. Everything seems a little flat. I don't know if it's the translation or what but maybe things will be more interesting when they get to their destination.

By the by, that's my sister up there reading to my cousin's daughter.

Zamyatin and Kellerman you know

This has been a tiring week. We got a call about our other house, the one my father inherited from his grandmother. Apparently a pipe burst due to a combination of unfortunate events and flooded the place with three feet of water, ruining the floors and ceilings and pulling cabinets away from walls. I'm not so much upset about the structure itself; if the insurance company actually does it's damn job we can get the money to rebuild. It's the stuff inside that's probably ruined that hurts.

My great-grandparents bought this house in 1952, the year it was built, as a retirement home. It's a five minute drive from the beach in a small, quiet town. This house became a repository for a lot of old family things, a number of them over 100 years old. My great-grandfather died in this house. My great-grandmother and my grandmother lived there until their deaths in 1980 (they died only a few months apart). I never met my grandparents, both were gone before I was born, but staying in this house on weekends and during the summer and winter vacations surrounded by their lives made me feel as if they were with me. My father would tell me stories about all of them when I would ask him about various books and photographs and other objects. With all these things probably destroyed it feels like they've died all over again. It's felt like grieving. And then I feel bad because there are so many others who are going through much worse and lost much more right now but I can't help it.

Anyway, the above picture is a rocking horse from that house. It was my father's. He used to play on it when he went to visit his grandparents. My sister and I played on it when we were little as well.

Eleemosynary:

a. Charitable, pertaining to alms.

b. Dependant on alms.

c. Done as an act of charity.

The OED makes it pretty clear that this word means just about anything to do with almsgiving from the donations to the institutions set up by donations to those receiving them.

I borrowed a copy of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin from a co-worker on Tuesday and finished it yesterday. It was written in 1921 in Soviet Russia at about the time when writers were beginning to be forced to write only in approved ways. We was not published there and Zamyatin was forced into exile several times during his life. It was finally published in Russia in 1988.

It's a story about a future time in which the One State controls just about every aspect of the people's lives. They live in a city surrounded by a glass wall to keep out the uncontrolled greenery of nature. In fact, just about everything is made of glass so no one can hide what they are doing. The only time they can lower shades over their rooms is when they have sex. Citizens have a Table of Hours that lays out what they should be doing at all times. They have two personal hours a day to read, write or redeem pink coupons for intercourse. They are assigned work, participate in farce elections for their Great Benefactor, chew each mouthful of food the regulation 50 times, and attend lectures that mock the disordered ways of the ancients and glorify the logical civilization that they live in.

The novel is the journal of number D-503, an engineer and mathematician working on a spaceship meant to bring the One State way of life to other planets. He is eventually seduced by I-330, a woman who is part of a revolutionary force trying to bring down the wall and break free of the state's oppressive control. It's a decent read. The story is more about the control of the One State (I think we can all guess who Zamyatin was talking about and what he was trying to say) and how a logical way of living implemented for the benefit of the majority crushes the will and individuality of the one. D-503 is diagnosed as ill, having developed a 'soul'. This causes him great anguish as he starts to distinguish the difference between himself as a complacent automaton living according to the rules and the individual he is becoming, one who has wants he can only satisfy by breaking those rules that formerly kept him happy and safe.

The writing is poetic which is a little problematic considering the writer is supposed to D-503, a person who admits he is no poet and has little imagination. He's not supposed to be very experienced at describing things and yet he does, quite beautifully. I think the novel would have been stronger if his writing had started out humdrum and eventually moved towards being luminous and fey. The "love" part of the story (which seems more like lust to me but so many writers get the two confused so pfft I guess) is not very original; his friendship with R and his companionship with his regular lover O is disrupted by the temptress I. D experiences confusion about what is happening to him and what he should do to resolve things one way or the other.

I have a few problems with the book but nothing majorly off-putting. Gendered roles and stereotypes seem to have persisted a thousand years into the future in this 'egalitarian' society but it was written in the late teens. I don't understand why a controlling state would allow its citizens to decide for themselves who they want to have sex with rather than just assigning them regular partners. It doesn't matter I suppose. It was a good read.

Now I'm finishing up Jonathan Kellerman's first Alex Delaware novel When the Bough Breaks. Like all of his books there is much that could have been edited out; scenes of the main character receiving directions to locations or phoning his girlfriend to tell her he has to make a short out of town trip. The reader doesn't need several paragraphs describing these rather boring phone conversations. The author can tell us in a couple of sentences that it happened. We don't need to know how to get to the university. "If you're coming from downtown take I-5 to 520 which turns into the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. Drive all the way across the bridge to the east shore, turn south at Fairweather and continue along the coastline." I'm not going to go there. There are many instances like this and all they serve to do is break up the narration. Nor do we need to listen to Robin and Alex debate about whether she should accompany him on his trip or not. Alex himself is a rather boring character and the amount of interest he attracts from women in this book and throughout the entire series has always baffled me. Robin's characterization bounces between needy and supportive depending on what will make Alex look best in any given scene. Characters are often portrayed by stereotypes. The entire book reads like a barely veiled diatribe at the way society as a whole treats children. And yet despite the many flaws of Kellerman's writing style and characterization I keep reading his books. What can I say? The man knows how to create interesting plots.

My favorite books and why you should like them

Rodomontade: Extravagant boasting or bragging; bravado; boastful or bombastic language.

This word comes to you from Perfume. It kind of makes me think of gardening tools.

Perfume actually had a number of words I wasn't certain about although I didn't get the chance to write them all down. Most had to do with fragrances unsurprisingly.

Civet: A substance used in fragrances. Yellow or brown, "unctuous", and harvested from glands located in the anal pouch of the African Civet cat.

I don't think I need to comment on that. And my mother wonders why I prefer body sprays. I'm fairly certain they don't contain unctuous secretions from a cat's anal pouch. Wait, I gotta go check.

Anyway let's move on. I have a long day tomorrow.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I loved this book. Fair warning; it takes time and energy to read. A young man, Johnny, has discovered a manuscript that examines a film about a house where odd things were happening. It's not entirely clear that the film ever existed although the manuscript contains many references and reads very convincingly. A photographer and his family moved into a house in rural Virginia where a door appears out of nowhere that leads into a vast, dark labyrinth. The film is about the photographer's family and the exploration of the exploration into the frightening black space. The manuscript analyzes the film and the people in it. Johnny decides to edit what he's found and his project seems to cause a descent into madness. There are footnotes on top of footnotes and the original manuscript is interspersed with Johnny's increasingly incoherent ramblings. It's an impressive exercise in writing tales within tales. I have a fondness for the surreal.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I think everyone has read this trilogy by now but I still want to mention it. I found this book, as well as the two following, very engrossing. If you want a conspiracy story this is far better than Dan Brown. Again though, you need to have patience. All three are thick books and there is material that could probably have been cut out or streamlined. However, there's something about Blomkvist and Salander I found very engaging. They're different from your more usual hero and heroine. Neither are really interested in conforming to other people's views but they're not in your face about being different. Blomkvist is a very earnest person who wants to see justice done but he does it his own way. Salander just wants to be left alone but she still has a surprising number of people she can count on who ultimately pull together to help her. The books are well-plotted and the ending is very satisfying.

Fudoki by Kij Johnson. I'm going to slip this one in there. This is a magical-realism story set in ancient Japan. It's more like a fairy tale or a myth and mimics the logic you usually find in such stories very well. A fudoki is explained as being a cat's tale, the story cat's pass on to one another down through generations accumulating moments from each life. The cat the story follows loses her family and home in an earthquake and thus loses her fudoki as well. She sets out to find a new place and a new fudoki. Along the way she turns into a woman, a huntress, and she meets and deals with many people and not-people along the way. This isn't always a nice book; she's a cat after all and even human she acts like a cat. The fairy tale mist this book seems to wrap itself in dampens the occasional violence. I enjoyed it a great deal.

I should be looking for a new job

Contumacy:

A. Perverse and obstinate resistance of or disobedience to authority; rebellious stubbornness.

B. An act or instance of wilful disobedience.

I finished Missing yesterday. Not the best book ever but still a good read. It's not really a mystery. Yes, there's a killer and it's a mystery who it is but that's not what the story is about. It's really about Sibylla and her journey out of obscurity and hopelessness. It's about the connection she's made with another human being for the first time in her life. It's the story of her fight for legitimacy. The chapters alternate between the present and the past with a few pages of religious rambling from the actual murderer thrown in for good measure. There is very little investigating. Leads are found right away and they always pan out. It's easy to pick out the important clues but the author doesn't make you wait too long for the character to figure them out. There's a dramatic showdown between Sibylla and the murderer. The whole thing was a bit depressing until the end but I found it worth it. I seem to be reading a lot of books like that lately. I need something more cheerful.

One thing it helps to know is that Sibylla is apparently the name of a fast food chain in Sweden. I had to look this up on Wikipedia because I couldn't understand why she hated her name so much.

I seem to be reading and now watching a lot of things with children being abused both physically and emotionally. How am I finding these things? I need a break. I watched the new The Karate Kid. Jaden Smith does a great job as the protagonist. Jackie Chan reminded me that he's a great dramatic actor. The fight scenes were very entertaining and the story was, well, the same as the original. Boy (Dre) moves to a new place where he meets a girl. Kung Fu kid takes a dislike to Dre and beats him up. Dre meets Mr. Han the maintenance man who teaches him Kung Fu. Dre wins the tournament (hope I didn't spoil the ending). Pretty predictable. However, the way they get there is still well worth watching. The relationship between Dre and Mr. Han is rewarding. There are several fairly emotional scenes and you really feel their weight. The bully is a terrifying little snot. Seriously, he looks like even if he couldn't hit you anymore he'd still attempt to gnaw on your leg. At the end it seems like Dre has learned more than just the physical aspects of the sport.

On the other hand I feel they could have pared it down by about twenty minutes especially from the beginning. It's hard enough watching a nice high school kid get the crap beat out of him but it's even more painful when the boy is only twelve. Still, I recommend it.

I don't even know what to say about the earthquake in Japan. The whole thing is heartbreaking and I hope that the reports about more than 1,000 people being dead are not true. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to have everything swept away, to have an entire town flooded and broken. Where I live there are basically no earthquakes. A little further north they occasionally have one that feels like a truck passing by. The ground is a solid thing to me. That picture in The Washington Post of the road literally split in two was awe-inspiring. Like those gigantic sinkholes that sometimes open up, it shows how fragile the terrain we walk on (or drive on) can be. The only good thing (if there can be a good thing) about the whole situation is that Japan is a developed country that has made massive preparations for just this sort of emergency. They've reinforced many larger buildings and they're not unused to earthquakes. This will not be another Haiti. My heart and prayers go out to the people of Japan and I hope that recovery will be relatively swift.

And now I will return to my (semi)regularly scheduled post.

Senescence: "The process or condition of growing old." From the OED.

I finished Perfume by Suskind last night. I stayed up late to do so. I hated it by the end. I was trying to be nice and give it the benefit of the doubt earlier but really? It was kind of boring and obnoxious. The writing was beautiful but the plot and the characters were rather uninteresting. There is very little dialogue in this book and as a result there is very little meaningful character interaction. The main character, Grenouille, is the only one that is fully developed. This would be fine but I found myself increasingly disliking him. I honestly couldn't tell if this was the author's intention or not. I did not find myself supporting Grenouille in his endeavors. I was wishing that he would fail. Admittedly this was because he was murdering young women but also because I had no vested interest in seeing him succeed. It was actually the opposite; I wanted him to be caught and punished.

There seems to be some sort of moralizing going on in the book. People are easily influenced by Grenouille's scents because their baser instincts come through in reaction to odors regardless of the civilized veneer they present to the world. Grenouille has no scent himself and is not affected by the perfumes he creates. I have several problems with this. One, I know we are all animals driven by base instincts that we counter-balance with higher feeling. There's little more irritating than being lectured by someone who thinks they've discovered some new truth when they haven't. Two, I just don't believe smells can have that much of an effect. You can't sneak by people just because you are wearing eau-de-wall-flower. People would still see and hear you. Sound is a very powerful force as well. Maybe Grenouille didn't rely much on sight but other people do. I won't even comment on the ridiculous nature of the final perfume. It was just plain stupid. Third, Grenouille is presented as having basically no human feeling (and believing himself to be above human instinct) and this is linked to his odorless state. One quibble; he does have human feeling. He smells a scent that sends his heart racing and he wants to possess it. He is obsessed with owning something that has great meaning to him. He wants it even as he knows that having means its eventual destruction. This is a very human trait. I could probably argue for others but this is getting too long already so I'll move on to a couple other annoyances in the book.

Beautiful virgin girls apparently smell the best of all. Oh good fucking hell. Really? You're going with that? You're going to compare the harvesting of their scent to harvesting flowers? Budding breasts and blossoms. Picking flowers to deflowering a virgin. Oh how clever. Suskind, your imagination knows no bounds, I'm sure.

There's more to be annoyed about but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that this is a surprisingly boring book with lovely, sensual prose and an abhorrent main character.

I'm still reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac and I'm also reading Missing by Karin Alvtegen. The idea of having a homeless woman as the main character is intriguing. She's on the edge of society and her life on the run (she's been falsely accused of murder) is exacerbated by her lack of funds and a support network. We'll see where this goes.

It's entirely possible that at some point I will write a short story

Callipygian: "Of, pertaining to, or having well-shaped or finely developed buttocks." From the OED.

You can't hear it but I'm snickering. There's a word for everything, isn't there.

Wedding was wonderful. Myself, my sister, and two of the other bridesmaids went to get our hair done in the morning and then had sushi for lunch. We lugged our stuff to the bridal room in the parish house and spent the next while getting ready and having our pictures taken. I laced my sister into her dress and she looked just gorgeous. The wedding ceremony was meaningful and sweet and the reception afterwards was full of good food and fun dancing. Several of us went to the hotel a few of the guests were staying at for another drink after everything was cleaned up. I had a grasshopper; one part creme de menthe, one part creme de cacao, one part half and half. A couple at the far end of the bar tried to get into a fight. There was a shoving match and the woman tried to slap the man but she was pretty plastered and just ending up smooshing her hand in his face. The bartenders broke them up fast and sent them on their way. But not before they were reminded to pay their tab.

The next day we had a brunch for out of town guests to say thanks and bye. We were all well-pleased with how smoothly everything went.

I finished Let the Right One in. I think, on the whole, I liked the book. It could sorely have used some editing, I really think Tommy's part could have been cut out somehow, but the ending was good and the characters were interesting. This is the sort of book you read while half-cringing though because you know that bad things are coming. But I'd read another book by this author.

I finished The Way Through Doors today. A circular story and most definitely not for everyone, it has a dream-like quality to it where things only make sense in a nonsensical sort of way. I occasionally like to read books that don't entirely make sense as long as it's on purpose. There is a common thread throughout the book; Selah Morse is looking for a woman with amnesia. He was taking care of her and now she's lost. One story bleeds into the next and comes back to Selah and then looks at an earlier story from another point of view and so on. It's wandering. I liked it.

Now I'm reading Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. I don't know how I feel about this one. It tells the story of Jean-Baptise Grenouille who was born in 18th century France and has an incredibly powerful sense of smell but is completely without any odor himself. So far it's recounted his life from birth through apprenticeship to adulthood. He has killed one person thus far but it has had little relevance to the story. I'm on page 153 and I keep waiting for that early murderous experience to have some impact on his life. I assume he'll kill again but so far it's been an exercise in writing a fictitious (magical-realism) biography. There is very little dialogue. Well...it's entertaining. I'll finish it and I'd even read something else by this author but I'm a little disappointed. I expected something a little more Jack the Ripper only with perfume than the roving of someone with an amazing olfactory apparatus.

Wine was good; forgive my rambling

Pyritic: Of or relating to pyrites; consisting of, containing, or resembling pyrites.

Well that's not interesting. I would have thought something to do with fire. Pyrite must be a type of rock. Hmm, yes. A stone or mineral that can be used to for striking fire. Let's see if OED has something better to suggest.

Nebsy: Prim, precise or Brusque, impudent, cheeky, ill-natured.

Something tells me I won't be using either of these words anytime soon.

Rehearsal went well. Our Priest is a pro. And very funny. Dinner afterward was great. The waiters kept filling the wine glasses up like they were water so it was hard to keep track of how much was drunk. Tomorrow is the big day.

Let the Right One in has gotten really gross. And weird. If there is a scene in your book where the walking undead is about to sodomize a prepubescent vampire, congratulations, because I never thought I would ever be able to write something like that in a review. The me up there feeding the ducks? Totally scandalized. The me now? Asks what do you write for an encore?

Oh. The thing that comes after, with the nursery rhyme and the stone trophy. Well, I'm just disgusted.

For those with strong stomachs and tolerance for rambling I still recommend the book. But get it out of the library.

Words go here

This photo proves my grandmother has been making the same "don't take my picture" face her whole life.

Phillumenist: A collector of matchbox labels or matchbook covers.

I...really? There's a word for that? Of course there is, what am I thinking? What else do you have for me OED?

Crabologist: A student of collector of Crabs.

Conchologist: A scientific collector of shells.

Oologist: A collector of birds' eggs.

U'lero: A collector of rubber.

Wikipedia offers - Arenophile: One who collects sand samples.

Galantophile: A collector of snowdrops. (The plant. which makes so much more sense than I first thought.)

Pteridomania: A craze for ferns. A Victorian era thing because that sexual frustration had to go into something, I guess.

Tyrosemiophilia: A collector of cheese labels. ?!?...? Sure.

Still reading Let the Right One in. It's kind of slow but I still can't put it down. Half of it is devoted to the whole vampire plot and the rest of it is domestic and school relations. Actually a lot of it about personal connections. Between lovers, parents and children, classmates, friends. There's a lot of focus on each character's particular situation. Lots of character building is what I'm saying. It's interesting watching how everyone deals with the subtle and not so subtle effects of the vampire living in their neighborhood. And this really is more of an old-school vampire as I mentioned before. A child vampire, creepy, sweet, gross, and awkward. Who falls on people from the shadows and plays wounded to get at prey.

I'm also reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac by Senji Kuroi. About a small street in a Japanese suburb and the people who live there. I like how he shows what the characters imagine and how it contrasts with what is actually there. We all do that, we all imagine how something is going to be or how we think something will look and then sort of surprise ourselves with how it actually is. It's a clever writing technique.

Anyway. Rehearsal dinner Friday. Wedding is on Saturday. Got a few small things to do first. Don't think I'll have much time after tomorrow.