The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch

I wish I could hate this book. I really wish it had something to it that I could sink my teeth into, whether a stupid plot or irritating characters or a general disrespect for the reader's intelligence. At least then it would have been interesting. As it is I found this book so innocuous, so bereft of anything truly attention grabbing, that it is too boring to even be an annoyance.
Oh, sure, there's the dead kids with the witch's mark on their backs but the mark only serves to stir up witch anxiety among the villagers and the killings all happen in the first 1/4 of the book. Other stuff happens but nothing on par with child murder, leaving the book feeling a little top heavy.

The marks are only in the plot to get the local midwife accused of witchcraft so that we have someone to worry about during the story. Only the midwife doesn't exist outside of the role of "innocent victim who needs to be exonerated". I mean, I don't want to see her tortured and killed, but I never want to see anyone tortured and killed. I don't really have any feelings for her otherwise.

The characters on the whole are pretty stereotypical and flat. The young doctor is enlightened and prissy, the titular daughter is feisty and intelligent, and her father is phlegmatic and practical. He's the only character I really had any interest in and he still had little in the way of an inner life. The villain has the looks and sartorial sense of a Disney antagonist and the townspeople are petty and stupid.

The hangman wants to find the real killer so he doesn't have to torture the midwife but all he seems to do is smoke and drink and then he ends up torturing her anyway. The mystery itself is straight out of an episode of Scooby-doo. This book had the potential to be way more interesting but it seemed to keep retreating into safe blandness.

This zombie craze

                   The Walking Dead convinced me that I should pay a little more attention to the Zombie genre. That's not why I bought Dead Island; that was because it was 10 bucks on Steam but it is why I watched Berlin Undead (Rammbock) on Netflix. Netflix has some weird stuff. Like that French zombie movie The Horde I wrote about a while ago. This German movie, sort of like that one, is only so-so.
                      We've got Michi (Michael) going to return a key to his girlfriend of seven years who recently left him and moved to Berlin. It's basically a McGuffin, I can't remember what it's for. She's not at home although the plumber is, angrily banging away at a radiator and it's quite obvious he's going to turn into a zombie. His assistant Harper shows up, the plumber goes apeshit and Michi and Harper end up locking him out in the hallway. Then the raging horde invades the apartment courtyard.
                  Technically we aren't dealing with zombies per se but rather people infected through bites with a disease that makes them foaming mad with an urge to bite (though not eat) anyone in sight.Their eyeballs go milky white and their skin gets all veiny, so, sort of zombies.
                       The tenants of the apartments can confab across the courtyard through their windows. Let's do endtime rollcall, shall we? We have Michi and Harper. We have a muscled, tattooed guy named Manfred who has obviously been bit. (He never says a word and he dies halfway through. He is my favorite character.) A weaselly dude who has "I am going to betray you as soon as you give me a chance" stamped on his forehead. Metaphorically, of course. A man who's wife has been bit. ( He's been keeping her sedated to stop the change.) Thorsten and his sister. (Of these two, if you think the named character is the one who makes it out alive, nice guess, but no.)
                       Thorsten foolishly wades into a horde of not-zombies in an attempt to close the courtyard gates. He fails and they have a zombie infestation.
                        Harper immediately starts planning to kill some bitches (I love that his first response to the zombiepocalypse is to fashion medieval death implements from cutlery) and Michi frets about the phone he dropped on the hall stairs. Someone has been attempting to call him and he worries it might be his ex Gabi. The two make a foray out to get it, Harper's homemade weapon turns out to not be zombie deterrent (seriously, there needs to be a spray), and they lose ground when they're forced to retreat to the bedroom. It is not Gabi on the phone.
                         Bit-Wife_Man offers them food (they lost the kitchen) if they get him sedatives from the crazy lady's apartment next door. Michi looks at a picture of Gabi and remembers her wearing a bear suit. He continues to fret and Harper falls asleep. When the next morning dawns Harper wakes up to Michi lying next to him wearing the bear suit complete with head. I am honestly unsure if this is an attempt at humor or sentimentality. Either way, if I were Harper I'd find that more terrifying than the zombies.
                         They break the wall so they can get into crazy druggie lady's apartment to scavenge sedatives but who should be there but crazy druggie lady herself. And guess what? She's now a not-zombie. More not-zombies rush in and Michi hides Harper on top of a wall and then scrambles into the attic. Who should he find up there but Gabi and her new man, son of crazy druggie lady. Michi throws a hissy fit because it turns out Gabi was probably cheating on him and Gabi and friend freak out because they mistake a scratch on Michi's arm for a bite. In the end they hand him sedatives and shove him out onto the roof. Michi briefly contemplates suicide before noticing a rowboat on the river. He can hear a horn out on the harbor and realizes there might be safety close by. Meanwhile, Harper has discovered that his camera flash is not-zombie kryptonite. An accidental discovery right up there with Pasteur's and Newton's I'm sure.
                     Michi makes his way to Bit-Wife-Man's place to give him the sedatives. Bit-Wife goes bonkers regardless and Michi immediately offers to brain her with a candlestick. Bit-Wife-Man declines and instead tricks his wife into tackling him off the balcony where they plummet to their death. Harper shows up driving all the not-zombies before him with his camera flash and locks them out of the courtyard.
                       The survivors gather. They only have a few scraps of food from Bit-Wife-Man's apartment because in the last day and a half everyone ran out apparently. They plan to use flashing lights to get to the river to use the boat Michi saw. Predictably, weaselly guy makes off with their supplies in the night. Michi goes after him and returns with a few lights and a fresh arm wound in the shape of teeth-marks. Sucks. He rigs a bicycle with lights so Harper and Thorsten's sister can make their getaway.
                           Michi stays in the courtyard to contemplate his future as a cuckolded not-zombie. He isn't alone for long because crazy druggie lady's son runs screaming in with crazy druggie lady attached by the teeth.Not-zombie Gabi shows up soon after and Michi hugs her to him while she paws at his back looking perplexed. Harper and Thorsten's sister make it out to the harbor where a ship honks at them, signifying rescue.

Yeah I'm giving up on The Windup Girl

     I've ended up reading everything but Paolo's "steampunk" novel. I can no longer renew it as some poor fool has a hold on it. It's so boring! I have several more chapters I've read and written about so I'll post them eventually but I can't go on right now. I have no interest in the trade and politics, the cynical premise and stereotyped characters, or the 70s setup. I don't care what happens to any of the characters. On to better books!

     I finished Fred Vargas' Have Mercy On Us All. Good book, gets kind of dark when it goes into the plague spreader's reasons but the melange of backstories and damaged characters makes a pretty, tangled mess. I'll have to continue reading the series.

     I also read Ice Moon by Jan Costin Wagner. Wagner is German married to a Finnish woman so the story is set in Finland with one character from Germany. This book was eh. The main detective's wife dies of a long illness in the beginning of the book and this colors his perceptions of the investigation into a series of deaths by smothering. We get chapters from the serial killers perspective which seem to consist entirely of single sentences as paragraphs. There's a number of chapters from the POV of one of the victim's summer flings who flies to Finland when he learns that she's dead and he inherited her apartment. The woman is portrayed as energetic, special, happy, and bright but her focus on some guy she met years ago and never saw or heard from again is just a tad creepy. The one thing I found interesting was how surprised other people were at how easily she talks to strangers. I think this might be a cultural thing because striking up conversations with people you don't know is practically taught from birth here. Also, the main character muses a couple times about how one of his colleagues is so cheerful he's hard to take seriously because upbeat people are seen as superficial and stupid. Apparently smiling = dumb and frowning/neutral = serious. It's a decent, short read but it's kind of repetitive.

      I also read The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney, a first novel by a screenwriter. It takes place in 1867 in the Northwest territory. A man is murdered and a woman's teenage son goes missing and a whole bunch of people stomp off into the wilderness to go find him. The writing is generally good though she has a bit of trouble with tenses changing not just in the middle of paragraphs but also in the middle of sentences. She also seems to forget that we can't see who's talking or what facial expressions they're making. There are too many characters. Line, the Norwegian woman who runs from the religious community that took her in, is entirely without purpose. One of the main characters, Daniel Moody, basically does absolutely nothing and people just generally seem to have a 21st century mindset, especially about religion. Basically none of the plot points are resolved and a seemingly important thread about a bone tablet goes absolutely no where. However, the writing was atmospheric and descriptive and the main character, Mrs. Ross, was sympathetic and strong so it was a pretty good read despite the problems.

      I'm about to finish A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers which is absorbing and obnoxious by turns. More on that later.

Three day weekend

I'm taking care of the animals while my parents sort things out at our other house. Our dog has an infected cut on her foot and an ear infection so I have this entire regimen for treating her twice a day. Poor thing hates being left alone; she insists on being wherever I am, even waiting outside the bathroom door while I shower. She takes it hard when my parents are gone. She does wake me up in the middle of the night, however, and that gets old quickly. Then this morning my mother's alarm went off at 5:45. Half-asleep, fumbling with the buttons on that huge-ass thing she calls a clock radio I thought I'd managed to shut it off but it started up again a few minutes later and...well I think I might need to buy her a new one.

Work is tiring and a little bewildering. I still have no idea how much money they're willing to spend on resources. They want databases and journals but anything you buy for institutional use is hellishly expensive. Even a subscription for a once every two months journal from LWW through Ovid costs $1088 for full onsite access. If you pay $288 you can onsite access for one IP address. One! You may as well buy an individual subscription for the print edition if only one person can use it at a time. There are far fewer options for small institutions and I'm going to have to convince my bosses that free resources can be just as good. Make use of everything you can. Many journal sites allow you to view a number of free articles and Medscape and Pubmed are free to use. Netlibrary seems to be reasonably priced but they already have ebrary. I'm in contact with EBSCO about a couple of their databases so we'll see how that pans out. I'm just a little tired of talking to these people when I know we probably don't have the money to afford what they're offering.

I still need a new computer and the IT guys haven't fixed the printer for the students. I can use the printer fine which means I can print out call numbers but I have no tape. I've requested book tape so we'll see if I get that in a timely manner. I am also apparently in charge of faculty development so I've been looking for good books on curriculum and syllabus creation and planning seminars on using internet resources like ERIC. I want to find out more about the student population to judge what would be best useful for them.

Less reading, more movie watching. I finished Tropic of Cancer. It was amusing and I liked the writing though it wasn't always stellar. This was an early book though so maybe it improves. I'll have to read Tropic of Capricorn. The Tao te Ching was excellent; I'll have to read a more literal translation though for comparison purposes. Kismet was entertaining. There were cultural things that I didn't quite get. The Hessian, Frankfurter, Berliner stuff was confusing. Or maybe Frankfurters are Hessians? To Wikipedia! Okay, yes they are. And wouldn't you know it but some of my ancestors were from Hesse, Darmstadt to be exact.. Course they were Jewish. Anyway the tone of the book is noir-ish at times with its barely scrapping by private detective going after the bad guys to settle a personal matter. The writing is wry, sly, and friendly though sometimes the sentences are a little convoluted. The main character, Kemal Kayankaya, goes after a protection racket when he and a buddy end up killing two of its members while helping a local businessman. He wants to know what's going on and why these two people had to die. He gets beat up a lot and blunders around investigating (seriously, I think most of it was less detective work and more being really lucky) until he reaches the conclusion. It was a decent book and Kemal was an interesting character. He was blunt, a little unethical, and grumpy but a decent guy for the most part.

I'm reading The Fire Engine that Disappeared and it's not as good as the first few books in the series but it's still a good read.

I watched District B13, a French action film written by the director of The Fifth Element and wow, this is an awesome movie. It's short and not too complicated; the fight scenes are highly watchable and the two main characters are pretty hot. This is not a movie to spend much time thinking about; it's pure entertainment. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance however, is a movie to think about. Done by the director of Thirst it tells a story about desperation and revenge and ultimately shows how the drive for payback can lead to utter annihilation. The actions of the characters just seem to send everything spiraling into a black void of nothingness. Again, it could have used editing. Long shots of people sitting around eating or staring into space can set the mood or show the mindset of a character but you need to distinguish between the necessary shots and the self-indulgent ones. Anyway, good movie and Oldboy is next.

I also watched a French zombie movie called The Horde because, well, French zombie movie. It was eh. The characters were mostly 2-d and the action was so-so. The plot was only half told. The one thing I found odd was when the African guy was killing the zombie who killed his brother. He started screaming about how he was Nigerian. I wasn't quite sure what his nationality had to do with anything. Maybe Nigerians have a reputation in France of being bad-ass? I don't know.

I am reading Lao-tzu's Tao te ching and it's like woah

There are very few people around on Fridays so I spent most of the day by myself. That was fine. After four days of activity it's nice to have some alone time. I spent the morning putting the books I've already cataloged into some semblance of order so people can use the books in the library even if there's no OPAC up and they can't check them out yet. I need the new computer I've been promised; the old one keeps having conniption fits and it no longer lets me enter books correctly into the OPAC. I need the adapter to allow me to use the scanner to speed things up but that's a fairly low priority. I need the bar codes I ordered. I called the lady at Brodart and she said that the vendor will have them ready in 2-3 weeks. I had no idea it was that hard to print bar codes! I thought there would be some computer that could calculate what they should look like and just print them out. At some point, when I'm really bored, I should learn more about the complex world of bar code production but as long as I get them I'll be happy.

More pressing is that I need a printer to make call number labels and book tape to affix them to the spines. I could at least organize things better then. Everybody who comes into the library now looks at the shelves of books at marvels at how fast everything's coming along. Seriously, a collection of books on shelves does not make a functional library. After that there's policies to create and journals to subscribe to and instructional sessions to plan. Oy. I'm glad people seem happy though.

A co-worker has loaned me her Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao te ching and I'm loving it. Some of it meshes with how I think anyway but makes clearer things I haven't been able to articulate. Some of it seems unattainable to me; I hold onto certain possessions very hard and I don't think I would be able to face death with such peace but it sets out something to strive for. Or not strive for as the case may be. To let happen. "...just do your job, then let go."

Getting close to finishing Tropic of Cancer. I've said enough about him already, I'm sure but he's fascinating in a way. His philosophical ramblings and clunky metaphors are mush and his attitudes towards other people, cultures, and religions show him to be a close-minded, juvenile little tit but the extent to which he opened himself on the page is captivating. I don't think he meant for it all to be there. He's like one of those teens who write fanfic self-inserts, making themselves to be clever and cool, looked up to and catered. They have a put on tortured facade but really seem like children pretending to be world-weary adults. He attempts to paint himself as some tragic figure surrounded be imbeciles. He's so silly but for all that he's very human in his need to make himself the hero. For some reason it's very interesting.

I'm reading Kismet by Jakob Arjouni. A Turkish detective in Germany gets involved in figuring out who's behind a bizarre new protection racket in the station district in Frankfurt. Kayankaya is a little grumpy and something of a smart-aleck. I'm about 90 pages in and it's been a good read so far. Quite a bit about the immigrant situation in Germany. The English edition was published last year but the book takes place in 1998. I don't know when it was first written.

If Henry Miller weren't dead already I'd hunt him down to punch him in the mouth

I did my first bit of cataloging today. We haven't ordered any books yet, no where to put them, but they have extras to give the still being born library. The walls were knocked down today, everyone is getting displaced. People are office-less, wandering, sharing the computers in the faculty office where I've been placed. I listened to a student cry about her grade today; I just wanted to give her a hug. The fridge was moved across the street and there was a wheelchair and handicap toilet in the hallway. I think this will be the norm for a bit, though no longer than necessary with the director in charge. She knows what she wants and how to get it. For now I'll work at all the little various things that need doing and than, I'm sure, discover all the things I should have done. When things are less hectic I'll need some feedback on the books I've chosen. I think they look nice and I know they're pretty good but I don't know if they're great. I'll get better with practice.

One thing that struck me is the sort of images I'm coming across. I was looking for a free medical videos website and came across one that seemed likely. First page has a selection of stills from the archive that you can watch and one was a how-to for inserting a catheter into a man. Right smack in the middle of the page, hand gripping the goody and I hit the back button real quick while making sure no one was looking. Then I realized that they practice this stuff on dummies and there's no need for a NSFW tag. It is for work.

I've dug out Taylor's Introduction to Cataloging and Classification to take to work tomorrow so I can look up specific points about AARC2r. There is much tedious and anal work to be done.

I finished Six Geese A-Slaying. It was eh. It was bland and mainly inoffensive. Those damn city dwellers with their snootiness and their inability to deal with weather. Why, if they had weather like rural folk have weather, nothing would ever get done. They'd spend all day on the internet writing letters to the editor about how they can't be expected to work under such conditions and basically diva-ing up the place. Because everyone knows how big city Washington DC is. Drive ten minutes and you're out the other side dodging deer. And geese.

Henry Miller. Oh Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer was quite revolutionary for its time, (mainly because of the sex), but now you can find more raunchy stuff for free with a simple Google search. Granted, you still don't find this sort of stuff in most printed matter, but it just doesn't have the same illicit feel. Back in 1934 you could get in big trouble for having something like that sent to you through the mail. (The guy who was basically in charge of America's morals was Anthony Comstock, who was batshit. Wikipedia him.) So the sex is there but the shock value that made it such a "thing" in the '30s and '40s is gone. What you're left with is wonderful, brilliant prose wrapped around a disgusting little turd of a man who thinks he's too clever for this world. Let's see, what have I written about it in my notes.

Cynic of the more annoying sort. Enjoys portraying everything as filthy and then wallowing in it. Smug, believes he sees more than most people and feels clever about it. Starts off the book by telling us about the "cunts" he's fucked and how big his dick is, if that gives you an idea. Declares he no longer has a need for societal norms, how they hold him back and mean nothing, like he's practicing the defense for his own rape trial. Inwardly mocks all his "friends" who actually work while he sponges off them.

He talks about needing to do anything to survive, like he's been done a great wrong and is just barely getting by, but refuses to work which just makes him seem silly. Actually, his entire attitude and the way he and his "friends" interact puts me more in mind of a bunch of teenagers.

Oh, and he's a misogynistic, racist pig. All women are "cunts". There are two subspecies, the slut and the whore. That's it. Of course, he has great disdain for all people not himself but his supreme contempt is saved for the ladies. Seriously, I'll usually let this slide if it's one character that's a jackass but all the men in this book talk the same way. It's a very heavy layer of I want to stomp his head in, yes. Overall he shows a very dim understanding of people.

However, the book is interesting. I just have to grit my teeth and try not to laugh at the parts that are on the emotional level of a thirteen year old.

I like the book, I'm just not wild about the author.

Watched Fritz Lang's M, a German film from 1931 . Damn that's a good movie. This was one of the first modern movies. Peter Lorre plays a child murderer who's actions have started a city wide manhunt, creating terror, suspicion and paranoia among the populace. The police have the problem that any serial killer creates; he strikes at random and people don't notice him. Eventually the criminal syndicate, angry at the increased surveillance disrupting their business, decides to catch the murderer themselves. The whole thing is well-paced and at times very tense. Lorre gives a riveting speech at the end about his compulsion. I seriously recommend this movie.

I've had beer and now I'm having tea

They haven't sent me the terms of employment yet and I'm getting antsy.

Today was filled with annoying tourists and rooms of god awful, pink paintings. I hyperbolize; they're not horrible but they're not very good. They kind of look like something you might find on some wannabe artist's DeviantArt account. They look like concept art for a Super Mario Brothers game. In shades of pepto-bismal.

I finished Body Count by Martin. Finishing it felt kind of like eating a dessert I don't really like; at the end I feel a little ashamed to have spent time/calories on it that could have been put to better use elsewhere. The villain was not who I thought it was so I'm not smug but nor an I pleasantly surprised. She pulled The Dante Club trick; make the villain an extra, someone you would never have guessed simply because they were entirely unimportant to the story and had no real scenes. It's the way for less than clever authors to pull a fast one to wow less than clever readers. The authors can feel smart for keeping readers from following clues (mainly because there are none) and the readers can feel happy because they put no real effort into reading and are surprised by the "twist". This sort of thing works much better on film where and actor can work to show depth despite having few lines. Also, the thing that really bugged me is that Sophie's prowess as a hand-to-hand fighter is painstakingly shown in the beginning of the book but at the end it's like she's completely lost all that and all she can do is run, while hoping the big, bad man (with, as far as we can tell, no combat experience) doesn't find her. Ew. Seriously woman, if you want a strong female lead actually let her do her thing.

As a side note, I have just finished Herta Muller's The Passport. Muller won the Nobel prize for literature in 2009 and it caused a minor stir because few people outside Germany had heard of her. Well, my library now has a few of her books and I thought I'd give her a try. A German family in Romania is trying to get a passport to go to Berlin. That's it basically. Windisch wants to be honest about obtaining it and tries to bribe with flour but eventually has to send his daughter around to have sex with the officials.

Okay, I don't know what the hell kind of standards the Nobel prize committee has but it certainly doesn't include awarding this thing based on readability or an interesting story. Muller writes exactly the way countless generations are taught not to write, not because it hampers creativity but because it makes you sound like a retarded child. Half the sentences begin with "The". Each sentence contains one thought, one solid thing. Each description is broken down into its component parts, creating a disconnected picture, forcing you to carefully string everything together yourself in order to picture what's going on. It's tedious. Like Saramago's style, it makes reading artificially difficult for no good reason.

The dress was long. It was blue like the soft fuzzy stuff inside your jeans pockets. They nested in the dress. The dress billowed as she walked. She walked along the path. The path was a duck's sigh in the night.

Shit like that. The surrealism is less so and more like non-sequiturs. And she commits the cardinal sin of writing; if your characters aren't likable at least make them interesting. She does neither.

On the plus side I'm reading The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri and that's going pretty well. His main character, Inspector Montalbano, is kind of laid back, a little grumpy, and clever. And I, Claudius still pleases. That one is going to take a while though.

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.