Bat signals

The inner bat signal went off yesterday evening and my trashy-novel homing beacon was set to detect the trashiest novel I could get my hands on in the immediate vicinity....

(I have occasionally offended some poor author who has offered to send me his or her gruesome serial-killer thriller by saying something along the lines of "Yes, please, I love light reading!" - and I am marginally aware that nobody wants to think they have written a trashy novel - I should eschew the phrase....)

Anyway I have a 25% discount at the Columbia Bookstore, because that is where I order my course books (they bribe us that way!), and I went and got an absurd stack of stuff. The one I gulped down last night was this! I loved the Pern books when I was a kid, but they have considerably fallen off - this one was perhaps a bit better than some of the other recent ones?

Earlier in the week I had a better book, courtesy of M.'s killer crime-fiction collection (a secret resource of the Columbia English Department): John Harvey's Cold in Hand. I have occasionally found minor elements of this series annoying (but perhaps it is just because I do not like mustard, which is often an ingredient in the sandwiches the detective too regularly makes for himself as a kind of set piece or arabesque?), but Harvey is an excellent writer.

(Hmmmm - is this book part of a trend, though? I will refrain from saying more to avoid spoilers.)

On another note, I saw a very poor production of Hedda Gabler this afternoon, I am about to go for a short swim and I will then return home, eat a second dinner (the first one was post-matinee and really could be thought of as a late lunch) and find the next trashiest novel in the house!