Holiday edition

The sad truth about Columbia's election holiday is that I mostly use it to catch up on work!  Just finishing a tenure letter for a scholar at another university (these are time-consuming) and will spend Tuesday and Wednesday working on a similar letter for an untenured but prolific colleague at my home institution as well as writing several other letters of recommendation and an overdue reader's report on a journal article. 

On the bright side, though, I'm in an environment full of lizards and chickens; I got to do an Olympic-distance triathlon yesterday; I intend to go to yoga every day this week unless the minor sinus infection that has been teasing me since Friday escalates; and I read two very enjoyable books, quite different from each other, during Friday travels: Jacqueline Carey's Santa Olivia, which was so thoroughly immersive that I gnashed my teeth when I finished it and realized I couldn't get the next installment for my Kindle until November 22; and Siddartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, which is so fascinating and so well-written that I gnashed my teeth at the thought that I am not capable of writing such a book myself.  It was a satisfactory day of reading that took away the pains of a long layover in the Miami airport!

Vexed

At Largehearted Boy, Martin Millar's playlist for Lonely Werewolf Girl sequel Curse of the Wolf Girl, which I cannot wait to read but which I must wait for until I am either (a) back in the continental U.S. or (b) able to get it electronically. In my opinion Martin Millar is a Genius of Literature...

Travel miscellany

Airport/plane/train reading: Rachel Vincent's Pride (have not read first installments in series, but backstory is well handled, and I can never resist a good were-animal story); Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know; Charles de Lint's Memory and Dream; Mark Billingham's Buried; Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger (very good); Linwood Barclay's Too Close to Home.

The last was the only one that irked me - I thought it was not up to the standard of his previous one. The plot is very transparent (I am not a plot-driven reader, but it was extremely obvious as soon as the real murderer appeared on the scene who he must be and what his motive was - this is very clunkily handled), and more importantly I felt that the couple main characters are fundamentally wildly implausible. At times they seem like thinnish, almost satirical Elmore Leonard-style creations, so that one cannot really take them seriously at the other points when the author seems to expect the reader to consider them as fully motivated and thoughtful human beings...

Brains!

At Publishers Weekly, Gwenda Bond has a fascinating piece on trends in paranormal romance and urban fantasy.

Fantastic

Colleen Mondor interviews Martin Millar, whose last few books have basically made him one of my favorite writers...