Blogger.com is one of the many many websites not easily useable over dialup which is all I had at my parents' place, so no updates for me for awhile.

Before I left town I read Peter Kuper's graphic novel adaptation of The Jungle. I hestitate to call anything involving slaughterhouses beautiful, but he did a very good job with it. (Granted, I haven't actually read the original though I've moved it quite a few times).

My Christmastime reading was Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. I think I'd have understood a bit more with a more thorough grounding in Islamic history, but I generally enjoyed it. I suppose that same ignorance is what keeps me from truly understanding why someone would consider it so blasphemous that they think Rushdie should die because of it. There's a lot of things that religious fundamentalists do that I don't understand though.

I went to a slightly lighter book afterwards: Roald Dahl's Kiss Kiss. It's a book of his short stories for adults. I think I'd read some of them in a collection before, but good as always in that special twisted way of his.

Neal Barrett, jr's Interstate Dreams and A.L. Haskett's Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom were next up. I enjoyed both, and they seemed to fit together somehow in my brain (and not just for the prophetic dreams) though I'm not sure it's something I could describe. Both books of non-genre fiction (unless weird counts as a genre these days) but rather different. One a mystery of sorts, the other a coming-of-age sort of thing involving lots of strippers and Harleys. I don't think I can do either justice however, so just pick one up and read it.

After I got home I polished off Puzzles and Essays from the Exchange by Charles R. Anderson. It's a collection of weird questions researched by reference librarians, both answered and unanswered. I found the essays about the job much more intresting than the actual lists of answers though.
posted by kristin at 7:46 PM