(no subject)

While I'm waiting for some file updates so that I can move forward on today's big project, I might as well start my 2008 "books read this year" notes.

1. The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula, Eric Nuzum. Who knew that vampires like to meet up at a Ruby Tuesday's in Fairfax? I didn't, until I read this book. (Technically they do, at any rate; apparently the turnout is pretty much nil.) For a good chuckle (and a sense of the seriousness of this book, check out the chapter titles and excerpt in Amazon's book search.


2. My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, P.N. Elrod (ed.). I admit I picked it up because it's got a Jim Butcher/Dresden story and it was something like $2 at Green Valley. It's a nice fluffy read, if you like supernatural romances or are a Jim Butcher completist.


3. Captivated. An "erotic romance" anthology featuring Bertrice Small, Thea Devine, Robin Schone, and Susan Johnson. ( Speaking of fluffers fluffy... )


4. The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, Catherynne Valente. If I'm going to pick anything out of all the books I've read in the last 6-12 months to recommend, it's going to be this book and its predecessor, In the Night Garden. Beautifully crafted, interconnected stories. I'm glad for my own sake that I didn't start In the Night Garden until In the Cities of Coin and Spice came out, so that I could read one soon after the other and find it easier to trace connections between the two.


5. Captain Alatriste, Arturo Perez-Reverte. Seventeenth-century Spanish swashbucklers and Golden Age poets! (I've been in the mood to read such things recently for some unknown reason.) I thought in places the translation didn't flow very well, but that could just as easily be the style of the original. Sometime when I have a lot of time to kill, maybe I'll try reading it in the original Spanish and put that really rusty degree to use for essentially the first time in 15 years. Woo? There's also a movie, with Viggo Mortensen as Alatriste, but I don't think it's been released in the US.


6. Purity of Blood, Arturo Perez-Reverte. Second installment of the Captain Alatriste novels. The third is out in hardcover, with the paperback due in June, and I gather there will be seven all told.


7. The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart, Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Velez (ed.). Just in time for Valentine's Day. ;) (No, really, I just happened to see it o the shelf at the library last night while looking for something else, and picked it up since it was on my Amazon wishlist.) An anthology organized by emotional stages of a breakup (Rage/Sadness/Self-Hatred/False Hope/Resolve/Relapse/Real Hope/Moving On), beginning with Margaret Atwood's "you fit into me" and ending up at e.e. cummings' "i thank you God for this amazing".

(no subject)

When I got my Democratic ballot at 6:00 tonight, I was voter #596. (No idea how the Republican voting was going and whether it was busier than normal.) In the last general election, I voted around 6:45 my voter number was somewhere in the mid- to high-300s. And this is even with freezing rain and the worst commute in recent memory.

[Edit: CNN and the Washington Post (and probably others which I haven't looked at yet) are already calling VA for Obama by significant margins. Huckabee and McCain are close, with Huckabee currently leading by 4 points.]