read read I read read

I finished the second volume of the glass thorn series by Melanie Rawn. Now I have to wait for the library to get the third and fourth books. I never ever do this. And when I tried to tell Keith (my younger roommate)about why I liked this stuff, I couldn't describe it in a way that doesn't sound like bad books. But they are not bad books, they're fun. I've put the third one on request for when it comes in, but the fourth one, while published, is not even on order yet.

Now I'm reading Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi and oops it looks like it's part of a series too. I'm not sure I like it. I haven't thrown it against the wall yet. I won't, literally, of course. But it has a lot of elements I find annoying. All the post-singularity claptrap where whatever happens is because the author decided it would be cool, and the mechanics of the world allow for any damned thing whenever, that just irritates me. And I'm not into stories about "history's greatest thief" either. But in translation at least it's sort of amusing, even though I can't bring myself to much care about anybody, even the poor Quiets, who are paying for their longevity by taking turns being transformed into enormous hideous worker drones.

I'm also still slogging through The Coasts of Bohemia which is for some reason harder to get into than Prague in Black and Gold. I gather Derek Sayer, author of the first, is a decade or two younger than Peter Demetz, author of the second, and didn't leave during the Communist years like Demetz. I wish I could say that one or the other of them is more left- or right- wing, but I don't really have evidence as they both take a kind of Scheikian view of the Soviets as being just another of a long line of people who seem to have thought that Central Europe would fare better as clients of someone else. And also both of them are critical of Czech nationalism and clear-eyed about history's nuances. I would maybe say that Sayer is more bitter than Demetz, based on a few sentences here and there, but I don't even know if I can say that. I do feel like Sayer's point is "We Czechs (et cetera) are too much more important than anybody ever acknowledges, so there!" while Demetz's point is "these lands have always been diverse and polyglot, in fact the Germans and Hungarians got here a bit before the Czechs (etc, since apparently until Masaryk "Czech" really only referred to a certain tribe of Slavs in the region, and if you wanted to talk about all of them you said Slavs or Slavonians)." I may be being unfair the Sayer, I should be able to tell when I'm done with the book. It's not that Sayer doesn't address the issues of ethnic and linguistic diversity in Bohemia (etc), he does, and he addresses the question of "who the hell is Czech anyway?" which is a touchy one throughout much of the history fo the area. Because a lot of German speakers considered themselves Czechs and a lot of Czech speakers considered themselves German, or Austrian, or whatever the country was that was ruling them at the time.

On another front, my latest leg insult is not a blood clot. It may be something rather like sciatica. On a relatred front to that, I like the clinic arrangement. I like having these different assistants and other professionals to talk to, and I like the production-line fashion that they deal with admistrative things. I also like that when they ordered a doppler ultrasound on my leg, we didn't have to wait a week for the insurance to authorize. I didn't even have to take a paper. The PA asked me to make my appointment before I left the office because if it didn't work the first time she would pull strings. The doppler itself was amusing. The handheld device was set against my leg repeatedly and it made quiet little clicks each time until suddenly it went WOWOOSH which was the doppler we spoke of running through clear blood vessels. I couldn't stop laughing afterr that. Unfortunately, it doesn't make a nice tidy image for me to get a copy of.