In this parallel-worlds scifi adventure, our hero meets some people who are largely, but not 100% like him; he figures they will all get along OK, and they do. He goes to strange places similar to our own world, but not quite like it. I read this book while riding a Greyhound bus through Texas; it all seemed to fit, somehow.

I have so many of these book reports written up. I should post them more often. I don't post them because lately I'm working long hours. (Which sounds impressive until you find out the reason I'm working long hours is incompetence and ignorance, not dedication. It turns out that learning Javascript, learning a browser compatibility API, and learning a bunch of other things... makes for slow progress on writing useful Javascript code.) So I come home, I fall asleep. Which is silly. Pushing the "publish" button on an already-written book report is easy. So anyhow: Eleanor Rigby, another little novel by Douglas Coupland.

This book brought me up short in a couple of places.

The protagonist's name is Liz Dunn. She points out that there is a pattern to the lives of most of the world's Liz Dunns. I thought, Didn't I go to high school with a Liz Dunn? Then I wondered Did I really go to high school with a Liz Dunn, or did I just convince myself of that, fooled by this book? So I pulled out my high school yearbook, and I really did go to high school with a Liz Dunn.

Coupland generally has a good ear for language, so I wondered what went on here:

How many people with MS does it take to put in a light bulb?

Answer: Five million - one person to do it, and four million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to write depressing on-line web logs.

That "on-line web logs" sounds so wrong. Who says this instead of "blogs"? The person in the novel who says this... is this phrasing supposed to suggest that this person doesn't know much about the internet?

Ah, winter. Cold, snowy, icy, windy winter. What a great time of year for sitting inside and reading. The Winter Queen doesn't really have anything to do with the season, through.

This novel is by Borkis Akunin, translated by Andrew Bromfeld. It's a rollicking adventure story in which a dashing police detective zips across Europe on the track of a vast conspiracy. Fluffy good fun. Just the sort of book to keep you occupied inside when Jack Frost prowls without.

Once upon a time in old St Louis, a kid walks into a bar and starts waving around a katana. Just when you hope that this comic would descend into a blood-soaked massacre, a priest calms the kid down with some sensible talk. But I have high hopes for the future of this comic, high hopes indeed.

Tags: comic | potential | cowboy |