The last one's the only one that's remotely seasonal, and I suspect it'll require more than my fractured Christmas-with-family attention

It will. Greer Gilman is brilliant, but man, her prose is baroque. You need a quiet house to get through it.

Hey Consuela! I was thinking of you this morning as I was watching the movie version of Touching the Void on cable.

Let me just say this about that: Yikes! I can't even begin to imagine climbing down a mountain, unaided, with a broken leg for four days. I don't want to imagine it actually.

The Touching The Void guys came to my elementary school for an assembly when I was in 5th grade. The image of how he demonstrated how he broke that leg is pretty indelibly in my brain.

I was thinking of you this morning as I was watching the movie version of Touching the Void on cable.

Hah! I will take it as a compliment that a story of a climbing epic-but-not-tragedy reminds you of me. *grins*

That docudrama was almost too much for me: I had to stop the Tivo and go away for while when they dramatized Joe breaking his leg.

To bring this back to literary subjects, the book Touching the Void is really excellent, highly-recommended, and it has a happy ending of sorts.

For those who like their romance reading spiced with rapid political rhetoric, there's a diary from the weekend on Daily Kos about romance novels.

[link]

There's a mention of Smart Bitches in the comments, and I was taking copious notes on what books I should read.

I just belatedly read the His Dark Materials trilogy. I knew Pullman was antireligious, but I now fail to understand why organized religion didn't join together for an ecumenical burning at the stake.

I now fail to understand why organized religion didn't join together for an ecumenical burning at the stake.

No kidding. I also couldn't figure out why certain parties didn't object to it being marketed as young adult.

It seemed to me like his main target was Catholicism. (I read them a few years ago, and was giving advance warning to a Catholic friend whose 9-year-old daughter was reading them a little after I did, for anything that she might want to discuss with her. I ended up giving some warnings for religious stuff and some for sexual stuff. Luckily, the girl stopped reading halfway through the second book, because I really would have had no idea what to tell her about the third.)

It's children's literature only in the sense that a child is the main protagonist.

but I now fail to understand why organized religion didn't join together for an ecumenical burning at the stake.

Well, they did successfully kill the movie.