So I splurged today and bought the new Jacqueline Carey book. Thank God, it was nothing like Banewreaker, which was so boring I didn't even read it twice OR buy the sequel.

I was sucked into it quite happily. It sets up Imriel as a independent character -- lots of internal conflict, but well done. I don't find him as compelling a character as Phedre, but I liked it.

Can't let the whole day go by without this:

STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

--INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

--Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

--For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.

--Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

Happy Bloomsday, everyone!

Excellent. I always forget.

And now I need to buy more Harp on the way home tonight.

I'm close to two-thirds of the way through Foucault's Pendulum. Now I am very much seeing why people brought it up in discussing The Da Vinci Code.

Yeah! Except Foucault's Pendulum is satire.

Is it? I haven't really gotten that. Well, maybe a little, in the sense that he kind of dismisses the whole Templar legend as lunacy.

Well, it's more satirical than satire. But the impulse is the same.

Paging Matt:

I read the Jirel of Joiry book. Terrible writing , but great stories. Which made me respond to it in this schizoid way. Some of it was just unfamiliarity, so I think that whichever story came first, I would have disliked it because I was so unused to the style; the further I went on the more I got immersed. And I know they're, jeez, 70 years old, so I do understand that, and viewed in that light they're amazingly modern. But there was a part of my brain that was just critiquing and thinking "Why don't you give her someone to talk to instead of having 10 straight pages of interior monologue?!" And then on the other hand I kept staying up too late to keep reading when I could barely keep my eyes open. "Black God's Kiss" was probably my favorite, because I heart irony. Anyway, thanks for mentioning the stories, they were definitely worth seeking out.

I think the full effect of Foucault's builds with the overall arc, but there are some definite snarky bits, like the part where they prove that the measurements of a kiosk add up to the square root of the distance to the sun, or some such.

So, I finally finished Strange and Norrell. I'd bogged down hard, really losing patience with the writing, but once I was able to committ more than a couple hours to it, I found I really liked it. Funny and bittersweet.

Did anyone watch the "new" Miss Marple mystery, which was an adaptation of "By the Pricking of my Thumbs"? They included Miss Marple and Tommy and Tuppance Beresford, which I can't remember if it was that way in the book. They also seemed to make Tuppance an alcoholic (she even had a flask!), which I remember not at all!

Am I craxy, or were these things in the book and I just missed them (I read most of the Christie oeuvre from age 11-13)