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)

Okay, I haven't read the book but was excited to see Tommy and Tuppence with Miss Marple.

Oh I was very excited to see Tommy and Tuppence and Miss Marple, too! I HEART Tommy and Tuppence. I was just kerfuzzled.

wow...there's one I don't know. I'm surprised. Oh, and somebody tell me the world doesn't need a Tommy and Tuppence crossover Wooster story because suddenly I have an urge.