Wow, I had the opposite opinion -- loved On Beauty, felt like I slogged through most of White Teeth. At the time, I thought it was because I couldn't relate to any of the characters, really.

I will admit that I thought White Teeth dragged in the middle. But I loved the first and last thirds so much, it compensated.

Jilli, I brought in one of your promotional bookmarks and mentioned the Gaiman name check when I went to my comic book store today. They seemed interested in carrying it.

Ooh, sj, that's a great idea. I'll see if my comic book store is interested.

Jilli, there were three copies of your book on the new non-fiction table at my local Barnes and Noble.

Has anyone else read Guillermo Del Toro/Chuck Hogan's book The Strain?

I know Ailleann is reading it and loving it, and my MOM picked it up, which is just the weirdest thing EVER for me. (Apparently she read some British mystery series with a paranormal twist -- a female vicar who becomes a sort of exorcist -- and now just loves supernatural stuff. She seems to think it's about zombies, though, and Ailleann assures me it's about vampires .)

Amy, it's definitely vampires. And the good evil ones not the sparkly lovey ones.

Cool discussion in the Guardian regarding: Which cities are the most science fiction?

The comments are rich with intriguing suggestions. I liked:

I would put in a vote for Sarajevo and Mostar. The combination of historical architecture (itself a curious mishmash of European and Oriental) in the centre and decaying communist-era tower blocks surrounding it would be striking enough in itself - the fact that so many of these buildings still bear they very visible scars of war (plenty are simply ominous ruins) lends everything a post-apocalyptic air. Like in much of Eastern Europe, you have the contrasts between brand-new luxury cars and the occasional horse and cart still driving along the road. Here you also have the contrasts between hedonistic clubbing youths and religious fanatics of 3 stripes (Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic). Towards the end of Sarajevo´s main shopping street, the American and Iranian cultural centres jostle for hearts and minds just a few doors apart. And even as old churches are being restored, foreign money is paying for the construction of massive and modernist new mosques on the city´s outskirts. Mostar is considerably smaller, but the landscape it lies in is bleaker, the war damage to its "new" section appears more dramatic, the waters of the river that run through it are an unnaturally green colour, and to top off the experience, when I visited there 2 years ago, the streets in front of the souvenir shops were still being patrolled by machine-gun toting (and ice cream eating!) peackeepers. Perhaps not so much "science fiction", but the most surreal cities I have been to nevertheless.

and...

Longyearbyen in Svalbard is a city only because it is the administrative centre of the archipelago, but you can easily imagine it as a mining colony on a distant planet. All corrugated iron, abandoned machinery and vicious weather set amongst a bleak and inhospitable landscape, with the added alien menace of polar bears forcing the inhabitants to go armed. As Elizabeth Hand writes of Reykjavik, only more so.

and...

Not a city, but anywhere in Mongolia. Ulan Bator's fairly strange with its crumbling Soviet relics, but i really mean the utterly beautiful, bleak, barren and almost-entirely uninhabited landscape of the rest of the country. Looking back at your tiny huddle of small domed tents in a vast silent plain as night falls, the temperature instantly plummets, and the cloudless sky gives way to the best view of the milky way on earth, is the closest you can get to having just landed on an undiscovered alien planet. (at least as a wussy tourist who's not man enough for the Antarctic...).

Finished Auster's Man in the Dark - it turned out not to be my favourite of his books. So I'm re-reading his utterly fantastic New York Trilogy. Now that's good.

The English Teacher who teaches primarily Early Modern Lit and Victorian Lit.

Oh yes. It was Wuthering Heights and Mrs Dalloway all the way, for my twelfth graders. (But they did not like Hardy. Meh.)

any interest in this book?

That looks fascinating. My dissertation was on children's lit and the fantasy genre. I'll see if I can get hold of that.