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Ha! Yes, that's a very good point, Jesse.

I read Kickback, and kinda didn't like it. The heroine is too self-conscious. I never wash my short blonde hair, if you get my meaning -- her first person POV seemed too external. I am still reading Blue Genes, though. It's my car book.

How much do I love the fact that someone else has "car books"? Actually, mine at the moment is a purse book. I got half a chapter read in line at the PO today.

Hmm. Trying to be open-minded, but can't imagine anything replacing the '95 miniseries as the OTP&P adaptation.

Me either. I also really can't picture anyone but Colin Firth as Darcy. The Bridget Jones Diary sealed it for me, he is Darcy to me.

I expect to be beaten for this, but: I don't find Colin Firth sexy in the slightest. As Darcy, or as anyone else.

Also, I like Keira Knightley well enough, but I am already getting tired of her Gwyneth levels of overexposure.

In book news, I am reading the New Yorker. Oh, I did read a book 3 weeks ago - a new-to-me Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck, in a very nice UK paperback edition courtesy of Nutty (not 'Butty' as I originally typed). Not my favorite Heyer - hero too superior and always frickin' right, and the heavy use of actual historical figures as characters took some geting used to - but kicked the ass of most books of its type nonetheless.

NovaChild, I just started reading HP book 4 and just got to the Avra Kadavra part! Spooky timing. =)

flea, it just means more Colin for the rest of us. No prob, honestly. And we all have our quirks - I completely missed the John Cusack meeting. His sister Joan, OTOH, knocks my socks off.

"Regency Buck" is one of my favourites - that's the one with Judith and Perry and Lord Worth, yes? You meet those characters again a few years later, in Heyer's wonderful book set in the days up to, during, and right after Waterloo, "An Infamous Army".

this is the point where I admit with a hangdog expression that even though I majored in history, battle scenes make my eyes glaze over

beth, Infamous Army is less about Waterloo than it is about Brussels and the people (real and fictional) that she's writing about. ALthough she covers the battle, it's not a huge long unbroken battle scene; she does it as much through personalities as through description. It's actually my favourite fictionalised take on Waterloo and the events of that summer; I prefer hers to Thackeray's.

And I know what you mean. Also history major, but most battle scenes? Yaaaaaaawn. Maybe it's because too many of them take them on as somehow heroic, the Grand Sweeping Pageant Of Military Glory.

And I do not now and never have for one moment drunk the Kool-Aid that produces a belief in the rightness of the Grand Sweeping Pageant Of Military Glory.

Also? Don't give a rat's ass about the linear progression of tactics. I want the setting, and I want to care about the people involved. Heyer did that, in spades.

I read Infamous Army sometime in my high school years. I remember skimming through large chunks. It is one of the few of hers that I never reread. I bet I'd feel differently about it now.

I adore Infamous Army. Heyer intertwines the lives of the characters and the battle so naturally and seamlessly that the amoutn of work that went into the piece never shows. The scene where Babs and Judith bond over tea after tending the wounded all day? Brilliant.