I read SJ Rozan's first Lydia Chin/Bill Smith novel over the weekend. Good read, fun mystery, great family interaction, nice sense of place. Thumbs up. And I gotta love a novel that actually cares about provenance.

Where are you right now?

Where am I physically? Or in the novel?

Physically, I'm on the 7th floor of an office building in Honolulu, which is so over-air-conditioned I'm wearing a fleece sweater.

In the novel, I finished it.

Now I'm reading Bill Bryson's Made in America, which is great. In fact I was sitting in a coffee shop yesterday reading it, and laughing, and a woman came up to me and said, "I hope you don't mind, but I always make a point to find out what someone's reading when they're laughing out loud." Which was very cool.

Has anyone read The Lake of Dead Languages, by Carol Goodman?

My best friend foisted it off on me, because she really liked it. It's kind of a ripoff of The Secret History, but it was a nice snowed-in weekend read.

If you are a crime nonfiction fan, or you read stuff like "Nickel and Dimed", you have to read The Corner right now.

Tell me more erika. I'm like one of those corner preachers spreading the word when it comes to my love of "Nickel and Dimed."

You'd probably love "The Corner" Heather. It's about one family that lives by a drug corner in West Baltimore, and why they make the choices they make and who gets into and out of the drug life(I was completely stunned by who got clean and who didn't...at the beginning it looks very different.) And also it talks about where the drug war went wrong, and how really poor people have different expectations. And a lot of the vivid details I loved about "A Year on The Killing Streets" like what people really do in crack houses. And what a burn bag is(That's when you sell baking soda or something as drugs.VERY hazardous to your health.) My proof that Simon and Burns know whereof they speak: Graffiti in W. Balmer Social Services elevator: "All of y'all that work here can just go fuck yourselves." Trust me...that person is a poet and he doesn't know it.

Is it non fiction or fictionalized?

Non-fiction...some of the dialogue got reconstructed.David Simon used to be a Baltimore Sun crime reporter, and Edward Burns is ex-cop turned schoolteacher(there's a guy loves doing stuff the hard way.) They hung around and followed people, basically.

OK, I'm in the "gloaty-gloat-gloat" privileged corner.

I just got the e-MS of Roz Kaveney's new non-fiction, Waking into Dream: Readings in Science Fiction Film.

(jealous of deb)

Random question: I need a make and model of a car I might rent if I go to London. What's a stereotypical British rental car?