No, I love pop references in mysteries! Didn't Pelecanos also write a piece in Hec's new book, or something?

The only Lehane I've read was Shutter Island, which I thought was good although there were a couple of pretty glaring anachronisms, eg someone using the term "anger management" in the late 1940s (or whenever it was supposed to be)!

I got Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty for Christmas and I'm really enjoying it so far. I was slightly worried, it's a bit disconcerting to see an author I absolutely love win the Booker Prize (which I've always been snooty about)!

Didn't Pelecanos also write a piece in Hec's new book, or something?

Indeed. He's an expert on 70s soul music and did a piece about Curtis Mayfield's Back to the World.

One of the characters in the Strange series is an ex-cop who works in a used record store.

My only problem with Pelecanos is that every villain seems to be gay. Or at least a Schillingeresque manrapist. Which after a while starts to seem like a theme.

You know, I never noticed, but...now you mention it, a lot of them do look upon prison a bit more fondly than one might expect, Jim. Wow, Hec's and Pelecanos' stock both rose. Color me impressed. Yeah, Angus, wrod on that term thing. Surely, there was a fifties word he could have found. And it's probably easier when you're Lehane, as opposed to, say, me, Newbie McRookie, who doesn't even come up on Amazon or anything. No excuse.

Interesting book gift I got: the Faber book of Movie Verse. Poems about movies from the turn of the century to the early 90s. Looks amazing but I haven't gotten a chance to look at it in any great detail. The only other book gifts that I got were school books, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories.

I got [link] Shakespeare After All.

I'm looking forwad to reading it, though it's a little bit intimidating looking to my vacation jelly-brains.

That looks excellent...pretty much any book about Shakespeare makes me salivate though.

I got Shakespeare After All.

Wow, that looks like a gem and what a good price. Or, alternatively, what WDC said.

So long as it doesn't make me feel like I'm at work, I'll enjoy it.

I read Biohazard on the plane last night. It's a nonfiction book by a former Soviet bioweapons scientist named Ken Alibek (actually Kan Alibekov), who was possibly the highest-ranking Kazakh in the Soviet military. Anyway, he defected to the US in about 92 and wrote this fascinating history of his involvement with the Soviet bioweapons industry and his experience with it. What I found most interesting is that the USSR was absolutely convinced the US had an ongoing bioweapons program, and their program was intended to counter ours. Alibek finally left when he became convinced that this was untrue, after a tour of US sites in 1991.

It's an easy read -- I read the whole thing on the plane last night -- and rather unsettling, because Alibek isn't convinced the threat of bioweapons is gone even if the Soviet union is. Fascinating stuff.