Carrot bothers me. We never see inside his head, he's always portrayed as he appears to others.

I think that's they only reason he works as well as he does as a character. If you could see what he was thinking, it would break the mystique, I think. I love the possibility that underneath that simple facade, his mind might be as twisty as Vetinari's.

I like Elmore Leonard, but I like him better when he stretches himself. His short story in the McSweeney's Thrilling Tales, e.g., was more interesting to me because it did not take place in Detroit, LA or Miami. Also, it was about cowboys.

I find his novels can be kind of retreads, taken as a bunch; or anyway at certain points in his career he has churned out Good Enough while at other points he was reaching for Damn Good.

I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. It took me a while to wrap my brain around the narrative conceit, and longer for me to get past the twee, but ultimately it was a pretty good book. (The fact I did get past the twee, that it became invisible after a while, is a good sign overall.) You could write a good English paper on the book, and at the same time, it held my interest on both plot and emotional bases.

I like Elmore Leonard, but I like him better when he stretches himself. His short story in the McSweeney's Thrilling Tales, e.g., was more interesting to me because it did not take place in Detroit, LA or Miami. Also, it was about cowboys.

Not that big a stretch - he started out writing westerns. I think his first 10 novels (give or take) are all westerns of one sort or another.

(The fact I did get past the twee, that it became invisible after a while, is a good sign overall.)

It took me a good three days to get through the first half of the book, but only three hours to finish it, so ITA on getting used to it.

For something completely different, has anyone else read "Focault's Pendulum"?

Yes, brilliant work. Unfortunately I read Angels and Demons and then Da Vinci Code right afterwards and now a lot of it is a jumble in my head.

Favorite Discworld characters: Vetinari, Death, Angua, Vimes, Leonard of Quirm, Cohen the Barbarian, Death, the newspaper guy, the new post office guy, and I have to say Dibbler and his entire extended family.

And you think Illumantus! doesn't? Illumantus! makes fun of everything.

The distinction is in my second sentence. The word "affectionately". Illunantus has affection for conspiracy theories - thinks that in a fundamental way they may provide good insights on reality. Pendulum has no affection for conspiracy theory. Sees them as a fundamentally totalitarian attitude towards life. There is a degree of anger in Pendulum that is not in illumantus; I find it the better story. Of course I always thought there was a lot of hot air in Illumantus - that losing about half the wordage would have improved it immensely. So a personal literary judgement here as well.

Oh and what I came to Literary for:

Ken Macleod has noted that Romantic Times has really good coverage of Science Fiction. (When they reviewed him he checked out the issue and noted that they do good genre reviews in general.)

[link]

I've just signed up for a subscription to RT, mostly because they're so very comprehensive in their romance reviews that it's wonderful market research for which publishers are printing what. I'll have to take a closer look at their SF reviews.

Has anyone read Smoke and Shadows, by Tanya Huff? It's a supernatural thriller set in Vancouver, on the set of a vampire detective show, with a couple of characters who seem--80 pages in to the book, anyway--to map rather well to Angel and Wesley. And of course, the protagonist finds the latter incredibly hot.

That sounds like fun -- is it good? Or have you read it yet?