What I'm Reading

Silly moi.

This guy is good. He's really good. He writes about a homicide cop in LA named Hieronymus Bosch ("Yeah, like the painter")--Connelly was a police reporter for the LA Times and his knowledge shows.

What's especially cool is that he wraps up the crime about four-fifths of the way in...but you know since there's another fifth yet to go that there's another shoe left to drop, that something else is going to happen, that there's something he's set up that you've missed entirely.

Another book that is on the bookstand, ready to be read, is Mary Wollstonecraft's A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, paired with William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Women. The introduction to the book, which gives an overview of Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's lives (they were the parents of Mary Godwin Shelley, and Wollstonecraft died as a result of giving birth) is so damned exciting that I don't even want to read the book--I want to write an action-adventure movie based on Wollstonecraft's travels in Scandinavia.

Recently I also read Pauline Gedge's Child of the Morning, a well-written novel about the Pharaoh-Queen Hatshepsut, one of those wacky ancient women who didn't know her place and ruled like, well, a guy. A couple of things were frustrating about it, such as (natch) the ending, but overall I found it a beautiful read.

I found Child of the Morning via Amazon's Recommendation page, which keeps coming up with books set in ancient times for me, because of all the books I've bought that are set there: Colleen McCullough's Masters Of Rome series, Steven Saylor's Gordianus The Finder mystery series, Lindsey Davis's Marcus Didius Falco mystery series, and Lynda S. Robinson's Lord Meren mystery series. Of these, only the last disappointed me--I bought a couple of books in the series all at once, only to discover that I could not for the life of me force myself through the first one. Very unexciting writing.

I highly recommend McCullough's Masters Of Rome series--I wish to God she'd write faster, dammit, even though I know that Caesar must be coming to the end of his reign, he hasn't met Cleopatra yet and I can't wait to see how she's going to handle that.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Did 7.2 miles today. I wanted to go further but the dull ache in my side--as if my usual side stitch had spread out and said, "I'm moving in"--kept me from going the 8.3 miles I wanted to. Well, tomorrow is another day, but if I truly undertake this new regimen that I want to (one long day, one fast day, a day off), then tomorrow is a speedy but short day. The next long run will be Monday.