monday morning

I haven’t had enough caffeine yet to write anything particularly coherent, but here’s a quick summary of my weekend reading. Some of it will (I hope) turn into longer posts later. After more diet coke.

 I’m listening to The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer. It’s an Enola Holmes (Sherlock’s much younger sister) mystery. So far I’m really enjoying it. There was one part that I had figured out very early on and was driving along thinking, “Argh, just figure it out already!” and if that had turned out to have been the whole mystery, I would have been very peeved. Luckily, she figured it out quickly enough and we’re on to more interesting (and mysterious) mysteries. The audiobook is read by Katherine Kellgren, who I think also read the audiobooks of A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels (if she didn’t, she sounds like that reader and the books have enough in common — corsets, carriages, etc. — to remind me of each other) and it is making me very, very anxious for my hold on The Sweet, Far Thing to arrive.

Speaking of audiobooks, I finally got downloadable audiobooks to work. Back in February, my library system started offering downloadables through Net Library and I was really excited about it, so I went out and bought an MP3 player. However. First the thing shorted out the day after I got it, then there was a whole mess trying to get it fixed, and then the downloading didn’t even work. Not happy. I was ready to throw it out and buy an iPod. Then I mostly ignored it for eight months, which didn’t make my husband very happy. Last month he built us a new computer, and when installing software, found a Windows Media Player disc he didn’t know he had. He installed it, convinced me to give the subscription service another try, and lo and behold, it worked! I checked out Keturah and Lord Death and bookmarked a bunch of others to check out soon. Hurray!

Most of the rest of my reading this weekend was adult graphic novels (at least adult in our system). I read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, which I loved after I learned to stop trying to remember all of the history parts. I thought I had a decent grasp on who did what in the Iran-Iraq war, but for the first part of the book, I had trouble keeping everyone straight. Eventually I got it all sorted out, then decided it didn’t matter anyway, the amazing thing about the book was the girl and her… well, I can’t think of a less cliched word than “spirit.” Very cool. Very powerful. I can’t wait to read volume 2.

I also read the second volume of Love in a Foreign Language. It’s a pretty sweet little story about a Canadian guy in his twenties who is feeling very lonely while teaching English in Korea. He’s about ready to break his contract and go home when he meets the school’s beautiful new secretary. He decides to stay, now he just has to work up the courage to talk to her…