Swindon... Swindon? Swindon. Swindon!!!

I was just looking at my blog visitor stats on Sitemeter. Mostly the usual. Folks from here in Victoria, some in Vancouver, a couple from Toronto. Right, there's the usual Japan visits. A scattering of U.S. visitors (I seem to have a regular visitor from San Luis Obispo in California). But... what's this? On Thursday, I had a visitor from...

Swindon! One of my favourite places that I've never been. The setting for Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next stories. And the hometown of (swoon) Billie "Rose Tyler" Piper. So, a heartfelt greeting to that visitor, should they ever drop by again. Oh, and if you should happen to bump into Ms. Piper, tell her I'm willing to bear her children.

...

What? Why are you all staring like that? What?!

Especially observant visitors may have noticed that I've changed the "what I'm reading" list down the side of the page. However, I am not actually finished reading Stephen Baxter's Emperor, but am taking a quick break from it. Again.

It's not that I'm not enjoying the book. I am. Well, I'm enjoying the story anyway. The book itself is a little dry in tone. It's definitely an engineer's view of Roman history (or alternate history). Baxter's insane amount of techincal detail suits his hard SF stories better. But I do want to see where this multi-volume epic will eventually lead. Just in bits a pieces right now. It doesn't help that I find myself easily distracted by the novelty of my still-relatively-new PeeEssPee. As for the out and out break...


...that's due to a new Kage Baker book. It's been out for a few months now; how did I miss that?! I love this woman's writing, especially her Company series. With her words, she is able to make you burst out loud laughing one page, and feel you heart well and truly wrenched on the next. Gods and Pawns is a collection of short stories in her Company universe and I couldn't be happier that something has come along to fill the gap between novels.

For those of you who don't know the series. it's all about the immortal, time-travelling cyborgs who have lived among us since the dawn of time in order to make money for the Dr. Zeus company a few centuries in our future. I kid you not. And these characters are wonderfully human. Again, I kid you not. I find myself automatically empathising with Lewis, a Literature Preserver. He's the nice guy who will, for example, let Mendoza (a Botanist on whom he has a sizeable secret crush) take the remaining tent after the flash flood almost completely destroys their camp. I love the guy.

I've also changed the book that Lynn and I are reading together. We've finished Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, the funniest (and surprisingly touching) retelling of the New Testament (including the missing bits) you've ever read. Next up is Mr. Thundermug, the tale of a talking baboon.

In other catch up news, I should mention that Lynn has started her own blog, Everything I Eat. It was inspired by the surprisingly addictive book Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth, in which the author, Tucker Shaw, took a picture of everything he ate for an entire year. And, unlike me, she actually updates her blog regularly! Every day even!