Some words on things that I have read since I've been in Delaware, and the weeks leading up.

Now, my job itself is not exciting. Not to spoil what it is precisely, let's just say that I'm a glorified receptionist, and that I have a lot of down time.
Prior to this job, I spent a number of years in the food service industry. I got out because... I was not a lifer.
My current job involves providing customer service with large swathes of down-time inbetween.
For the first time in a few years, I can just sit around and read all day.

First things first, I flipped through The Club Dumas. This is the book upon which the film The Ninth Gate was very loosely based. (VERY loosely, it turns out.) I'd always liked the movie (despite my long-standing antipathy towards Roman Polanski), and I figured it was high time to get around to the source material.
The book took my brain and punched it in the face. Gone are almost all traces of the Satanic themes of The Ninth Gate, and in comes a long, fanciful riff on themes from much of Alexandre Dumas Pere's work.
Needless to say, I am hopelessly in love with the book now.
The Three Musketeers and related works by Dumas are, without a single doubt, some of my favorite literature in the whole wide world. Not only that, but I will never say 'no' to watching filmed adaptations of the same stuff. I went in expecting Satanism and the occult, and I came out with a book nerd's ultimate mystery adventure story.

I ripped my way through the first three books of Mercedes Lackey's Bardic Voices series next. I'd read them before, but it had been quite a few years.
I will admit that Lackey's work tends to be a little bit too heavy-handed when it comes to overly-lucky protagonists and romantic themes, but at the same time... she gives a lot of detail to the settings and clothes, so I think that that aspect is fascinating enough.
It's not deep, challenging reading, but I like it well enough.
(One of her Elementals novels, The Fire Rose, is a wonderful play on Beauty and the Beast. It runs in to a lot of the same problems that I mentioned above, but the characters get a little bit more fleshed-out than the Bardic ones tend to.)

I next made my way through The Complete Sherlock Holmes, though I admittedly skipped a few stories here and there. I can honestly say that for as much as I LOVE the stories for the most part, I also love the recent Guy Ritchie adaptation quite ardently; I always felt that the Holmes stories could have used a little bit more actual adventure.

I then moved on to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I know that a lot of people aren't fond of the emerging mash-up genre, and I can respect that. Someone taking a work (or historical figure) that you loved as-is and splicing in weirdness... I can see how that would be off-putting. At the same time, though, I find that I actually quite like the whole idea.
Theres not a whole lot I can say about the book at hand, honestly, than that making Abraham Lincoln a vampire hunter is almost as good as making him a werewolf hunter, in my eyes.
(See also: Abraham Lincoln Hates Werewolves, a companion piece to the Jesus Hates Zombies comics.)

The last book that I read before I left was Game Of Thrones, which was... well. Lots of things.
Firstly, I'd have to say that George R. R. Martin has a wonderful sense of intricate world-building. Next, I'd have to say that it took me until I was nearly finished with the book to realize that this entire book was pretty much a complex series of setups for what I imagine are going to be a very long-reaching set of payoffs.
There is some body horror, though, and that was distressing as hell. (WHAT THE FUCK, DANAERYS, is all I'm going to say here.)
I honestly think, though, that instead of 'A Song Of Ice And Fire', it should be re-named 'A Song Of Ice And How Tyrion Has Far, Far Fewer Issues Than Any Of You Crazy Bastards'.

On the train, I started Snow Crash. This is my first-ever Neal Stephenson, and I have to say that I'm a little bit in love with it. The way he slowly layers more and more nuance onto his characters, and the way he can invoke wonderfully-formed settings without going into gratuitous detail is amazing to me.
On the other hand, he goes into just enough detail during Hiro's conversations with the Librarian regarding the nature of human language and religion that I was astounded. I'm not going to spoil anyone here, but this book is basically flawless, as far as I'm concerned.
(If you have previously read this book, I might recommend the Otherland quadrology by Tad Williams. It is definitely not as casual of a read, by a LONG SHOT, however.)


I'm going to be starting A Clash Of Kings (the second book of Ice and Fire) fairly soon, so maybe we'll have that one posted about in short order.

In the mean time, it's time for bed - I'll most likely be posting again tomorrow afternoon. (THIS afternoon, I suppose I should say.)