Daily Archives: December 31, 2007

What I Read This December

Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn
Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson
Lyra’s Oxford by Philip Pullman
The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray
Deep Magic by Diane Duane
High Magic by Diane Duane
Aria, vol. 3 by Kozue Amano
Aria, vol. 2 by Kozue Amano
The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith
An Equal Music by Vikram Seth (reread)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

Deep Magic: Finally, finally I picked this up again and read the last half in one sitting. I don’t know why I ground to a halt last spring and couldn’t get back into it; I like the setting and the magical system and the why of it all. Jumped right into the third one and polished it off in an hour. I should look in to getting the SFBC omnibus editions. (Aha — finally something to make up our order to open a new account, Blade!)

Kitty and the Midnight Hour: Yawn. I wanted to like this book much more than I actually did. Kelley Armstrong does the girl werewolf thing better. I was more interested in the radio programme bits.

The Sweet Far Thing: A solid ending to the vaguely Gothic fantasy set in the Victorian era. Libba, you are my current hero for pulling this off.

Strong Poison and The Nine Tailors: What will I do when I have read all the Lord Peter Whimsey mysteries? Woe, woe, woe! Nice to see Lord Peter and Harriet meeting, after having read stories like Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon. And while Gaudy Night may end up being my favourite Sayers novel, The Nine Tailors is perhaps the best-crafted detective novels I’ve ever encountered.

Whee!

This is one of the best parts about publishing books: seeing the confirmed cover for the first time.

One more step towards it being real! Yes, I’ve gone through this three times. No, this step never gets any less exciting.

Seven months to go before it hits bookstore shelves!

And Then, Like Magic

The phone rang as I was slicing steak for tonight’s stroganoff and it was a jolly phone tech, telling me that as the phone had rung and I’d picked it up, our phone must again be operational. He even told me to make sure the DSL light on the modem was doing what it was supposed to be doing before he rang off.

The culprit? A broken wire, which has now been replaced.

As grumpy as we were for losing the service, I am thankful to live in a place where things can be restored within twenty-four hours. HRH is probably already joyfully crusading on WoW downstairs.

The domestic drama has resolved. Life proceeds apace.

ETA: Our landlord just called, greeting me with “So, you’ve had some phone trouble!” Turns out he knew this not because our line was dead, but because our phone number went to someone else for a while — then someone different. The complexity of the comedy of errors perpetuated by the original newbie tech just keeps increasing in surreality.

Our Day So Far

The phone tech came. He fixed the upstairs phone and left.

HRH went upstairs to use their newly-fixed phone to call Bell and yell at them for being idiots.

(I know, I know — the tech just looks at the address and phone number on his clipboard, and in retrospect we should have opened up our own ticket just to be sure even though it was outlined in the original call that both civic numbers were affected. But gods, I wish people would think.)

ETA: Aha. The same thing happened to the people behind-kitty-corner to us — both upper and main floors of their duplex went out, a tech came, and only fixed one of them. (We are flabbergasted: the tech who fixed the upstairs line *knew* this, and he didn’t think to check ours? Gah!) The original problem seems to have been with a new tech who went and somehow messed up the main box around here and affected half a dozen lines. Anyway, our Personal Visit From This or Another Unthinking Tech will happen this afternoon between 12 and 6. The poor woman who took HRH’s call was speechless as to this morning’s debacle.