I rarely stop reading a book in the middle because I dislike it (the last one was Preternatural, awful awful!). I guess I’ve been lucky recently to have good recommendations from friends so I don’t often stumble upon bad books. When I saw a copy of The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling on the bookshelf at my friend’s house I asked what he thought about it. “I don’t know, I haven’t read that one yet.” I decided to give it a shot, it sounded really interesting (see wikipedia entry here). It is alternative history, has all sorts of characters I thought would be interesting, the whole premise of computers being developed in the 1800s was very interesting, and Gibson is one of the authors! I started reading it on New Years Eve.
It’s horrible.
I thought it was just going to be a slow beginning, but I’m 160 pages into it and I just don’t care about it. The authors have me so swamped in techno-babble and silly details that it’s difficult to even keep track of the plot at times (this is common with Gibson, but this book isn’t good enough for me to care to spend the time to sort it out). I kept reading hoping it’d get better, and then I hit amazon.com to read reviews. These people actually finished the book and most had feelings that echoed mine, and no, it doesn’t get better. The research is detailed, so it felt like it could have really described a 19th century world, and I was amused at the use of Historical figures, but I need a good plot.
Very disappointed.
So I picked up Robert Asprin’s Myth-ing Persons instead. Yay it’s fun! I love these Myth books.
We took down the Christmas Tree yesterday. We’ll be finding needles until next Christmas no doubt. Caligula seemed sad to see the tree go, he loved hiding under it and attacking the lower branches.
This morning I woke up to find that BirthdayBot (a Perl script that queries a mysql database of birthdays and if it finds a match it logs onto IRC an changes the topic in #13thHour to a Happy Birthday $nick! message) didn’t work last night. I just dropped the script into my home directory on minute and set up a crontab so it’d run daily. It’s been running, but today was the first day it actually had to go in and change the topic in #13thHour for a birthday (happy birthday
Today is my last day of vacation, and we don’t have any plans. I’ve finished up the computer projects I wanted to finish, and did a lot of little things I wanted to do on this vacation, so I’m content.
Now I’m going to go read for a bit. *wanders off*