![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jan. 15th, 2005 09:28 pmYesterday I got my copy of The Vesuvius Club, a novel by Mark Gatiss that's what James Bond (the Connery Bond) would be like if he had been an equal-opportunity rake living in the early 1900's. Kind of. I don't reckon it's available in the States yet, because I can't get shit when searching for it at regular Merkin amazon.com. I ordered mine from amazon.co.uk because, as we are all aware from the nekkid french rugby players, ordering from foreign amazons is just like ordering from the local amazon, except that the weak dollar abroad means that your copy of The Vesuvius Club will cost you, including shipping, on the close order of two tanks of gasoline. I still think it was worth it. It's a delightful read.
( Read the first four pages of the book in question? )
The book overleaf says "A bit of fluff" and it is that. Some novels try pretty hard to impress you with their seriousness. This isn't one of them. It's not particularly Lit-Tra-Chure, but that's not a crime and sometimes it's positively an endorsement. The first chapter of the book is entitled Mr. Lucifer Box Entertains and y'know what? He does. I have laughed aloud (No, I will not use the horrid internet designation LOL in any way, shape, or form. Sorry. "Teh" is about as good as it gets around here. ROTFL is also verboten in my book. People cheapen those through overuse, damn it, and I'll not say I laughed out loud if all I did was smirk. I smirk a lot.) more than ten times at the sheer effrontery of the prose in this book. It's honestly the most fun I've had in ages. (This says a great deal about the amusement potential of the book or a great deal about the lack of amusement in my everyday life. Possibly it says both.)
The novel gets a bit uneven about three-quarters of the way through, but as far as I'm concerned, it redeemed itself with the ending. I was planning on being *very* upset with the author, but since things worked out properly in the end, I forgave all. This particular novel is written to suggest that there may be more of them, should this one sell. I do hope that further adventures come to pass. It'd make my day, anyhow.
Besides reading The Vesuvius Club, I also put the final coat of polyurethane on the dining room table. The finish looks as good as I could have possibly hoped for, considering that it was painted in the living room of a house containing two longhaired cats and a running woodstove. Personally, I'm amazed at how well it came out and flat out stunned that the little shits didn't jump on the damn thing when the finish was wet. Apparently they're smarter than I thought they were... two hours after it's painted, though, they jump on it. Can they read the instructions that say "allow to dry for two hours'? Enquiring minds want to know...
I also made pickled beets-n-eggs, a cuisine of my ethnicity. Because I was boiling eggs anyway, for dinner I had egg salad and celery. (Omit the celery in the egg salad recipe, then use the celery stalks to scoop up the egg salad, see. It's how to eat egg salad when you haven't any bread. Grocery day is three days off. Celery, I have. Bread, no.)
For the remainder of the evening: I need to do laundry. I have half of a samurai movie to finish watching (Samurai III, Duel at Ganryu Island). Also there's the problem of moong dal. Nobody wrote in with what the hell to do with dried whole moong dal. Come on, people, do I have to do all the heavy lifting myself? I'm a girl, damn it. Is chivalry dead, or what? (Don't answer that. Let me keep my illusions.) This isn't a seriously critical issue, but it's on the weekend activity list because generally dried whole legumes take long enough to cook that they're not a practical project on weekdays. *sigh* I will see what the internet has to say about moong dal.
( Read the first four pages of the book in question? )
The book overleaf says "A bit of fluff" and it is that. Some novels try pretty hard to impress you with their seriousness. This isn't one of them. It's not particularly Lit-Tra-Chure, but that's not a crime and sometimes it's positively an endorsement. The first chapter of the book is entitled Mr. Lucifer Box Entertains and y'know what? He does. I have laughed aloud (No, I will not use the horrid internet designation LOL in any way, shape, or form. Sorry. "Teh" is about as good as it gets around here. ROTFL is also verboten in my book. People cheapen those through overuse, damn it, and I'll not say I laughed out loud if all I did was smirk. I smirk a lot.) more than ten times at the sheer effrontery of the prose in this book. It's honestly the most fun I've had in ages. (This says a great deal about the amusement potential of the book or a great deal about the lack of amusement in my everyday life. Possibly it says both.)
The novel gets a bit uneven about three-quarters of the way through, but as far as I'm concerned, it redeemed itself with the ending. I was planning on being *very* upset with the author, but since things worked out properly in the end, I forgave all. This particular novel is written to suggest that there may be more of them, should this one sell. I do hope that further adventures come to pass. It'd make my day, anyhow.
Besides reading The Vesuvius Club, I also put the final coat of polyurethane on the dining room table. The finish looks as good as I could have possibly hoped for, considering that it was painted in the living room of a house containing two longhaired cats and a running woodstove. Personally, I'm amazed at how well it came out and flat out stunned that the little shits didn't jump on the damn thing when the finish was wet. Apparently they're smarter than I thought they were... two hours after it's painted, though, they jump on it. Can they read the instructions that say "allow to dry for two hours'? Enquiring minds want to know...
I also made pickled beets-n-eggs, a cuisine of my ethnicity. Because I was boiling eggs anyway, for dinner I had egg salad and celery. (Omit the celery in the egg salad recipe, then use the celery stalks to scoop up the egg salad, see. It's how to eat egg salad when you haven't any bread. Grocery day is three days off. Celery, I have. Bread, no.)
For the remainder of the evening: I need to do laundry. I have half of a samurai movie to finish watching (Samurai III, Duel at Ganryu Island). Also there's the problem of moong dal. Nobody wrote in with what the hell to do with dried whole moong dal. Come on, people, do I have to do all the heavy lifting myself? I'm a girl, damn it. Is chivalry dead, or what? (Don't answer that. Let me keep my illusions.) This isn't a seriously critical issue, but it's on the weekend activity list because generally dried whole legumes take long enough to cook that they're not a practical project on weekdays. *sigh* I will see what the internet has to say about moong dal.
