Friday, November 04, 2011

my body don't lie

I kind of feel like death. I told Terry (when she knocked on my door to check on me - she heard me coughing tonight, but since I'd curled up in bed before she even got home, she hadn't seen verifiable evidence that I wasn't on the verge of death) that at least I wasn't as sick as I was when I got home from Germany, and she appreciated that I've developed a baseline. Still, I'm pretty miserable, and so I got virtually nothing done today, which annoys me.

That's not entirely fair to myself. I woke up and nine and cleaned my room, showered, made tea, took care of some business, etc., and then sped down to Mountain View to have lunch with Gyre. This was a journey fraught with peril, since I've been so focused on zee writing that I haven't seen or made plans with a lot of people at my former place of employment. And as Gyre and I walked into our usual cafe, I ran into my friend Jenni (who emailed me a couple of days ago and I hadn't gotten back to yet), but she gave me fair warning that she was about to have lunch with two other people whom I haven't seen (Heather, aka dear respected madam, whom I at least had dinner with a few weeks ago, and another person who's been trying to get together with me for ages and I've kept putting off in the interest of getting stuff done). So Gyre and I fled through the side door and went to another cafe, where the food was awesome and we caught each other up on all the developments in our respective lives (which were interesting and numerous, since I hadn't seen him for six weeks).

He had a one o'clock meeting that he couldn't skip, so I left campus as soon as we were done and went to the other campus of my youth -- namely Stanford. I was in the parking lot there and almost decided to come home instead, since I felt like crap and just wanted to lie down, but our cleaning lady was supposed to come today and I didn't want to lie about while she was here (so you can imagine my annoyance when I got home at seven and discovered she didn't come - grr). So I went to the library and did some legitimate slogging for an hour, then some daydreaming/sniffling for another couple of hours. I gave up around 5:15, grabbed a quick dinner at the CoHo, then came home and crawled into the bed I had wanted to be in all day. I should have written, but it was a losing battle, so instead I picked up a book...

...which is always my downfall. I read the whole thing, but since I started it at a reasonable hour, I'm done with it and can go to bed at 12:30am, which is pretty good for me. The book is a new release, and it's steampunk, so if you find all that ridiculous, you can stop reading the post for the night. It's called HEART OF STEEL, and is the sequel to THE IRON DUKE, which I read last year. I loved the book all the way through (really, truly loved it), and yet I finished it feeling slightly bemused. It's basically an alternate history/fantasy, and the premise is that the Mongols kidnapped Marco Polo and his entourage of scientists, then used them to create ghastly steam powered war machines to destroy cities, as well as nanotechnology that could either turn people into zombies or make them susceptible to control by radio towers (depending on the strain of nanotech one was infected with). Thus, when the Mongol hordes attacked the West, they weren't stopped at Vienna, and instead turned all of Europe, Asia and Africa into a landmass teeming with zombies and studded with fortified citadels inhabited by enslaved citizens. Cheery, right?

Anyway, I loved this book, possibly more than THE IRON DUKE -- but I realized after I put it down that I loved the characters (adored them!) and loved loved loved the intriguing, unique world (which fits all the characteristics of a world that lives on in the reader's imagination, since it's impossibly vast and can hold millions of stories), but I didn't love the plot/romance. I mean, I liked the plot/romance, and in any other book, they probably would have satisfied me. They just didn't live up to the amazingness of the characters and the world-building, which made them seem weaker than they actually will. Still, I'll keep reading the series and am utterly hooked, so it was a good use of a few hours.

And now that I've geeked out, I shall go to bed and hope that I feel marginally less like death tomorrow. Goodnight!

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