Just like a jewel shines in the night

[wombat_socho]

Whenever I think my life sucks, all I have to do is look at LJ. divalea's house burned down and took nine of her pets with it (and her new neighbors are ASSHATS), onsen_mark's mother just died, and materia_indigo, well, let's just say she's had better years. That just scratches the surface - I could go on and add quite a few people to this list. So I don't have a lot of room to be complaining.

I was completely wiped out last night - got home, tested my blood sugar, and then sat around like a lump for about twenty minutes in front of Cowzilla before realizing that I needed to eat something for dinner. I was so tired I forgot to walk the rent downstairs to the super - just went to bed, finished Declare, set the alarm, and went to sleep. About all I managed to accomplish yesterday was mailing out the bandages I sold on eBay and getting the money order for the rent.

I wound up getting a good ten hours of sleep last night and actually feel halfway decent this morning. This was a good thing, because P's Swedish Death Flu is trying for a comeback and she was all kittywumpus this morning, unable to find wallet, phone, head...you know how those mornings are. I took her by the Caribou on Penn since I figured we had time to do that on the way to catch the bus, but I was wrong and we wound up activating Plan C, which due to something having gone horribly wrong on I-35W required us to drive into town via Lyndale, 46th, and 1st Avenue to Marquette. Even though we were on the surface all the way in, I still got P to work on time. Yay.


Well, it's very different from Stross' The Atrocity Archives, and that's only partly due to the stylistic differences between Deighton and Le Carre which are the most obvious point of departure. Declare develops slowly, drawing together the disparate threads of its story over forty years of wandering in the wilderness of mirrors that was the Great Game played out between the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD/KGB on the one hand and the various intelligence agencies of the NATO powers on the other, while Stross' short novel is more of a thriller in the Quiller/James Bond tradition - one can easily see it being made into a movie along the lines of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with which it shares some literary/historical genes.
I can't really go into the other major point of divergence between the two books without spoiling both, but suffice it to say that while Stross' book is definitely a part of the Cthulhu Mythos, Powers' is not, although that's not entirely clear until a good ways into the book. It has all the feel of one, until the significance of Hale's Middle Eastern connections becomes apparent, but that's not until you've gotten well stuck into it. I enjoyed it tremendously, and recommend it highly.

Finally, an observation: it's a waste of time looking for cheerful icons in the utena_icons community. What was I thinking?

Comments

[onsenmark.livejournal.com]

Internet's being a bitch right now, so hopefully it'll be nice enough for LONG enough to let me post, period.

It's been a generally crappy week, all around, I think. -_-;

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Week? How about year? I mean, I've been doing okay, all things considered, but a lot of folks have been really run through the wringer. I'm sure it's all Bush's fault.

At least your Cox stayed up long enough for you to double-post a reply. :)

[onsenmark.livejournal.com]

I don't blame Bush. He don't know no better. ;)

And I meant to delete the extra post, but I was getting frustrated at the time. Heck, I got home last night and thought my computer was going batshit again. Thank God it wasn't my machine, but Cox... although I wish I had known that before running a system restore. Now I have to reinstall Azureus again. 9_9