Getting Situated at Home

It’s always somewhat daunting to start catching up after a vacation. I wasn’t even gone a full week, but I was greeted with more than 100 e-mails when I arrived home. The Blackberry’s still not connecting to the Internet, so I’ll have to check into the instruction booklet to see if I can do anything about it short of contacting Verizon.

I've put away some of the books from the trip. I finished Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City. It was enjoyable, and the material about the Chicago Exposition of 1893 was fascinating. But somehow, although most everyone I know who's read it disagrees, I found the prose style to be just a little bit stiff, and it kept me from being as enthralled as others seem to have been. The sections about the serial killer were fine, but I get the feeling that they functioned more as a way to bring readers (and perhaps publishers) into a book about the Chicago exposition. Although true crime and history are both publishing niches, the true crime niche seems to sell a bit more, so my theory is that a number of readers who wouldn't have read the book without the killer found themselves more fascinated by the story of the exposition.

I also read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which is absolutely brilliant. I've previously talked about the hype it's been receiving here (where I annoyingly added an extra l to her name a couple of times, though I've corrected it by now), and it deserves every bit of it. I'll have a fair amount more to say about this, but I think I might read it again before I do. I started to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, and I'm quite enjoying it so far. By this point, I'm about six years behind the curve, but when it came out, everybody I knew was reading it (or claimed to be reading it), and my natural aversion to bandwagons (most of the time) required me to keep it at arm's length long enough that I could claim I'm reading it by choice rather than because of peer pressure. I just started it on the plane ride home, but it's proving itself a quick read, so I hope to complete it soon.

Because the Blackberry was down, I really only started to come out of my vacation news cocoon yesterday morning as I prepared to leave. I've only seen headlines or heard radio reports about Robert Novak publicly fingering Rove as a Plame source, the death of Syd Barrett (I feel bad that I revealed it a little too bluntly to a cousin who was a bigger fan than I realized), and the ongoing and escalating trouble between Israel and Lebanon. I may be writing about all that and more in the next few days (I've already had a request for my comments on Novak and Rove), but I'll have to digest it first. This blog has never had a particularly chatty readership, but if anyone wants to tell me what I should be sure not to miss, I'm all ears.