I've been enjoying a delightful spree of very fluffy reading, mostly British chic lit. It's been a nice change of pace. These books do tend to make me hungry though. Everyone is always sitting down to yummy food and good wine.
During our vacation, I also read Good Omens. It's hilariously funny, and I was all set to buy it for Dad for Christmas, when I read about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and their four biker sidekicks (with names like Grevious Bodily Harm and Embarassing Personal Problems) and had a vivid memory of Dad reading that part aloud to me.
Two of the main characters are a demon and an angel, who have become friends over the thousands of years they've both been on earth interferring with humans. I found these snippets from the demon's point of view very telling:
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. . . . Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of genearlized nastiness.
And just when you'd think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occassionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved.
I'm also continuing to read Living the Sabbath, mostly on Sundays. It's extremely thought provoking and deserves its own post once I've finished.
I had hoped to take The Book Thief on vacation with me, but only one of the three libraries I'm currently using has a copy, and it's out and not due back until later in the month. Endless Forms Most Beautiful will have to be an inter-library loan. I'm hoping to call in the request tomorrow.
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You may like other Terry Pratchett books as well. The Discworld characters have evolving story arcs, despite the never-ending nature of the series. (Each book is a self-contained book though, so in theory you can pick up anywhere. My recommended starting points are: Guards! Guards!, Going Postal, Wyrd Sisters, or Mort.) My favourites are Hogfather (recently a great movie from the BBC) about the nature of belief, and Jingo, about war. (Hogfather is the third of the Death books, which start with Mort, and Jingo is the fourth of the City Watch books that start with Guards! Guards! But as I said, they are all self-contained, so while you will see longer story arcs in the background, you could theoretically pick up anywhere.)
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