My Own Superhero

-Bey/buxom_bey and I attended a themed party this weekend . . .
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The New Place

-Here are those photos of the new place I've been promising. (This is not our furniture, obviously.)
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Books: Spin, Families

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

-The good is that I had trouble putting it down. The core mystery is well-presented, and the revelations are doled out at juuust the right pace. The bad is that for the first half of the book I kinda felt like I'd read it before. Plot is as follows: The Earth is encased in a vast bubble, sealing it off from the sky. I got that far, and thought, "Yeah, I've read Egan's Quarantine, what's new here?" Then as the book progressed, I thought, "Gee, this reads a lot like Wilson's Chronoliths. Something vast and inexplicable happens, society starts to crumble, cults arise, and our heroes must try to figure out what's going on in a collapsing infrastructure."

-The first feeling went away, since the physics and logic of the Spin bubble and the Quarantine bubble are very different. The second feeling stuck with me, but I ended up enjoying the novel anyway. The suspense is very well done, despite the fact that on the major issues there is no real suspense. To over-simplify somewhat, the odd-numbered chapters are set during a few weeks around the year 2040 A.D. (or the year 4,000,000,000 A.D., depending on how you count, but never mind). The even-numbered chapters cover the years from 2000 to 2040. So, on the very first page, we learn that A) the world doesn't end before 2040, B) the narrator is still alive, and C) one of the other main characters is still alive. (These are not spoilers, these are all things you learn on the first page, like I said.) So, when the questions arise, "Is the world going to end? Is X going to die?" you already know the answers. The suspense comes from explaining the odd-numbered chapters . . .

-Anyway, if you like hard SF, recommended.

In the Best Families by Rex Stout

-Another Nero Wolfe mystery that I picked up in the mall so I'd have something to read over lunch. This one is fairly pivotal in the Wolfe canon, in that it deals with a major confrontation between Wolfe and his Moriarty. Highly recommended if you read Wolfe, merely recommended to people who like early-20th-century mysteries.

Some Rough Estimates

Comic book collections, 14 shelf-feet.
Roleplaying games, 20 shelf-feet.
Video (VHS, DVD, LD), 33 shelf-feet.
Non-fiction, 41 shelf-feet.
Comic books, 75 shelf-feet.
Fiction, 101 shelf-feet.