(no subject)

[niko]

Got home yesterday from my annual vacation in Michigan.  Awesome time, overall.  The forced abstincence from "the real world" always helps me reboot a bit and get a little more perspective on my life.  Going back to work will be hard, but overall, it's worth it.  Only bummer is that I somehow caught a cold and am now heading back to work with my head feeling like it's stuffed with wool in addition to the usual end-of-vacation blahs.

Probably the coolest thing this year was a statue I bought that is an actual piece of "real" art.  The statue is a "La Catrina" figure from a Mexican artist, Juan Torres.  It's very "Day of the Dead"-ish and wouldn't normally be my thing, but something about the level of detail and just gorgeousness of the figure was just so striking - a bit macabre, but beautiful too.  I'll have to take some pics. 

Of the books I read, the most notable is:  The Scar (China Mieville).
Mieville is one of those authors like GRRM that I resisted reading at first just because everyone else seemed to be so ga-ga over his work that my contrariness-gene kicked in.  Much to my chagrin, The Scar was a *great* book!  My only gripe is that I didn't read Perdido Street Station first.  I gather that Scar isn't a direct sequel, but there's enough overview of events in the book to make me feel a little like I'm covering old ground.  I bought Perdido right away, but I think I'll let it sit on the TBR shelf for a little while.

Anyway, the book is just great.  Great imagery, even making me *enjoy* descriptions of some really gross, stomach-turning stuff.  There's a scene of pirates taking over a vessel from a point of view of an observer watching from a hiding place that was just amazing with how engrossing and *visual* it all was.