Ha, got my hands on the British edition of Neal Stephenson's new book, The Confusion. I don't think it even comes out yet in the States until next week. In your face, suckas! I might have to wait until October to see Hellboy but at least I get my Stephenson a week early. And the British publisher was even cool enough to release the trade paperback at the same time as the hardcover again (because, well, hardcovers are pure, undiluted evil).

(The whole paperback thing is confusing though. With his previous book, bookstore A only had the hardcover and couldn't find the paperback anywhere in their computer system, while bookstore B had the paperback right away. This time, bookstore B thinks the paperback won't be out until the summer while bookstore A only has the paperback. Amazon.co.uk only lists the hardcover. By the way, that picture of the cover there doesn't do any justice at all to the freaky ass shade of green they chose for it)

Now all I have to do is finish Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead first. That has to be one of the least engaging books I've ever read. Its gritty style and flawed characters were probably pretty cool when it came out right after WWII, when everybody was still high on John Wayne's war movies but it's been done to death by now.

In other news, Els and I started writing our thesis. We need to have somewhere between 120 and 150 pages done by May 12th. We wrote a few pages and mailed them to Pieter and Olivier so they can judge whether our styles are impersonal and academic enough without getting boring. And whether we broke any of the five dozen or so unwritten rules that seem to exist about thesis writing.