Bluejack made me laugh very hard with this entry. Thank you, Blunt. I needed that. Wishing you much success in achieving a successful resolution.

I started listening to Dorothy Dunnett's The Game of Kings this morning while exercising. It's not quite an ideal audiobook experience: there are many names to keep track of, and people are often witty with that kind of convoluted 16th century Scots wit that is easier to parse on the printed page than by ear while huffing on a stationary bike. But it's certainly entertaining enough. I am liking it better than the one book I read from Dunnett's Niccolo series, in which so many of the characters were so inscrutably clever that I couldn't figure out what they supposed to be up to.

It's really hard to sympathize with a character when you can't even figure out what they want, you know. But so far, this is not a problem in The Game of Kings.

My non-audio reading of late has been Wilderness Empire, a history covering roughly the period of what we call the French and Indian War. (I wonder what the French and the Indians called it?) It's a bit of an odd book: it tells the story in a rather novelistic fashion, with dialogue supplied from eye-witness accounts and written journals and so forth -- an interior monologue supplied from the same sources. It makes for a very readable account that manages to incorporate a lot of primary source material. The author is not much of a novelist however: he tends to lean heavily on stock descriptive phrases.

One thing the book makes clear is that the Iroquois were pretty savvy politicians. They generally had a good sense of when the English and French colonial governments were lying to them, and were pretty slick diplomats.

The other interesting thing is that the young George Washington comes off as a bit of dope. Though I suppose that any energetic and ambitious commander without much actual military experience under his belt might have made the same mistakes.

Anyway, I seem to be in a non-fictiony kind of mood lately, so I went to the library yesterday and came back with a motley haul of non-fiction:

• Best American Science Writing, 2001. The 2000 volume was pretty cool, so I picked up this one.


• The Musket and The Cross. French and English settlement in the New World in the period just prior to that covered by Wilderness Empire.


• The Poet and the King. A book about Jean de la Fontaine and Louis XIV. I guess I'm in a 17th century kinda mood.


• Our Posthuman Future by Francis Fukuyama. I'm sort of expecting this one to be lame, because so very many books about "this is the kind of world current developments in science will bring us" are either anti-science scare stores or utopian tracts. But in the end I decided to chance it.


• Kazakhstan. Really I picked up this one for Daniel, who has an ongoing interest in that part of the world. But it looks interesting enough that I might read it.


• How to Succeed as an Independent Consultant. If the current full-time job prospects don't pan out, I'm thinking about putting some serious energy into landing more work doing freelance proposal writing or scientific manuscript preparation. So this one is career research.

Now, whether I'll actually have time to read all these books is another question entirely. But it's terribly hard to exercise restraint at a library: generally, I just keep grabbing things off the shelves until my bag gets heavy enough that I have doubts about being able to haul it home.

Well, okay, it's time for me to tackle a few pesky little tasks on my to do list (like sending off a bill for the freelance job I did so I can actually get paid), and then it's writing and reading time.