Except for my ridiculously clever post (ha ha), I wrote nothing yesterday. I went into town and ran several errands, which included hours and hours in the chair at Sculpt getting a cool purple thing done to my bangs and a stripe of hair. Pictures are forthcoming. I was way overcharged, but my blood sugar was dangerously low by the time it was done so I didn’t realize it until I left. Damn those guys!
I also bought three classic thrillers for my next project:
Silence of the Lambs
Mystic River
The Day of the Jackal
I spent so long at Sculpt that I started reading Harris’ Lambs. It’s fucking great! I loved the film and there’s no disappointment so far in reading the book. I’m 137 pages in. I’ve noticed that, for the film, they took a lot straight from the book, including most of the brilliant dialogue. I just wished I had anticipated the long hair appointment. I would have brought The Firm and finished it. The Firm is way better than either of the Patterson books, with a terrific amount of suspense, but it’s still very sparse in terms of prose and character. I can’t tell any of the bad guys apart from their dialogue — or even tell the FBI agents from the mob guys, for that matter — except one bad guy has “sinister black eyes” and one of the FBI agents wears stupid clothes when undercover that would make him stand out like a sore thumb. I do appreciate the structure of the book. It’s a great deal like Out of Body, so that’s helpful and reassuring. By Patterson’s definition, someone has to die practically every third damned chapter to be a thriller.
Harris is entirely different, though. He creates such amazing characters. Yeah, yeah — I heard the next two books sucked. Whatever. I’m not reading them, anyway.
Laundry a la The Middle Ages today, then packing. Maybe some writing this afternoon.
As for other reading, I’ve gotten to the section in The God Delusion where Dawkins supposedly disproves the supernatural. The rest of the book has been effective and informative, if not snide in its quest to disprove the existence of God. But this section is such weak sauce I just want to slap him. His argument amounts to “Well, it must be a hallucination because, like, there are things called optical illusions and the brain is flaky. Ha ha! I win! I’m so smart!” He opines that people who have these experiences are reluctant to share them with “people like him” who know all these mighty secrets of the brain. No, Mr. Dawkins, we don’t share things with people like you because you’re a close-minded ass who is so convinced of his own smartness that we don’t bother. Even those of us with experiences that meet Hume’s definition would rather recite experiences at length knee-deep in pig shit and mud to hungry, violent sows than recite them to you. The phrase “pearls cast before swine” comes to mind, and frankly, the swine win.
