Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

Crummy day at work yestday, between having an Aspie moment, then getting chewed out by one manager for it -- I'll worry about the damn holidays when we get to them; having an Aspie moment when its less manic does not presuppose that I'll have one later on. I never know when to expect them, and since That Time of the Month is imminent, I'm more likely to have a bad spell than when it It Isn't. At least the other front end manager was a lot more empathetic and got on her case for getting on mine.

But enough of that: I currently have a nice little pile of books I'm reading or have read recently, including:

*"Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville. Just the dedication alone and Neil Gaiman's endorsement sold me on it. Anyone who drew their inspiration from and dedicated their book in memory of Mervyn Peake has a lot going for them. And the Peakean influence shows: the city of Crobuzon could easily exist in the same 'verse as a certain ginormous castle. I would die happy if someone wrote a crossover between the two.

*"The Physick Booke of Deliverance Dane" by Katherine Howe. In some ways, it's rather like "The Historian" only with the Salem Witch Hysteria, but the writing is nowhere as good. I probably shouldn't compare apples to oranges, but while the descriptions are vivid and the history is interesting... the characters seem a bit thin. The fact that the various archivists and professors seem uniformly to have it in for the heroine reeks a little of Sue-age. At least said heroine is somewhat conservative and reticent helps redeem it, since if she was plucky and rebellious, I'd be sending her to a certain Mansion to be reformed...

*"Black Butler" aka Kuroshitsuji by Yana Toboso. I picked this gothic-Victorian manga as a way to tide myself over till the next volume of Yami no Matsuei gets translated and released in the States (a little bird tells me it may be released in February of next year). It's a lot of fun, reminds me quite a bit of Hellsing, only with some mild shounen-ai overtones, and with a dash of YnM -- Sebastian could be Tsuzuki's more competent twin brother, when he isn't reminding me of a kinder, gentler Alucard.

And our roof is being repaired! I got awakened at seven this morning by what sounded like giant woodpeckers hammering on the roof, so I moved to the couch to catch a few extra Z's... only to wake up a few hours later to find the daylight in the room had a blue tinge due to the blue tarps which the roofers had laid down on the lawn and draped from the roof to catch the busted shingles they were pulling up. Besides getting the roof reshingled, we're also getting rid of the very unnecessary hatch that was in the middle of the roof, which did little more than leak when we had a heavy spell of rain.

I just bought the last five volumes of Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days. Yeah, the manga set in what Carl Horn called "the doujin universe", ie. that little segment of Episode 26. I know, I know, it's somewhat derided by hardcore fans (the "Lutherans" of the fandom, it would seem, to riff from the "Christianity as fandom" animated icon). But for what it is, it's just *cute* and that's what it was intended to be. I have to admit to liking the doujin universe: God knows Shinji could stand to have some semblance of normalcy to balance out the weight that life has tossed onto his skinny little shoulders (And yep, I am a proud Shinji Ikari fan: anyone who calls the poor kid "emo" should try carrying the weight of woes that *he's* got. Seeing your mother disappear during a lab experiment when you were only three, being emotionally abandoned by your father and getting packed off to live with a succession of estranged relatives and teachers, then being goaded by him into piloting a 40 to 200 meter tall cyborg robot that is linked to your mind, *AND* being expected to fight weird looking giant creatures is not going to make you a happy camper. To say nothing of having to share living space with a girl who's so self-centered and aggressive she borders on being a psychotic narcissist. No wonder the kid is screwed up emotionally).

Also trying to come up with a good first name for the Nephillim who's one of the main characters in Part III of "Neon Enoch Evangelion", which is now set about fifteen years post-End of Evangelion. I know his personality very well (and he occasionally likes to peek into my head to see what I'm doing: I told myself I wasn't going to let any Eva-verse characters visit my headspace, especially if they were post-Third Impact, but I guess I can make an exception since he was born after 3I): he's cheerful, friendly, a bit mischievous, a bit of a geek, hyperactive and a definite big eater, which causes his father to quote the line in the Book of Enoch about the Nephillim consuming the plants and the animals, or make references to a Dirac Sea.