The Playwright Across the Street has gone the Front Lawn Library one better with a Little Free Library-- a box on a post, with a glass-fronted door, that's an exchange library: give a book, take a book. It's weather-resistant and thus a good idea in this weather-benighted town (like yesterday, with its night-long downpour and thunderstorm.) Discovered another Little Free Library last week on the other side of the block. (Japan has influenced me to the extent that I now register blocks as units of four sides, even as I still naturally think in terms of streets with two sides.) The Manning box had a Sookie Stackhouse err whatever they are: too small-town to be urban fantasy but with the same cast of vampires and werewolves and whatever. There are three UF writers I was determined to steer clear of- Jim Butcher, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Harris; but Harris is the one I knew least ill of, so I nabbed the copy to see what she was like. And started reading it during that prolonged thunderstorm last night when I couldn't be online.
She's more than respectable. I shall read others in this series, while I try to figure out why Sookie's man-problem-beset heroine bothers me so much less than all the other man-problem-beset UF heroines. Not as dumb as the others is a part of it, certainly, and the men being (on the basis of half a book) warts and all guyz, not pure Id-figures, is another. Possibly it's just a matter of a modicum of style and a congenial voice. I hadn't realized my mammogram was booked for the same day as the massive Run/ Walk/ Whatever Against Cancer day, but getting into Princess Margaret Hospital through the wall of pink and horns and noise-makers was something of a feat. As ever on a Saturday, the place was empty and I was out in fifteen minutes, with the added plus that my scans were so elegantly crisp and clear that the nice young fresh-from-Taiwan technician asked if they could be used to apply for American College of Radiology Accreditation. "Thank you for having such nice breasts," she said sweetly, a line I have never heard before and certainly never expected to hear now.
