Ok, so in my earlier post about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell I alluded to a "surprise book" I wanted to talk about it. And then in authentic HiddenJester style I got all busy and never followed up. Except I did! Follow up! Right Here! (and stole some stylings from Mimi Smartypants apparently. I've been doing to much archive reading when I should be doing my own writing) So yeah, the book in question is So Yesterday by Scott Westerfield. Embarrassingly, I can't quite explain why I have this book. At some point I read a description of it on a blog and thought the book sounded very cool and dropped it onto my Amazon wishlist. I later decided I didn't like the source blog and dropped it from my reading list. Fast forward several months and I needed one more item to make an order be $25 and have free shipping. So I tossed this book in. The book sat on my nightstand for several months and only got busted out over the Christmas break. Which is a shame because it's my favorite find in recent months. But at this point I don't remember the source of the recommendation, or even much about why I dropped it. I think that blog got all heavy political, you know how that was last summer. So sorry mystery blog author who I forget! You should get a shout-out but I'm a slacker. If you liked the coolhunting aspects of Pattern Recognition, you'll enjoy this book. The protagonist is a young coolhunter who spends a lot of time spotting trends in footwear and advising shoe companies on their advertising. He's not what he calls an "Innovator" - he doesn't create the trends. He watches out for Innovators and pumps the trends back to the big marketing machines. There's a lot of sly commenting on our consumerist culture afoot. He ends up bringing an Innovator into his coolhunting world and then things get . . . complicated in a way I can't explain without spoilers. It's a quick read (his books seem to be classified as "young adult" although I'd say it's a slightly higher reading level than Harry Potter.) and I read it pretty much in one setting. I recommended it strongly to Karin and she seemed to really like it. I had no real preconceptions about this before reading it, but I really quite enjoyed it. I recommend it highly.

So now that I'm home all day I no longer have work Magic: The Gathering or DS play or whatever to fill my lunchtime. This week I've been catching up on Battlestar Galactica episodes, and now I'm completely current on it. (I'm still behind a couple of Enterprises.) So minus points for social interaction but a big plus on my sci-fi consumption scale. (shrug) And I have to say I was pretty indifferent to the BG mini-series but the show kicks major ass. It's dramatic, it doesn't wrap everything into a neat package for every episode, and truth to tell it's being somewhat politically subversive in our current times. It's only had what . . . five episodes so far? But it has tackled issues of dealing with terrorists, of witch hunts, of civilian vs. military control. SIlly minor point that really sold me on it? (minor spoiler alert) For two episodes after the one where Apollo fought the terrorist he had a slowly healing scratch on his face. It's a minor point, and I actually thought at one point "What's wrong with his face?" before realizing it was from a prior episode. I'd contend that's a major problem with modern Trek - the push for syndicated content means there is very little story that carries episode to episode. This season starts those three episode arcs - but you could swap around the order of those arcs with very little impact. Think about it - take a season one episode of Enterprise and compare it with tomorrow's episode. What has actually CHANGED between the two? - T'Pol no longer works for the Vulcans - Enterprise now has marines on board - Ummmmmm . . . the teleporter works better? Battlestar Galactica has had more development in four EPISODES than Enterprise managed in four SEASONS. A few episodes ago I would have said that BG is the best sci-fi currently on TV. I'd actually say right now it's one of the best SHOWS on television, bar none.