So I'm cool

- I'm continuing to enjoy the purple hair. Multiple people at work have admiringly exclaimed how cool I am, which makes the high schooler in me want to keel over laughing. It's actually really entertaining because it's subtle enough people don't usually notice at first. They get three or four sentences into a conversation and then trail off, stare for a second, and then exclaim "Oh my god, is your hair <i>purple</i>? That's so awesome!"

- This week's been insane. We're going on a cruise to Bermuda. It seemed like a good idea at time. (It's still a good idea, in isolation.) The problem is that after this was booked, this became perhaps the worst possible week of possibly the entire year to be away from work. Ah well. But it means I've been putting in serious overtime trying to set everything up so my team doesn't die in my absence. Apparently when I declared on Monday I would have everything set up before I left, my boss thought I was exaggerating. She admitted today that, no, I really did get it all ready. (I've got something like seven blog posts prescheduled for the next two weeks, so I don't have to worry about them when I get back, just for starters.)

- The freeze didn't kill my dahlias after all, or at least not all of them. Yay! Looks like 4 of them are coming up. The columbine appear to have failed to germinate, though.

- Vacation. Vacation vacation vacation.

End of April books

#36: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. 3.5. This is a dazzling work of science fiction, but it kind of left me cold. The set pieces are amazing. Moss-covered temples made entirely of crystal. Horrifying end-of-the-world cults. An ocean ring suspended in space by centripetal force. A death-based poker game only played  in the face of catastrophe. A dead world maintained as a mausoleum. The ideas are really, really cool. But I never really engaged with the characters. The protagonist (hero is too strong a word) has motives that are murky even to him--he starts on a course of action and sees it through despite ludicrous cost mostly because he's stubborn. And he stumbles from set piece to set piece without any real plot. The obstacles don't actually have anything to do with the goal, they just happen to be in the way. He doesn't learn or grow or change as a result. The protagonist is a shape-shifter, but only uses the ability once, really. It feels more like a loosely connected series of short stories about the misadventures of this one guy, in which he gets into a predicament and then gets out of it, never having really learned or gained anything in the process. It's not a bad book, by any means, and the ideas really are extremely cool. But I don't feel that strong a need to read the rest.

#37: The History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage. 3. Your run-of-the-mill gimmicky nonfiction. This one tries organize world history through the lens of beer/wine/spirits/coffee/tea/soda. It drags here and there, but does have some fun facts I hadn't heard before. Kind of fun, kind of forgettable. Feels like virtue for being true, but doesn't leave a great deal of understanding in its wake.

#38: Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic by James. H. Johnson. 4. I'm kind of torn on this one. Johnson has a really fascinating theory on Venetians' relationship with masks. (Very quickly--we're talking about a city that routinely wore masks for over six months of the year. Like wearing a hat. Wear it to the corner store, wear it to a diplomatic event, wear it to have coffee with friends. Most of Europe took this as a weird combination of licentiousness and secrecy, with the ability to completely reshape the personality on a whim. His argument is that Venetians were actually fairly conservative and had an extremely rigid definition of self, and masks were what enabled them to function as a society without having to fully observe all the forms of ritual propriety that would normally be necessary.) There's a ton of really interesting, deeply researched information here. On the other hand, there isn't as much as he thinks there is. So he goes off on some really weird tangents, and he repeats himself a lot. Also, it's out of print but in demand, and ludicrously expensive even when used. ($85 for a new copy? $30 for an old one?) Still, despite occasionally rolling my eyes, I'm very glad to have read it, so extra stars for you.

#39: Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Elites by Peter Burke. 4. This is not pleasure-reading, unless you have slightly odd pleasures. I read it as research for a project, and it's a dense scholarly work comparing two mercantile republics. Given what it is, it's well-researched and well-written and generally just well done. It's not something to pick up to just read on the train. But if you're actively looking for this information, it's an excellent source.