Feckoff.net

Its still really hot here but I’m getting used to it. Its nice to not have to worry about getting pissed on every time you want to go and do something outdoors. Hot and sunny climate ftw. I’ve booked myself a flight to Las Vegas ($300 return from Lubbock) and accommodation in the MGM Grand ($250 for 3 nights, sharing a room and splitting the bill \o/) during September. Really looking forward to it. I’ve been working hard since I got here, some downtime will be nice. Also, I’ll be reclaiming that Irish bank holiday I got screwed out of by being over here in the form of Labor Day in early September

I’m was almost tempted to buy an Amazon Kindle, even though its wireless functions will be utterly useless outside of the US, until I discovered that they won’t even sell ebooks for it unless you’ve got a US billing address on your card. I’ll get some kind of ebook reader though, and this is due to the rapidly growing stockpile of books I’m building here. I’d like to bring them all home when the time comes but I don’t think I’ll have the room in my luggage. Ebooks would solve that problem. I tried using an ebook reader on my iPhone, but that sucks. I can’t read lots of text for long periods on that small screen, plus the battery life is not sufficient.

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I read books. A lot. I have two shelves in my room that are stacked high and starting to bend a bit in the middle under the weight. Its a mystery to me why I haven’t blogged about them until now, so here goes. Most of what I read is fiction – crime thrillers and the like. Stuff that’s likely to be frowned upon and called airport novels by literature snobs. Here’s what I’ve been spending most of my reading time on over the last year:

• Anything Everything by Lee Child. His Jack Reacher novels are proper page-turners. I only stumbled upon his stuff this summer in a bargain bookshop, and now I’m working my way through everything he’s written. For a Briton he sure writes a great American novel!
• Nelson Demille’s “Wild Fire”. Terrorists and mutually assured destruction. Fun! I’ve read pretty much all of Demille’s books over the last couple of years and eagerly await his next one some time next year.
• Everything from Michael Connelly. His books are like crack. I’ve read every last one of them (eh, not all in 2007) and have always been left wanting more.
• A bunch of Clive Cussler books. I’m not fond of the nautical setting of most of them and I find a lot of the characters to be two-dimensional and ridiculously perfect but the adventures are compelling and enjoyable, and that makes the rest forgivable.

And now some non-fiction brain food: I picked up a box-set of Stephen E. Ambrose’s World War II books last summer but didn’t get around to reading them until this year. I found them a very easy and interesting read. If you have any interest in WWII, I highly recommend them. For those who don’t know, Ambrose is the man who wrote Band of Brothers, the book that spawned the critically acclaimed TV series of the same name. Cracking stuff. Sadly, he died of lung cancer shortly after the series aired.

I also picked up comedian/activist Mark Thomas’s “As used on the famous Nelson Mandela”, an investigation into the global arms trade which looks quite interesting. Its in my queue to be read in the near future.

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