reading wednesday

• What are you reading?

Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier, still.
Fullmetal Alchemist, Volume 2, by Hiromu Arakawa.


• What did you recently finish reading?

The Next Best Thing, by Jennifer Weiner. I was pleasantly surprised that this book contains neither a fat girl who becomes attractive by losing a lot of weight after heartbreak nor an unplanned pregnancy that turns into a Happily Ever After family. However, it contains Romance Miscommunication. She spends two-thirds of the book silently pining for him. Then he initiates kissing, tells her that he has been pining for her, tells her that she is beautiful. They have sex. She has facial scars, so she decides it must be a pity fuck, and:

"Fine! Great! Everything's fine!" Even as I was speaking, and trying to ignore the look of hurt and surprise on his face, I was coming up with a plan. I would pretend that this was a casual encounter, a fling, a one-time-only event. I would pretend that I was a girl who had casual encounters and flings. I wouldn't tell him how I really felt, or how wonderful it had been, there in the water, the slow liquid lapping of his tongue, his hands strong against my skin. Heaven. It had been heaven. And, I realized, with my heart wrenching, it would be a heaven I'd never experience again.

Other than that, it's about working your way up to getting your sitcom produced, and then watching all its character and integrity get erased as various people with more power tweak it toward their idea of marketable. I think Doris Egan wrote a post about that.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

I had better get to at least one of my book groups' next books:
The Player of Games, by Iain Banks,
Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey,
Still Alice, by Lisa Genova.