I'm still working on A Dance With Dragons. After four or five weeks I am only about 750 pages in or so. It's not that I don't like it, it's that I like to savor things and also we keep getting all these great books from the library that have to be read within a certain amount of time. Such as:

Manhood For Amateurs, Michael Chabon: pretty much brilliant, just a bunch of loosely connected essays about his life, and being a dad, and being a man, and being a geek. I wonder why I related so much. There was even one essay that opened with his great love for Big Barda, a superheroine I had never heard of till I met her at the Calgary Con and then saw her all over the place.

Then I read two books by Sesame Street Muppeteers- Carrol Spinney who plays Big Bird and Kevin Clash who performs Elmo. I learned about them from two different podcasts, so that was weird, sorta like running into Big Barda everywhere 35 years after her brief moment in the sun. Great books, especially the Elmo one, actually. Kind of autobiographical but also made me realize how important Sesame Street is and so I have Pallas watching much more Youtubeos of Elmo. Him and India Arie doing the ABCs is pretty good. Me: India is pretty, eh?

Pallas: Yeah! Mommy, India is pretty!

Michelle: Who else is pretty?

Pallas: Me!

Silver Surfer: Requiem is one of the best comics stuffs I've read lately. Especially since I had no idea it was about what it was about. I really like J. Michael Straczynski's stuff.

The best book I've read lately is Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. Michelle found it in a bookstore one time and showed it to me, but even though I'm a runner I kind of put it back on the shelf, thinking that reading about running sounds like even less fun than actually running. Luckily she read it and kept reading me all these astonishing highlights that I had to give it a try. It's awesome the way books like Into Thin Air and Klondike are awesome, full of amazing feats and real-life characters that would seem too over the top if you put them in a novel. I'm not quite done it, so every few minutes I turn to Michelle and say I'm gonna throw away my shoes and go barefoot, and she keeps telling me to finish the book before I go entering any ultramarathons. Today was actually a run day for me but due to inexplicable soreness on the side of my body I fell on when I crashed my bike, I decided not to.