And a Happy Monday to you

So I've got my coffee, I've got my indictment bingo scorecard, I've got a to-do list as long as my arm. . . I predict a busy, busy day peppered with brief interruptions for triumphant cackling.

The family went to Stratford for the weekend, saw Into the Woods, met Terry and Roy, ate well, played cards, shopped, etc. etc. There's something about family vacations that make me want to stick my nose in a book for three days straight. Wait, that sounds bad. No, seriously, my family doesn't make me want to flee into the relative safety of fiction. Really. Oh, screw it. The point I'm wanting to make is: Since Friday at five p.m., I've read Dan Savage's The Commitment and Ian Rankin's first Inspector Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses. I highly recommend both.

First of all, I love everything Dan Savage writes, and I make a beeline each Wednesday to his column in the Metro Times. Even before the freaky personals! I read The Kid last year, and loved it, and I've loved Savage's essays on gay marriage (and marriage in general) in Salon, most of came from The Commitment. Anyway, if you have any thoughts on gay marriage or marriage in general, really, I recommend it.

I've read a lot of reviews of Ian Rankin, all of them glowingly positive about his Inspector Rebus series. It's a mystery series set in Edinburgh, with the requisite complicated and haunted main character. I've gone through a couple of "detective series" phases, most notably Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series. I think it's good to have a detective series in your back pocket. It means that there's always a book to turn to when nothing else in Border's is doing it for you, and it means that you've always got one light and crunchy time-killing book. Rankin and Rebus seem to fit the bill, so you'll be seeing more of those in the big purple bag in the future.

Speaking of light and crunchy, I also picked up a copy of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem while I was there. . . yeah, not so much with the fluff there, huh? Anyway, it's something I've been meaning to read and something one ought to read, so it's up next. Penguin has a series called "Great Ideas" that they sell in the UK and Canada. I'd love to shell out the dough for the entire set--well, it's two sets, now, and of course I lust after both--but sadly that's not an option, so I've been buying one or two copies each time I go to Stratford. So far I've picked up Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Augustine's Confessions of a Sinner (speaking of books one ought to read), and George Orwell's Why I Write from the first series, and now Eichmann.

Thus endeth the book report for Monday, October 24th. Hopefully later today I will have up that cast list for the all Hip-Hop production of Guys and Dolls that I mentioned last week. Sparty and ROC helped me out with that, and frankly I think we are brilliant.