Away.

Tomorrow, I am going down to my Granny's house with my family.
This is good.
However, Matt can't get the time off work, and can't make it down until about 11pm on Wednesday.
This is bad.

I feel (not helped by my general downness) that I'm rather a failure as a modern, autonomous woman, being as I'm already sad about spending that long without him. My love, my best friend, my buffer of sanity against the madness that my biological family* can (and often does) become.

(*Not meant to be dismissive, I mean the family I was born into, rather than the family I chose - Matt and our pets. Both are family.)

I know that many dedicated couples spend far longer apart than this, and they manage. But I have never spent so much as a night apart from him since we were married, so many years ago (7).

I'm scared.

Really? A month?

First off, I would like to apologise for my hermitatude.
I haven't really been in the mood for online interaction lately (I know, very unlike me).

And, it seems, it has been a month since I last posted on this here blog thing.

So I'm going to talk about the only thing I have right now, that being book reviews. Yup, that's what I've been up to whilst not chatting to all you fine people. Reading. At least a book a day. So, amongst others...

The Abortionist's Daughter by Elisabeth Hyde was an interesting one. Basically, it's mostly written from the viewpoint of the titular character, and is about her mother's murder. I didn't work out whodunnit before the reveal, and the only problem I had with the book was that it rather romanticised the daughter, and the ending was a tad too pat.
I will reread it, though. No question.

Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives by Richard Wiseman and Sex, Gender and Sexuality by Tracie O'Keefe both led to some fascinating conversations at work (seems some of my co-workers have some rather... stereotyped ideas regarding the more obscure facets of gender and sexuality. I am now somewhat known as someone who can explain them. Yay me). I have nothing bad to say about Quirkology, and I was thrilled to see discussion of experiments I was involved with when I used to work for the Edinburgh International Science Festival. As for the other, it was fascinating, and the issue I had was only with the opening chapters, where Dr O'Keefe made some rather sweeping statements.

The Better Mousetrap is the latest of Tom Holt's tangled, hilarious and surreal books. As ever, I loved it. 'nuff said. Go buy a Tom Holt book. It's highly unlikely you'll regret it.

Hideous Progeny: A Frankenstein Anthology. Oh. Oh, so creepy. Oh, so good. Hints of The Illustrated Man, my favourite book in the world. All the stories contained therein are about what would have happened if Victor Frankenstein had been successful in his exploits. Again, oh, so good.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is, admittedly, a novel about Dracula. However, and this is important, at least to me, it is a vampire novel in which Dracula 1) doesn't turn up until 650ish pages in, and 2) is about Dracula the scholar, not the killer. Utterly absorbing, and finely detailed.

How To Survive a Horror Movie by Seth Grahame-Smith is a lovely find for one such as myself, who adores both books and horror movies. It's a very funny read - check out the back cover at the link for an example - and it lovingly lampoons every aspect of our generic horror films. Foreword by Wes Craven.

The Many Hands by Dale Smith is a Doctor Who and Martha book set in Edinburgh. As all of the DW books, it's hardly a challenging read, but fun nonetheless.

And I've been rereading several others, including Yes Man and The Truth.