What I Read over vacation

Halting State - didn't enjoy it as much as Stross' last book I read, Glasshouse, but the combination future fic/hard sci-fi/police drama/caper was entertaining and deft. Excellent airplane read.

Read the next few Robert Parker/Spenser books - Ceremony, Valediction and The Widening Gyre. All were excellent/recommended, but of the three I enjoyed The Widening Gyre most, simply because it resonated with some stuff in my own life. Ostensibly about blackmail and politics [which, published in 1983, it's remarkably prescient on the influence of the religious right and religiousity in politics] but really, fundamentally, a treatise on relationships in the guise of a private eye novel. At least for me, anyways. Particularly of long-distance relationships, which insightfully and synchronistically applies to my current conditions. Cutting very close to home in terms of assumptions, autonomy, expectations, romance... and, well, everything my life seems to be, these days.

To wit:

"But missing you is a price I have to pay in order to become completely me. At least for a while. And goddamn it, it's a price I am glad to pay. I sort of expected you'd understand better."
"I kind of hoped I would too," I said.

...

"You still can't get outside your own view. You can't understand someone without a goddamned code. You don't see that for millions of people, male and female, the workplace is the code."
I shook my head. "You have committed yourself to everything I've worked my all my life to stay free of.
"I know," Susan said.
"You endorse a way of life I find not only uninviting, I... disapprove of it."
Susan nodded.
"I always assumed," I said, and twiddled with my wineglass as I said it, "I always assumed that someone who found ihis or her identity they way you're finding yours was..." - I spun the stem of the wineglass slowly between my fingers and watched the round bottom circle slowly on the table linen - "shallow."
Susan's gaze on me was steady. "It's a view you tend to impose on anyone close to you. You believe things very strongly. It burdens people."
I nodded. "A person might need to get away from me," I said. "To develop her own views."
I stopped twirling the wineglass and picked it up and drank some wine. Then I took the wine bottle from the bucket and poured some more into Susan's glass and mine.
"The thing is, you're not shallow," I said. "And if you were, it wouldn't matter. Not only would I follow you into hell. I'd follow you into AT&T."

The Wheels of Darkness - An 'Agent Pendergrast Book' picked up for $5 at a drugstore back in the US. I've read a bunch of Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child books. Always entertaining, if ultimately somewhat forgettable. And Pendergrast is a fine Holmes pastiche. With a smattering of pulp heroes and a pinch of Lovecraft.

"Don't think for a minute that I believe I'm better than the rest of the horde. I'm as guilty of the fundamental flaws of bestial man as anyone. And one of those flaws is self interest. I am worth saving because I wish my life to continute - and I'm in a position to do something about it."

"There's a scientific explanation for everything... there are no such things as miracles or magic - only science we haven't yet discovered."

"Lead me into all misfortune. Only by that path can transform the negative into the positive."

Also some older Batman graphic novels - Son of the Demon, Bride of the Demon and Birth of the Demon. Ra's al Ghul is a great villain.