[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by BelleZora

Murder and mayhem are fine in books, but environmental irresponsibility is seriously upsetting.

Well, they say familiarity does breed contempt. And while most of us (hopefully!) are very unlikely to encounter murder and mayhem up close and personal in real life, we've all seen those people stub out their cigarettes right onto the street for the pigeons to eat, so it's like it matters more because we can visualize it happening in our vicinity so easily.

Admittedly, downtown Vancouver is supposed to be getting slightly better in that respect, with little recyling bins just for cigarettes prominently placed on many streets, which apparently, people actually use from time to time, even if it means the pigeons have to find a more varied diet now.

Finished my first read of the year, and the first thing read on my new-ish hand-me-down BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, which was kind of a holiday gift, although the holiday in question was more around Thanksgiving (version Canadienne) and it wasn't intentionally a gift since I was going to pay my dad for it but he said he'd gotten it pretty cheap from his tai chi buddy who hadn't used it in ages. So I ended up sideloading an old converted version of the Kindle for Android app, which, as it turns out is the last one which can actually sign in and retrieve books and not crash upon opening and doesn't support the newer formats, so no freebie Kindle comics-reading for me, alas, but otherwise it mostly seemed to work okay.

Anyway, in lieu of my usual festive winter re-read of Terry Pratchett's The Hogfather, which I didn't have the time or inclination to dig the French translation I've been meaning to try out of the box where I'm pretty sure I put its paperback, Overtime by Charles Stross, the Xmas office party novella in his The Laundry Files series of Lovecraftian bureaucracy urban fantasy spy thrillers, got to be my primary seasonal holiday re-read*.

This was the one which got me hooked on the series when it showed up in the Hugo Voter Packet (and can still be read online for free over @ Tor.com, as well as having been given away as a standalone e-book freebie several years ago and also collected in one of those Best of Tor.com freebie anthologies), because I happen to own a plush Santa Cthulhu which I'm very fond of (or maybe my soul's just telling me that because it's gibbering in fear of being devoured by tentacles) which came with a tag that said "bringing you Xmas despair!", and this story was the perfect fit for that mix of horror made humorous.

Once again, it was a highly enjoyable adventure which showcases the practical side of "those who fight monsters" in the comfortably numbing bureaucracy of the civil service, with a bit of "when you gaze into the abyss" leading up to projected future events in the series novels proper When The Stars Are Right.

Highly recommended as a nifty read which neatly encapsulates the goals and feel of the Laundry series, while also being enjoyable standalone in its own right.

* This actually happened a little by default, because I only had time to load up a few titles before heading for my bus, and the K4A(B) app had a nasty tendency to interpret my finger swipes attempting to navigate the archive as "yes, download and open this random freebie and reposition the archive list back at the alphabetical top when you try to cancel and navigate back to pick again", and it was the most likeable of the dozen titles I actually did get loaded up before spending the next few hours on public transit.

But I did get started in on a good chunk of Canadian mystery writer Peter Robinson's Aftermath, somewhere in his UK-set Inspector Banks series, which was a freebie a couple of years ago. Not sure if I'll keep on with it at the moment, as it is rather psycho-sexual serial-killer gory in the plotline and I don't think I'm in the mood for that, but it's interesting enough so far that I'll likely finish it sometime later.