Of course, I'd be stuck on the bus without anything to read. At least I can write, right?

Once advantage of staying home for Christmas is that I've had time to do a bit of reading. I finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom around 30 minutes into the year, after a memorable New Year's trying to get Sophie to stop crying and back to sleep. I don't feel like writing a big review at the moment, but I don't know if I can call it any better then just okay. It had some interesting points (that's half of wnat I read scifi for), but it didn't really excite me. I really like the stuff that he's co-written with Charlie Stross, but I like pretty much everything of Stross's that I've read. His Singularity Sky is next on my list.

Before I got to Down and Out, I re-read Lucifer's Hammer for the fourth or fifth time. If you aren't familiar with it, it's from 1975 or so and tells the story of a major civilization-destroying comet strike. It shows its age at times--the social issues that characters worry about are very 1970s, and the approach to sex is very 70's-scifi-author, but the story just feels right, and I'm continually drawn back into reading it. The sign of a good book, I guess :-). Its semi-sibling, Footfall is nearly as good--instead of a comet, Footfall has aliens, but it's a fun read. Between the two books, movies like Independence Day and Bruce-Willis-and-the-Physics-Defying-Asteroid are really disappointing.

Oh yeah, one other thing to recommend Footfall: they nuke my home town in the end. Things like that always make me happy.