Leaving on a Jet Plane (and Books)

We're off to Ottawa! Will be sleeping in our own beds tonight :)

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Books read in December:

• Me: no more progress on Aztec or Poland, as I left both at home and haven't been reading much anyway, but I did read The Davinci Code.
  
  OMG.
  
  Opus Dei and Vatican politics and Rosicrucians and Knights Templar and the Louvre and Davinci and Cryptography and Public Key and Paris and architecture and the Holy Grail and the Sacred Feminine and Isis and Venus and Sub-Rosa and Romans and Hebrews and Kabbalah and cathedrals and the Priory of Sion and conspiracy theory and Latin and iambic pentameter and sex rites and Sangreal and Mary Magdalene and codexes and papyrus and Constantine and alternate gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls and the Golden Ratio and Disney movies and freemasons and Grand Masters and Nicholas Flamel and Swiss banks and Francois Mitterand and the Biblioteca Atronomica and royal lines and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
  
  Did I miss anything? Like, about half the topics that came up in the book?
  
  What a total mind-trip. So cool. It's like a fluffy and dumbed down accessible version of Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. I'll be re-reading it soon, and will definitely rent the movie, though I have no idea how they could possibly do justice to the intricate and glorious insanity of the book.
  
  Am now reading Whiteout, by Ken Follett. It's... the plot is really good, and the characters interesting, but I don't think I've read more stilted sentences and unpleasant choppiness since that time when I got a challenge to re-write a story of mine using only 10-word sentences.
  
  Which is really really hard to do, by the way. And it really messes up the flow of the narrative. Because variable sentence length matters quite a bit, you know. You really don't know just how much till it's gone. Single length sentences are awkward to read and grate unpleasantly. It's really boring as hell to write, too, I find. If you don't believe me, count lengths in this paragraph. All sentences are all exactly ten words long, I swear. Now ask yourself if you had fun reading the paragraph.
  
  Anyway. I find it hard to believe it's written by the same guy who wrote The Pillars of the Earth, one of my very favourite novels ever.
  
  
• Chris: Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, by George Monbiot, which I gave him as a Christmas present since he's been getting more and more environmentallish in the last few months.
  
  I'll have to read it, and check up on many/most of the research. What I've been hearing from Chris is... disturbing, to say the least.
  
  
• Daniel: Got about halfway through Half-Blood Prince during the flight to Calgary, then got a bunch of books for Christmas (among them the Bionicle Encyclopedia, Justin's present to him and Wizardology and Dungeon Master For Dummies), so Half-Blood Prince got derailed.
  
  I love having reading kids :)
  
  
• Justin: SpongeBob, unfortunately. I loathe SpongeBob. And yet all of us are willingly supporting his unfortunate addiction by giving him SpongeBob gifts! Daniel gave him a Spongebob Squarepants: Crime and Funishment graphic novel, and we helped him buy himself a Spongebob Squarepants Phonics set with the Chapters gift certificate he got from his grandparents. He's read part of the way through the first book, featuring "short a."
  
  ::sigh:: At least he's learning.
  
  
• Chris and the boys: Chris finally finished reading Chamber of Secrets to them at bedtime. Will probably start on Prisoner of Azkaban when we're back in Ottawa. Now Chamber of Secrets took... ::looking up Calendar:: at least 4 months to read, so I'm estimating a bit longer than that for Prisoner. We'll see.