Reading

In the last couple of days, I've finished In the Bleak Midwinter, Jurgen, and Brief Lives. The next fiction on the list is John Barnes' A Million Open Doors.

I am told that one of the pleasures of reading in the mystery genre is the intellectual one of picking up on the author's clues and working out what is going on before The Great Reveal. Alas, this pleasure is one I rarely achieve. There have been exactly two occasions on which I've been able to figure things out ahead of time - both, oddly, science-fictional mysteries - and in both cases my pride was rather dashed, later, by reviews which sniffed that the secret was telegraphed early on. Thus, in evaluating a mystery, I must fall back on such mundanities as plot, characterization, and dialog. I am pleased to report that Julia Spencer-Fleming's In the Bleak Midwinter scores well in these respects. (I leave to others to say whether it also succeeds as an intellectual puzzle.)

( In the Bleak Midwinter )

Clocks

I am a clock person. I want some sort of chronometer within easy sight at almost all times. I have battery-driven clocks in the dining room, the living room, the computer room, and my bedroom. I also have a clock radio by my bed, and eight or so electronic devices with built-in clocks. Needless to say, this causes a bit of a headache at the time of transition to and from Daylight Time, although some of the electronic devices handle it automatically.

The problem with battery-driven clocks is, of course, that batteries run down. The various clocks are all at different points in their batteries' life-cycles, so it's easy to detect when one needs changing. The dining-room clock began running slow a few days back, so I got a new AA battery out and changed it.

Now it's running fast - very fast. Now what do I do? I can ignore it - the living-room clock is almost as easily visible from the kitchen - but there's something unesthetic about that solution. Or I could buy a new clock, but that offends my sense of thrift (mutant and stunted though it is).

Pfui.