New shiny book I'm lusting after...

Just what I need, a new book to lust after - which shows you how frustrated I am with Kavalier and Clay, the fact I went hunting for one.

But this baby looks amazing. Something new. Something completely different from anything else. With a bunch of prickily and interesting characters, which never fails to please me.

Here's the Amazon.com description of it:

Book Description:
Two months since the stars fell...Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

This is Blindsight by Peter Watts, which all the sci-fi writers are going bonkers over.
If the book lives up to that description? I can see why.

It's not being published until October which is a good thing - by then, I may be able to buy it without feeling guilty for breaking my thrifty lifestyle.

(no subject)

Playing online while watching tv again...at the moment a "Grey's Anatomy" re-run. Grey's is my comfort show.

I have all sorts of cultural things that comfort me and to be honest they are more satisfying to rely on than well, food and alcohol, although I do that too - more than I should. In that category *cough*chocolat*cough* comes to mind.

Some comfort books past and present include - the Spenser novels by Robert Parker (who I almost got a chance to see in person, but passed on it - have learned from experience that I prefer not to meet favorite writers and actors in person), Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels - which got me through the period of time around 9/11 (I read her novels like crazy on the trains and idiotically sent a fan letter about it to her site, which I wish I hadn't. Some people have foot in mouth disease, I have email in mouth disease.), Jim Butcher's Dresden series, Charlain Harris' Southern Vampire series, The Harry Potter novels, the PG Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster books, the Lymond Chronicles, and Elizabeth Peter's "Vicky Bliss" mysteries are all examples of some of my comfort reads. Also the X-men comic books. These characters speak to me, their situations, their pain, their struggle. I think the reason I adore the X-men is it is a series of comic books about characters who are misunderstood, exiled, and considered outcasts. The books are about prejudice, discrimination, intolerance, and the struggle against such things. They are about keeping one's dignity and integrity in the face of intolerance and in front of bullies. They are also about the feeling of being cast-out, different. The books I've listed above all have that in common - that idea of being uncomfortable in one's skin. Of feeling like an outsider. Of struggling to fit in. Of being different. Each of the leads is someone who is operating outside societal structure, who likes structure, but at the same time questions it, can't quite handle authority yet desires authority.
In short - the characters speak to me. Also each of the books I've listed above have very strong no-nonsense women in them - women who are not damsels, yet still feminine. Who can be the hero in their own right.

Comfort reads I define as books that do not require much thought. They don't make you bleed. They don't hurt. They won't change your mind or flip you upside down. Although that can happen. They aren't listed as "great literature" and more often than not, someone out there will tease or give you a disapproving nod for choosing to read them. They aren't in short on that academic reading list you'd get from your college professor. These are books you can more or less just emotionally fall into. The world surrounds you. You love the characters. And you do not, I repeat, do not want to come up for air. You just want to stay in this character's world for as long as possible. Curl up in it in front of a hot fire, with a mug of hot coco in your hand, while you just fall into the words. More often than not it is not the writing that makes me feel this way but the characters the writer has created, their inter-relationships, dialogue, etc.

Comfort tv shows are similar.

It's sort of like a scrumptuous dessert for the brain. Except you can eat it again and again without gaining weight or getting sick.

Anywho here's a meme:

What are your comfort reads?

Why?