There are many Christmas goodies to discuss, but for now I'll limit myself to one item. I got Lansdale's latest, Captains Outrageous for my birthday, and finished it that night. This is another of the Hap & Leonard books, so there's more funny dialogue and gruesome violence. Which is Christmassy, isn't it?

Brett turned up again, which meant I spent a lot of the book in terror that something bad would happen to her. What I liked about this one was that they come up with a rather elaborate plan to get revenge for one of the aforementioned gruesome bits of violence. Which doesn't work, at which point Hap decides to play sniper and take care of it himself. Since Hap's the (relatively) pacifist one, I expect this is going to have some repercussions in the next book. And just when he's kind of getting his life together, too. Poor guy.

More to come, since I've got a few other books and approximately a jillion DVDs to talk about.

Finished Evidence of Love in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning. And spent a lot of that evening telling a couple of friends about it. Even after skipping ahead to find out exactly what happened, there was still plenty of other things to keep me interested.

Like all the nasty things the cops pulled leading up to the arrest --okay, at one point it occurred to me that I shouldn't really be thinking the cops were awful for screwing with someone responsible for an extremely brutal murder. But that's one of the neat things about the book; you are kind of rooting for the killer. And not in a Ted Bundy, serial-killers-are-cool way, honest. It's not that kind of crime at all.

And then there's the trial, and the small-town defense attorney who'd basically been an ambulance-chaser up till this case, and... yeah, I know. Sounds like a bad movie. I'm surprised it hasn't been made into a bad movie, 'cause it's got all the elements. But the book is fascinating, because you have the time to get to know all the characters, and get their life histories -- which aren't just background filler, since it's very important to know what kind of people they are if you want to understand how the murder happened. So, basically, very cool book.

Yesterday I got my copy of Evidence of Love, by John Bloom and Jim Atkinson. Alibris again. Anyway, it's a "true-crime" story about a murder in Texas. I'm not that into true-crime stuff, although my former roommate was, so I can't compare it to anything similar. It's not a serial killer, tabloid-style crime, though, which is part of why it's interesting. I read about a third of it yesterday, which testifies to the fact that it's fairly engrossing.

Because I have no willpower at all, I had to skip ahead to find out what was going on -- before you even know the details of the murder, you know who did it. The question is why. I couldn't afford to stay up till 3 AM finishing the book, so I had to skip to the chapter that describes what actually happened. But having done that, I'm even more interested in reading about the investigation and the trial, so the arrangement of the story isn't just a device to keep you reading.

And, actually, writing about it is making me even more curious about the investigation, so I think I'm going to go read now.

For some unknown reason, I had bits of Buffy's "Once More, With Feeling" stuck in my head this evening, and the only escape was to watch it again. Let it be said that I still really, really like "Walk Through the Fire." A lot. If you put violins in it, it would be everything I'm a sucker for, all in one song. And I'm not big on musicals. Anyway. I do still have quibbles with the episode, and I'm grumpy that although Tony Head has a lovely voice, I find his song intensely boring, but the point is, wow. Like that song. Gives me chills, even after seeing it repeatedly. Thought I'm starting to think this episode should have come later in the season, because the emotional punch it had has been diminished by the fact that there's been so little follow-up to it.

(Yeah, I know. There's been follow-up, but not with nearly the same resonance.)

I'm just here to gloat about my super-cool new DVD player which arrived today. Yeay! And I got my annual bonus at work today, which will pay for it, and for other goodies too. So I might have done a little bit of jumping around with glee when I got home and saw the package at my door. Oh, but maybe my DVD player ain't right. Because the booklet says that one of the setup menus should give you parental control options. But that option isn't there -- it seems to have been replaced by a menu which lets me pick which region of DVD I want to watch. It's odd.

Yeah, I'm gloating again. Because I can play any region. I can get Farscape DVDs from the UK, where they're a heckuva lot cheaper. And, y'know, I can watch anything else. From anywhere. Gloat, gloat, gloat. Ahhhh.

Anyway, right now I'm letting one of my Farscape DVDs play, so I can think about how in love Ben Browder and Claudia Black are, and feel slightly bad for his poor, tiny wife. And then I'm going to watch Unbreakable, because I bought a cheap copy of it a while ago and I want to see all the extras. Whee!

My Sheckley books have arrived! Yeay! Options and Dimension of Miracles came last week from good old Alibris. Beee-yootiful copies, too. I mean, a bit yellowed, but they're thirty years old. Listen, they had uncreased spines. Well, now they're creased, but you take my meaning. I want to marry Alibris.

So guess what I've been reading? Good guess. I finished Dimension of Miracles. It's the less weird one, although only because Options is very weird indeed. And it's worth looking for if you like Douglas Adams, as parts of it have a very Hitchhiker feel. Particularly the first few chapters, which have a lot of galactic bureaucrats. And gods. And a guy who invented the rectangle. It's fun, and almost entirely plotless! I also love that the cover reads, "Death stalked him through the galaxies." Which isn't inaccurate, but it's not the action-adventure story that makes it sound like.

And now I'm nearly done with Options. I'd have finished it, but I've been cleaning, and buying presents for people, and reading their presents before I wrap them, and so forth. I'm just about at the point when Sheckley intrudes on the story in order to announce that he's giving up on it and starting over with a completely new tone and style. It doesn't last very long though. Options has even less plot that Dimension of Miracles, and isn't quite as funny, but is damn peculiar. I was thinking that lots of postmodern writing is characterized as "experimental," but they aren't usually experiments at all. They're may be declarations, ("This is the future of fiction!" or "Look how clever I am!") but they're usually rather carefully worked out. An experiment is just trying something to see how it works, it's playing. Options is certainly experimental, and a lot of the experiments don't work, but some do, and it's so clearly silly that it's hard to be disappointed by any of it.

A lot of it is also, at the very least, about drugs, if not actively inspired by them. Hey, it was 1975. And when I say about drugs, I mean in the Tom Wolfe sense, where just reading the paragraphs makes you a bit dizzy. Of course, a large number of chapters are only a few paragraphs long, so there are plenty of chances to calm down and let reality assert itself. I don't exactly recommend it, even though I do like it a lot; it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's just a typeset version of Sheckley's notebook, and he went through all of his abandoned ideas and fragments, changed the name of the main character so that it was consistent, and sent it to the publisher. But I like that; it's just fun to watch him play.

I finished my Christmas shopping! Which I mention because I also bought presents for me. See, I wandered in to that big book sale-o'-rama place again. I hope it goes away soon; just knowing it's there is eating away at my soul. But I went in with good intentions, because I'd found one good present for someone there, and I thought lightning might strike twice. And it did, so I found another very good present. Hooray! And then I scooped up a handful of things for me:

• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. It's a collection of short stories set around an Indian Reservation, and was the basis for the movie "Smoke Signals," which I haven't seen, but only because I haven't gotten to it. Anyway. I've heard good things about him, and I saw part of a little biography piece about him on Bravo (I think) a while ago which made me want to read his books, because he seems very clever and funny and all-around neat. And he was interviewed in The Door last year, which was also nifty.

• Queen of the Cold-Blooded Tales, by Roberta Simpson Brown. These seemed like good stories to read aloud around Halloween, because, well, I think that's what they are. Brown is "a professional storyteller," which is a pretty neat thing to be. I'm not quite sure if these are more-or-less traditional stories, just written as she tells them, or if they're her original work. I like reading aloud, though, and they're designed for that, so it's all good.

• Screwjack, by Hunter S. Thompson. What else do I need to say besides his name?

• Don't Know Much About History, by Kenneth C. Davis. Because I don't. Particularly American History, because that was all taught way back in elementary school and maybe junior high, and that was ever so long ago. And this has a highly anecdotal style, which usually helps me retain information for some reason.

Er, and I got something else, but I'm still trying to figure out if it'll be a present for someone, too. My gift-giving this year has been terribly complicated. It's a long story.