First, I am curious, why is advogato now on advogato.alancoxonachip.com, and why is it asking me for renewed authentication?

Any­way, it's not as if any­one cares what I put here, so I care not about se­cu­ri­ty ;-)

You know, I now have de­cid­ed there is a good side to 45 min­utes com­mutes. I can read a lot more!

This is what I have read in the last two weeks or so:

• Han­ni­bal
• The drum's skin (Nice nov­el by Ar­turo Pérez-Re­verte)
• 3 pieces of JG Bal­lard's riv­er world tetral­o­gy (I can't find the third piece) Re­al­ly nice!
• the 6th piece of Ben­ford's ga­lac­tic cen­ter hex­al­o­gy Crap!
• One book by Ann Rice. I can't even re­mem­ber the name, and hon­est­ly they all melt in mem­o­ry... this is the one where the an­cient egyp­cian queen comes awakes. I don't think I will ev­er read an­oth­er one of these.

And now I'm start­ing Paul Th­er­oux's "The patag­o­ni­an ex­press", which is, so far, aw­ful­ly good. "'This is like the tran­s-si­beri­an', he said. 'No it is­n't', I replied" is a seem­ing­ly stupid line that I can't get out of my head.

Not to men­tion:

"I had ca­su­al­ly men­tioned to her that I had been to Up­per bur­ma and Africa. I had de­scribed Leopold Bloom's love of 'the faint tang of urine'in the kid­neys he had for break­fast. I had shown a knowl­edge of the Bud­dhism and the eat­ing habits of Bush­men in the kala­hari and Gand­hi's ear­ly mar­ried life. I was a fair­ly in­ter­est­ing per­son, was I not? But not once in the en­tire con­ver­sa­tion had she asked me a sin­gle ques­tion."

Now, Paul Th­er­oux re­al­ly sounds like a pre­ten­tious bore, but it's still fun, so as far as I am con­cerned, he should keep on be­ing one ;-)