Dammit!

I got a call out of the blue this morning from my contractor saying she wanted to stop by and figure out what they could do to fix the cabinet after the leak a week and a half ago. I'd pretty much written the cabinet off, so yay! to them for following up.

So I went down to take everything out from under the cabinet again so she could get a look at the damage, and it was full of water again! No idea where the drip is coming from this time, I can't get down onto the floor anymore to even look. )-:

I did check it for several days after the plumbers came and it was dry, so I just don't know what the hell is going on and it's making me really unhappy. Also, one of the upper cabinets now appears to be coming slowly off the wall. Can't stuff just go right for a little while, please?

Books 2008 - #7

#7: Charles Stross, Halting State

Okay, first, I want to say that wearing the Reader Hat is much easier than wearing the Writer Hat, and it's a lot easier to see the flaws in and be critical of someone else's work than it is to write good work of your own. Having said that, I also feel I need to back up for a bit and talk a little bit about Charles Stross. I've read and commented on a whole bunch of his books here over the last couple of years, and I've had very much the same feelings: while he's been held up in the SF community as the greatest thing since sliced bread for a long time, and while his *potential* to be as awesome as he's been touted as being has been clear from the beginning, I've generally felt that he's never quite managed to actually fulfill that potential. (Mind you, with one notable exception I've enjoyed all his books, so take my disappointment in that context.) While on some levels an excellent author, he has had two fairly substantial weaknesses: 1) he is obviously much more natively adept at writing shorter works than novels (as evidenced by the very episodic nature of his earlier books), and 2) he doesn't quite seem to "get" characters.

I expressed a fair amount of excitement over the last book of his I read, Glasshouse, because it was the first novel of his that seemed a unified narrative whole and his instinct for characters was noticably improving. Worthy of its Hugo nomination, certainly, though I wouldn't have picked it as the winner out of the bunch of excellent novels nominated that year (I'd have placed it at #3, I think.)

That said, this brings us to Halting State. Not only would this book richly deserve a Hugo nomination, even without knowing what the competition is at this point I can't imagine that I would think a win inappropriate in this case -- there have been years where *none* of the contenders were this competent or enjoyable or original. This is Stross finally meeting that long-prophesied potential head on and kicking its ass all over the map. In short: this book rocks. It's of a solid piece from beginning to end with none of the fits-and-starts of earlier books like Accelerando, and although there's still some room there for improvement in how he manages his characters (and in particular their interactions with one another) they were solid and believable and fully-formed and they fit their roles *perfectly*. This is the book I've been waiting to see from Stross for the last umpteen years I've been reading his works, and I couldn't be happier. Well, so far anyway -- assuming that this is still just a data point on the sharply upward-sloping graph of Stross's abilities, I anticipate many future happy moments snug in my chair with my Reader Hat on and a book in my lap (-:

And a blurb from Bruce Schneier? How much cooler can you get than that?