Candy rots ones brains

But that's what I've been reading. I've read all the way through "Dead in the Family", which I think is Sookie Stackhouse #11. I'm enjoying the books much more than season 5, which is painfully awful. I like how the series emphasizes the town and community of Bon Temps, LA which has a Wal-Mart, but no other restaurants except Merlotte's. Someone open a pizza place there, please.

I finished reading "A Thousand Sons" which is a Warhammer 40k novel about the legion that was blasted to near-nothingness by Leman Russ & Co. Lots of hermetical references and sneaky cameos by the HP Lovecraft mythos.

"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". It was fun and it worked pretty well as "flipside of history", but not done as beautifully as Tim Powers can.

The non-junk was the Hunger Games trilogy. Once you start reading these, it's impossible to stop. The second one was very much a second act and the third one is just a tornado. I like Katniss, a lot. She really does come across as a teenaged girl forced into too much responsibility too early, and when her happy ending comes, it's a long time in doing so, just like real life.

I started Neal Stephenson's "Reamde" last night. After being absolutely unable to get into "Cryptonomicon" and giving up 200 pages in, I am delighted to report that I have a hard time putting this one down, too. I loved "Snow Crash" (read it in one sitting on a bus from Ottawa to Pembroke, Ontario) and "The Diamond Age" so "Cryptonomicon" seems to have been an anomaly.

I'm reading "Reamde" as a hardcover I picked up at a book swap. As for the rest, I love my Kindle.

And how can I forget...

..."Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling" by Bob Calhoun.

This was one of two books borrowed from Steve Mandel when we were out there earlier this year (I think).

Incredibly Strange Wrestling (ISW) was a fixture of San Francisco before the dot.com scene happened. The dot.com scene is what killed it. Bob Calhoun, under the name "Count Dante" was a performer/announcer for this local promotion that didn't specialize in wrestling so much as performance art, backed up by punk rockers. This was when San Francisco was still cheap to live in and alternative lifestyles were the norm.

ISW moved from a club called The Transmission to the Warped Tour to the Fillmore. The Transmission is gone now, having closed and turned into a yuppie office space before whatever company took it over went kablooie. Before that, it hosted wrestlers who were more interested in their bizarre and tasteless characters than sports entertainment. With characters like El Homo Loco, Macho Sasquatcho, El Pollo Diablo, Oi Boy, the Poontangler and Uncle NAMBLA, backed up by punk bands before and after, the wrestlers were paid in beer and suffered the indignity of tortillas being thrown at them every Friday night. Not pita, lavash or any Middle Eastern baked goods, corn tortillas only.

It's a crazy, crazy story and it's true. This tome is put out by the ECW press, so if you find it, read it. It'll be your most unique read all year.