I guess it must have been last year but maybe it was longer ago than that. But my MacBook Pro (July 2007) crashed again, to the point where the HD was unreadable. Fortunately, I use Apple’s Time Machine to guard against this, uhm--surely not--tactical obsolescence, so was able to reinstall everything. But as I had a) lost my ethernet capability (it died in smoke, and I am not kidding: my friend Charles recorded it for immediate posterity) and b) had, to save space, chosen--foolishly--*not* to back up my applications, I had to spend the Friday (death) and weekend following, resurrecting everything bit by bit from the harbours in the sky where these things lurk. By Sunday the 5th of April, all the bits were more or less there, some older, some newer, some different but all possessed of the precious halo new life after the fact of loss gives.
But it meant a forced weekend of no work, no writing, but a lot of reading on my so-far-faithful iPhone. My latest reads: Adrian Johns’ _Piracy, the Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates_ (Chicago, UoChicago, 2010; Kindle eBook), but also Charles Stross’ latest (#6 in the Merchant Princes Wars), plus, concurrently, the quite uninteresting David Edelman _Infoquake_, and the far more captivating but also uneven Miéville _The City and the City_, as well as the relentlessly dreary _Drood_ by Simmons. The latter, a *long* take on Dicken’s wildly weird Mystery of Edwin Drood (a right companion to the magnificent _Our Mutual Friend_), seems to add what is not needed to a narrative whose sole interest lies in the historical, not the fictive. Then again, my wife is a Victorianist, and inter alia, her speciality includes Dickens, so by osmosis (and some study done during my own literary days getting my PhD at Berkeley), I have come to some understanding of Dickens and am fascinated by his life & times, though I find myself more fixed by the present’s formation of the future and by the past’s comprehension of the present, than by the Victorian past itself.
(And of course, I have often enjoyed reading steampunk, but like all such things, quality depends less on formal genre adherence and more on the nature of the story and its writing itself: quality is the pleasure one derives from the text, and that pleasure has some relation to genre but it is not identical to it.)
