More Soon

I'm back from a few days in Los Angeles. I'll post more about it later, but I'm happy to see that I actually liked the city. Every store I saw seemed like a desitination store, all very specialized and cool. I'm sure there are also lame stores and Target's, but I think you get my meaning.

On the trip I finished Donald Westlake's The Hot Rock and started (finally!) on Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guard, a book I've been meaning to read for about a decade now. Seth recommended the Westlake novel and it was definitely a fun piece of throwaway crime caper -- but I couldn't help casting the move in my head as I was reading*. It would adapt well to a screenplay, so that make it more interesting for me. Good stuff in general, though. As for The Phoenix Guard, it's a lot of fun and a really quick read. I only spent about two hours and change reading it and made it to page 120 (plus the introduction). For me, that's a pretty good page rate. I'm definitely enjoying it, but I'm a fan of Brust's work, so I'm biased. I hope to devour more of it before returning to work next week.

Oh, I also finished watching The Conversation. A movie from Franis Ford Coppola starring Gene Hackman as a "professional eavesdropper" (as Coppola calls him in an interview about the film).

I'll fill you in on more of the trip tomorrow. Now I'm going to watch something and go to bed.

* I find out later, with a bit of research, that it was already made into a movie.