october. planes and trains gave me my first chance in a long time to read for pleasure, and having got back into the habit of reading when one should be working i can't shake it off.(travel time cannot be accounted work time, since the person in vehicular transit is of that class of people which byatt, misappropriating milton, called "floating redundant." long books read for pleasure while travelling are not indulgences, any more than chocolates are calorific which had been consumed while the eater was walking.) accompanied on the road by eliot weinberger, that strange master of the eccentric latticework poetry-essay, and richard power, who is pure cerebral compulsion and the only person who can writ an elegant sentence that is also thoroughly modern. (who else can talk about dna proteins in terms of tetragrammatical golem recipes?) but golems are on my mind because i've even reneged on my resolve and read the new pratchett, making money, a moist von lipwig novel, which i found sparser than its predecessor, that is, thin on the chuckling moments and sluggish in its action. as usual i live for the vetinari moments (veni, vidi, vetinari) and naturally i like moist and adora belle as a team (moist on adora belle: "sleeps in wilderness, argues with important men, all for golems.")better than, say, william de worde and sacharissa, yet the truth was a better read than making money, but on the whole one never feels engaged or moved in particular - i was merely interested in how moist was going to pull it all off. (and one needs a proper adversary like reacher gilt for there to be a real element of menace; cosmo lavish was just too absurd to be threatening, a less sympathetic and low-intelligence version of edward d'earth.