This sounds like a very interesting sports/art book and certainly not something I would have imagined being written. I remember Doug Flutie's pass in the Miami/Boston College game, (I was at my step-father's mother's house and he was a big Miami fan and I was pulling like crazy for BC and he almost turned the tv off before the end. Man, did I scream loud when that pass was caught!), and also Kirk Gibson's homerun which I think has to be one of the most iconic moments in sports, period. But are such athletic moments beautiful? I don't know. It is an intriguing thing to consider though, and I'm sure a fun reason to write an academic book.

So call me a sap, but I am all over From Baghdad, With Love. My father and his buddies bought a sled dog from an Eskmo when he was stationed in Thule, Greenland and it stayed on base with the soldiers as a kind of mascot. He loved that dog - everybody loved that dog. I'm always weirdly worried about the animals during war, (Vertigo has a very cool looking graphic novel coming out this fall that follows lions who escape from the Baghdad zoo and is looking to be one of the biggest comic releases this year.), and I know it's silly to think of animals when so many people are suffering, but blame my soft heart. Ron Hogan liked the book, and I can't wait to read it.

I finished Katherine Sturtevant's A True and Faithful Narrative the other day and this is a very well done piece of historic fiction. It follows the same cast from At the Sign of the Star, picking up three years later. This time Meg manages to be still both plucky and realistic - she doesn't know what to do about becoming a proper wife as she so desperately wants to run her father's bookshop one day. She also longs to write, something uncommon but not impossible for a woman in late 17th century London. What I really enjoyed though was all the discussion about truth in writing that Meg tackles as she works on the prisoner memoir of her friend Edward. She changes facts to make it more appealing to the reader, but argues that the larger truth is still present. Sturtevant did a lot of research on this type of narrative while writing the book and it is quite revealing that we have been grappling with the whole memoir issue for over three hundred years.

And hey - did I mention that my agent wants me to write a memoir?!

Another chapter from the AK flying book will be running in a lit mag this summer - this time over at Storyglossia. I have to work on it a bit so it will stand up better on its own as a short story and the editor had a few parts he wanted expanded, so back to AK for my writing brain. I also have to go backwards in the YA dragon book - I realized the other night that I jumped too fast in one part and needed to add a chase scene back there to rachet up the drama (and explain what happened to a couple of characters who are leaving town). I also decided that the whole book will probably take place over a week, which seems like a little bit of time but should work out for what I'm trying to do.

And a priest showed up the other day and is turning out to be a major character. Weird how that happens, isn't it?

I keep a pretty good schedule of what I plan to review and when I hope to run it that goes about six months ahead of time (this is pretty critical for putting my column together), but lately I can't seem to pry myself away from fiction. I have the two books on coal mining to finish and an Afghanistan memoir to read but I keep grabbing mysteries in some sort of compulsive way. I'm partly going to blame my book off the TBR pile, Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night. It's so much fun that I can't bring myself to think about big important things. I'm also consuming The Looking Glass War like it's food and I am going to be recommending this book in such a major way that it isn't even funny. The rest include Havana Black by Leonardo Padura and Gods of Winter, which is appropriately British and has me wondering just what is going to happen to this quirky little family next. I also got Kiki Strike in the mail yesterday and I'm struggling to resist the lure of the cover.

My comics come next week - after I binge on Batman & company for a couple of days I should be pushed back into serious reading. At least, that's the plan anyway!