Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/31

Normally, this space is filled weekly with descriptions of the books that arrived in my mail the prior week. And I did get books in the mail last week -- my memory is that several of them were particularly interesting, too.

Unfortunately, those books are in a neat pile on my desk back in a blogger's basement -- we're all issued them by the Blog Control Authority, you know, complete with the smell of damp, inadequate lighting, and a lurking miasma of despair -- while I am sitting in a nice hotel somewhere else, enjoying a family vacation.

(OK: it's Disney World again, for the eighth year in a row -- well, including one year to Disneyland in the middle there. My family is either incredibly consistent or incredibly boring.)

So I'm not able to blog about those books, even though it looks like I'll have more free time and uncluttered thought to do some useful blogging this week than I've had most weeks lately. (A: more time, since theme-parking is taking less time than working-and-commuting. B: more energy, likewise. Plus I can't play the videogames from my Steam account down here.)

This is thus a placeholder post. I hope to cover two weeks worth of books next week, even though I know next Sunday will be a very hectic day and I'm pretty sure I won't get to everything I want to do that day. But, for now, all you get is this random blathering.