I’m going to try to make this a weekly installment. (It probably won’t work.)

It’s nice when they get over that phase where they cry and cry,
and you don’t know the hell why.

E – “Are you humming the Pussy Cat Dolls?”
F *D’oh!*

I wish I had a house-elf.

Xavier would be happy on a peasant medieval menu of bread for a meal, every meal.

- “You changed her outfit again?”
- “Not by choice, this one. She pooped her way out of it.”

How depressing is it that I thought about enlisting someone to do my hobbies for me?

X – “Mommyyy?”
*Presents big gross half-crushed, half-wriggling spider.*
E – “Thanks Xav, that’s really nice.”

Transl. “Simultenuous naps”

The definition of a lucky mom.

I’m tempted to wait until I’ve read the second installment of Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion Cantos” (tetralogy) before I comment on Hyperion (book one). I suppose one could read only the first novel, but there is so much to be resolved still, that it feels like we’ve been brought along a trail right up to a precipice, and it would be a bummer to leave it at that. So the follow up books are on my wish list now; I hope they shed some light on the mysteries of the first installment.

But looking at Hyperion solely, I can say the structure was interesting: various stories (one per character), all widely different but also all linked up in the end, which lead up to the ending craftily. The humor threaded in the story was one of the things I enjoyed, as was the complexity of Simmons’ imagined future and the pace at which alien technologies and world details were revealed throughout. There’s a lot of foreign stuff to assimilate at first, but it all makes sense in the end, even for non-regulars of sci-fi such as I. In fact, it seemed to me that the novel is more a blend of sci-fi and fantasy than pure sci-fi – I’ll let genre readers agree or express horror on that one.

Yup, thanks for the recommendations on this one. It gets my vote.