A slow pace of reading, mainly because preoccupied with other things. And I did read a new Neal Asher short story in Asimov's Science Fiction. Which wasn't quite satisfying. Set in the Polity universe that he has created (Orbus is the best novel in this series), it's full of hardware and alien technology, trademark exotic weaponry, interesting twists. I read it like you might read a celebrity magazine*, with a faint sense of titillation but a sense of unease.
Unease. Typifies how you feel when you have a cold sore (herpes simplex), a visible, unsightly and painful sore with accompanying flu like symptoms. I used to get them more regularly after catching the virus from an old girlfriend at drama college. No idea where she is now - I think she emigrated to New Zealand and has disappeared from view, but I have, every so often, this insistent reminder of our relatively short relationship.
Wildlife is still good, but I'm slightly impatient with its slow progress. It definitely feels like a rehearsal for Canada, which is a better book.
*Or how I imagine people read celebrity magazines, or those magazines aimed at women at the supermarket check-out. They can't have sweets there now, so they have translated those desires into a taste for sugary shlock horror true life horror. Trauma is relative of course, for the celebrity there are headlines, fucking headlines, about a roll of fat round the waist caught by some low life paparazzi, whereas the true life lower class real life stuff consists of women married to serial murderers who have gradually dispensed with their children, children brought up in dustbins without any TV, that kind of thing.
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