Classics majors come out to play

My uni past comes back to haunt me today in pleasant fashion.

"Xerxes spelled backwards is Sexrex."

And that is all I have to say about 300 because rasetsunyo is absolutely right about the dickweed that drew the original. Oh- except for the fact that Thermopylae is on the north side of a mountain range so no, sorry, the Spartans did not fight in the sun. But when your history is on acid, who cares about your geography?

( Plus memorable classic icons from that entry )

Perdido and Kurotsubaki 1, 3, 4

So- I have Perdido Street Station from the library in a large and smooth-paged trade paperback. Pleasant to read and easy on the eyes: I think the over-heated adjectives might well oppress me in the smaller paperback format now out in the bookstores. OTOH I despair of reading this 700 page novel in three weeks, not unless the pace picks up pretty damned fast, which I don't think it will. I like to take my big dense novels slowly, and if that trade paperback were mine I could see me finishing it about the end of June.

The protagonists don't interest me greatly either. The fat bloke talks like a bloke, and Lin so far looks like a male's idea of a tough female. (Rukia Syndrome, a character I can live happily without.) Judging by the short stories, characterization isn't Mieville's specialty. But I'm still enchanted by the thing because it introduces a garuda who suddenly appears in the hero's house to tell him he's the heir to the sacred throne of a tiny eastern kingdom. No, of course not. But the echoes, which must must must be fortuitous, make me very happy indeed.

( Manga reading )