Thursday, October 9, 2008

It's kind of like having another pet.

I've got a big spider living above the study door. It's one of those yellow-brown spiders that build very dense, draping webs that look like instant cobwebs. I call them yellow spiders and they're really common around here. This one's legs would comfortably fit over a quarter without its even stretching them out.

Fortunately, spiders don't bother me. I like spiders because I don't like bugs, and while the gnat infestation is pretty much over, it's not entirely gone. So I keep an eye on my yellow spider, hoping to see gnats stuck in its web.

Yes, and that has absolutely nothing to do with writing or reading, so on to bookish things. My new Amazon order came today! It's the last bunch of books I'm going to order for a while, so I hope they're all good. Among the books is Lisa Shearin's Armed & Magical, sequel to Magic Lost, Trouble Found that I read last week. I had to take my car in for its (ridonculously expensive) 30k mile checkup, and I read half the book while I waited. I am definitely a Shearin fan now. I'm about three-quarters done reading the sequel and it's actually better than the first one. Raine's character seemed a little shallow in the first book; she's deeper now, and the predicaments she's in feel more tangled and harder to solve. And it's still a lot of fun, with fascinating worldbuilding, solid plotting, and the sexual tension ratcheted up to ever more delicious levels. The narrative snarkiness seems a little toned down too, or maybe I've just gotten used to it. I definitely can't wait for the next book to come out.

(The only reason I'm not putting this one on my recommended list is because I make it a point to list only one recommended book per author. Hey, you have to have rules or the world will end!)

2 comments:

The Margin Wight said...

I had a spider in my office once. It was brown with long, fine legs. His web was stretched among tendrils of ivy that had pierced through the edge of the windows from outside and grew down the walls. They had little sucker vines that attached to the slick enamel paint. The office was semi-subterranean in an old building at a state university, so very little money for maintenance, much less pest control. Anyway. I fed that spider by catching and dropping japanese beetles into his web. He lived a long time, as I recall; nearly a semester. Those were the days. Now I have a nice office, way up high in the building with new carpeting and no pests. It's lonely here. Sigh.

K.C. Shaw said...

You could always get a pet tarantula, I suppose, although it's the serendipitousness of the chance pet that I really like about my yellow spider. I may feed him bugs if I can catch him some.