This Made Me Laugh...

I just can’t get into any book right now. The bottom line is that it’s the end of the year and I’m tired, really looking forward to my two weeks off work over Christmas and the New Year! What I’m finding in the meantime is that even the most ‘brain dead pulp fare’ or ‘comfort re-read’ is proving too cerebral for my tired head... I want to read though, it’s what I do! If I took a break then there would be a nasty book shaped hole in my life just begging to be filled. What do you guys do in a situation like this?

One of the things that I do is take random books off the shelves and skim the first couple of pages; sometimes I’ve found that this will spark off something in my brain and then I’m off and reading! Variable results this time round (I realised that I’m too far into James Enge’s ‘This Crooked Way’ to put it down for something else) but I did come across this quote from Fritz Leiber’s ‘Swords and Deviltry’ that made me laugh...

‘As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were two long sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime – or a hundred lifetimes – of adventuring.
No one at that moment could have guessed that the Grey Mouser was once named Mouse, or that Fafhrd had recently been a youth whose voice was by training high-pitched, who wore white furs only, and who still slept in his mother’s tent although he was eighteen.’

Talk about setting the scene for something grand and then underlining it with a swift dose of reality and humour... I like that and I think I’ll be picking ‘Lankhmar’ up sooner than I’d planned.