I've been reading quite a bit lately, mostly in my favorite genre, urban fantasy. Last night I finished "Vicious Grace," by M.L.N. Hanover, the third in a series, which I've read all the way through. I love when I can do that, i.e., discover a new series of books and read them all right in a row. That way it's like a REALLY long book, which is my favorite thing. The series is 1) Unclean Spirits, 2) Darker Angels, and 3) Vicious Grace. Basically, the books are about a young woman, a college dropout, who finds out that her black sheep uncle has named her in his will. Not only has he named her in his will, but he has left everything to her, everything being multiple homes everywhere in the world, many corporations, and enough money to run a small country.
There's a downside, though--he also leaves her his legacy of fighting evil in the form of spirits ("riders") who possess people and cause them to commit hellacious crimes. She quickly gets together a band of sidekicks including a former Jesuit priest, a Buddhist, a gorgeous, geeky parasitologist and a vampire. In the first book they are devoted to taking out the demonic spirit who cursed the vampire.
The second book, Darker Angels, is set in New Orleans amid voodoo rituals, tourist museums, and a lot of local color. THe third book, Vicious Grace, is set in Chicago, mostly in a pretty creepy hospital. this one is much more like a horror novel than the others, and frankly, left me feeling a little odd. There is an event at the end that I couldn't be entirely happy with, but I did enjoy the book, for the most part.
I'm typing this on an Apple wireless Bluetooth keyboard, using the iPad, which I've got sitting on a book holder on the coffee table. I had kind of a hard time convincing myself to buy the keyboard, but I decided that I would get a lot of good out of it, and I can see a lot of uses for it. I love the iPad and the iPhone onscreen keyboards, but even with the larger iPad keyboard, it's pretty hard to actually touch type. I can, but what I found was that even though I could type the letters, I couldn't access keys like the apostrophe without changing keyboards, and it just wasn't working very well.
It's been kind of a weird day. Bob was out with some friends last night, and I went upstairs to bed at about 8:00 with the iPad to read. Bob came home shortly thereafter, and he was tired, so he laid down to take a nap, and I fell asleep, too. I slept until about midnight, woke up and read for awhile, fell back asleep, woke up around 6:00, read some more, fell back asleep, and finally got up around 11:00.
I spent the afternoon watching television shows about the upcoming royal wedding, doing laundry, and just puttering around. I never left the house or even got dressed!