back, you leechies!

What a nice doctor. She has given me two different kinds of antibiotic and a cortizone spray for sticking up my nose, thus elevating me in one nasal bound to the company of the manifold Shire ladies who spray cortizone around the show at the drop of a hat. I feel... well, actually not better as such, but as though the possibility of feeling better is definitely around the corner. Supposing, of course, that these great galloping drug herds don't thunder across the embattled plains of my body, leaving me trampled in their wake. Evil stuff, antibiotics, and cannot entirely be trusted to confine their evil to the decimation of my throat and sinus infection. Still, as evil goes, I definitely espouse it. Bring it on.

There's a new bookshop in the Riverside Centre, selling the most bizarre and motley collection of publisher's rejects at low prices. I celebrated clambering on the antibiotic-wagon by spending a happy bibliophilic half-hour, marvelling at the nerve of the organisers, who cheerfully stack Maya Angelou next to Dragonlance and conceal Edgar Rice Burroughs beneath a cheery stack of pastel chick-lit. This afternoon thus featured me re-reading A Princess Of Mars, in defiance of my pile of marking. I don't know what it is about Mars pulp: despite being racist, sexist, colonialist and as violent as all get-out it pushes a sizeable selection of my happy buttons. Perhaps it's all the extra arms. However, I also found Mary Gentle's 1610, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (yay eco-fiction!) and Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, a young adult weird fantasy about which I have heard good things somewhereorother I can't remember. Plus a new Gwyneth Jones which is apparently a sequel, necessitating the speedy acquisition of the first one. Also eco-fic, actually. It seems to be going around.

In other news, cool clouds.