Inferno, Dan Brown's latest installment of Robert Langdon

Just finished reading the newest installment of the Robert Langdon saga. Dan Brown enjoys jerking the rug out from you too much. I am not sure if his books are more believable than those within the 39 Clues/Cahills v. Vespers  canon.
Not exactly sure why I bother reading Brown's books since I find everything about them rather impossible to read.
I mean, Prof. Langdon is a "genius," but yet he manages to do very stupid, naive things, regularly. At least the Cahill kids are KIDS, thus too young to be truly cynical
Anyways, I guess I read them for the same reasons I read Block, for I find myself thinking the same thing... WHY ARE YOU SO STUPID! They're good to make you think... all you have to do is turn pages unlike a Sudoku puzzle that requires you to correctly place numbers within a grid.
Regardless, it's not a bad book in the grand scheme of things. I generally like stuff relating to Medieval times and this has tons. Not a big art history fan, but that's different matter for another day.
My brain hurts.

Spoiler: Sienna Brooks is FS-2080, also known as Bertrand Zobrist's LOVER! When you read chapter 66, you are set up to think that the provost spoke with FS-2080 in chapter 65 since he seemingly contacts FS-2080 but rather he contacts an actor known as Dr. Ferris who previously played the role of the Italian Dr. Marconi. Yes, I said ACTOR! The Consortium is a lot like the group that was depicted in the David Fincher's 1997 film: The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. They seem to kill people and such but they don't. They are masters of illusion to create alibis and such. This actor has been working with Sienna from the very beginning, and the provost finds his mentioning of the plague discussion as troublesome given the 9 minute video left to be given to the media the following day. By the way, Sienna Brooks is the only murderer in the book! The "plague" that is being tracked down has already been released and doesn't kill people, just makes 1/3 of those in contact with it sterile thus creating a means to control the population with out making mounds of condoms in Africa. In conclusion: If you got excited by the butt sex depicted in Chapter 66, then you were mistaken. Bertrand Zobrist is not gay. If you felt great when the assassin Vayentha died, then you are a sick person.

Herman Melville

Remember when I was readying Tom Jones?  It was in January, which seems like a lifetime ago, but it was when I was trying to be proactive towards completing goals set back before time seems to existed.
Anyways, we have a shelf of books we didn't send to Half Price Books and they're things I intend to finish or re-read. I took a slight reading hiatus after Dale Carnegie, but I did read some Block books from the library in March. I read all the time, but it's clutternet stuff that means nothing, but thankfully the shelf is in a location that begs exploring.
I started to read Thomas Malory, but my Middle English is rusty, so I've gotten to The Confidence Man.
Never read Moby Dick, but after reading the editor's preface to The Confidence Man, I might.
Confidence Man is rather short in the sense that I had it for a class that included these three: Tom Jones, Vanity Fair, and The Life and Times of Tristan Shandy. I know I finished it back in the day and that I wrote a paper on it, but much of it is vague to me in that I know I liked it, but I don't recall why.
Anyways, I'm reading the editor's comments and finding myself feeling like writing my own novel. It's been years since I had the bug to write, but I find myself in a position of having a mindless "job" that clears the mind of clutter (perfect recipe).

Playboy Market Research

Seems that this blog's only google traffic is from people who received postcards from Playboy regarding a special discount price.

With the internet being what it is, why should anyone bother subscribing to Playboy?

Granted it's not much of a nudie magazine aside from a few pictorials of T & A, but the items I found of interest can be found by following various sources on Twitter.

I think I bought my first issue because it had chapter of Vonnegut's Timequake. I was disappointed, but I found myself reading most of the issue. It was like Reader's Digest with better jokes.

One doesn't need a subscription to Playboy to stumble upon new writers.

Neeson is Scudder

Started following Lawrence Block when I saw he had an active account, so I was able to see that A Walk Among the Tombstones was in production with Liam Neeson starring as Matthew Scudder.

Interestingly, there's been a newer book in the series I haven't read. Hadn't thought he'd write another after All the Flowers are Dying, I was wrong.

Nothing against Block, but his books get redundant and predictable to be overtly excited about new things coming out.

I would like to read another Evan Tanner, but that may be another 14 years from now.

A long line of dead Chargers?

Saw in my Thursday Dayton Daily News that Junior Seau, 43, was the 8th member of the Chargers' Super Bowl team to die, and that all were under the age of 45. With the previous players' deaths being attributed to heart attacks, to a plane crash and to a lightning strike, the plot to a book came to me.
Specifically, Lawrence Block's A Long Line of Dead Men came to mind. In the book, which ironically was published in 1994, a group of 30 men who meet for an annual dinner start to die off mysteriously very much like a certain group of Chargers.
There was a time that I read all the Matthew Scudder books. I like mysteries, and Block's are a quick read. I might remember all the stories, but they blur over time. A Long Line of Dead Men was unique enough that I had no problem coming up with the title, from all of the various novels from the series.
I didn't like that particular Chargers team because they beat my Steelers in the AFC Championship game, but it is sad when anyone dies prematurely.