Lethologica

Denver is having its Springtime Winter Weather Issues. It is April and snow is predicted. Completely normal for us. We had 75+ temps yesterday, and today it is starting to turn. We should have snow by Sunday. This kind of weather makes me restless and lethargic at the same time. Not sure how that is possible. It just makes me want to sit for the whole weekend and read. Forget the social engagements I have agreed to, forget the pit of unorganized stuff my house has slowly degraded into. Pick up on of the many books sitting around that have been started and left lying around with sad dusty bookmarks. I started I Capture the Castle and I think I left it at a friend’s house. Not smart since I kinda got interested in it.

I finished Devil in the White City a few days ago and I have to say that it is a strange book. I think the language the author uses is a bit overblown. I think he spent too much time reading Victorian newspapers or something when researching this book. It is the strangest combination of World Fair planning and Serial Killer.

Planning the World's Fair is forgettable because I did not care about the characters, although I was interested in the engineering. He did not give the characters enough humanity to make me really care what happened. My curiosity was peaked about the politics and the crazy negotiations it took to get the Fair off the ground, but I just did not give a rat’s ass about the main characters. Then next to that is the great detail about the serial killer and his world. The killer - a Mr. H. H. Holmes - has been haunting me. He is just a creepy creepy psychopath who preyed (mostly) on single women. Blech. It just makes you think of all the charming and soulless people who walk this earth harming others without a second thought. I keep thinking about a book review I read on Salon (I can’t seem to find the review or the name of the book right now) where the author claims that 4% of the population are psychopaths. Since then I have seen that most researchers in the field think she is basing that purely on conjecture.

Apparently I am rambling tonight.

The time change is always difficult for me. I grew up in the two states that do not go in for Daylight Savings Time: Indiana and Arizona. I did not experience Daylight Savings until I lived in London. That was a shock.

I don’t do well with changing time zones. Needless to say my sleep patterns get mighty disrupted when the time changes. So to fight this issue I read about half of Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

It is such an odd book. It juxtaposes the building of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 against the life and cons of a serial killer who lived next door to the fair. It is a really creepy but compelling read. In some ways the Chicago World’s Fair part reminds me of Breaking Ground and the serial killer part reminds me of Stiff, but it is worse than that. The thing that is really bugging me about the book is that the author has made the book seem very narrative, but I want to know how he know what people said, thought and felt. He has some quotes and apparently researched it well, but I want to know which parts he just made up to make the story move better. I think he is imposing his concepts to their reality and it is annoying.

The ramblings of my sleepy mind. I hope I adjust to the time change soon.

Is it nap time yet?

Words give me great pleasure. I love running across seldom used words that capture a meaning so well. Like lethologica. Here is one I had forgotten about:
Imbroglio
What a wonderfully succinct word.

Imbroglio
A difficult or intricate situation; an entanglement.
A confused or complicated disagreement.
A confused heap; a tangle.
[Italian, from Old Italian, from imbrogliare, to tangle, confuse : in-, in (from Latin. See in-2) + brogliare, to mix, stir (probably from Old French brooiller, brouiller. See broil2).]