Book completed

Madness in Solidar, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Imager Portfolio #9 (#6 internally), and the first of the Alastar books. As I generally do, I enjoyed the day-by-day recounting of the events in the life and doings of one of Modesitt's characters, and Alastar is fine. The idea of basing the story around a societal conflict in the basis of the local system of taxation, however, is, frankly, amusing for a fantasy novel. In its sequel, the complications of the tax code become even more challenging!

I do wish that Modesitt were more willing to resolve his stories' difficulties without resorting to the magical assassination of everyone standing in our character's way, but at this point I'm used to it. Killing off the three most troublesome characters all in the same day does seem a bit much, though.

A dream about Keanu

Last night I woke after six hours of sleep, and when I can't get back to sleep my usual habit is to eat a little bit and read a bit from my bedtime reading. The book I'm reading now isn't unscented enough to leave in the bedroom overnight, though, so this time I got out my phone and read a NYT article instead, about Asian Americans as leading men. I then started reading the comments - the article hadn't mentioned James Shigeta at all, a famous Japanese American actor from the 1950s whom I remember from a Perry Mason episode. It did mention Keanu Reeves several times, but as a white actor, when actually his ancestry includes Chinese and indigenous Hawaiians as well as English people, and as I went back to sleep I was thinking about him, and how if Asian American ancestry had a "one drop" rule he'd be "Asian" too.

So then I dreamed about Keanu Reeves, and in my dream the big thing about him was that he had managed to keep his birthday completely private, nobody in the media knew what it was, only people he knew personally. Naturally when I woke up again I looked that up online, and of course it does have his birthday. It's Monday! He will be 60.