Two more CD purchases since I last wrote - the Interpol album, "Antics", and the latest The Delgados, "Universal Audio".

The Interpol album is good, but I might prefer the prior release because of its relentlessly downbeat tone. Interpol, however, is still some what guilty of having that "We know how to write one song" vibe because of the vocalist's timbre + style and the unique instrumentation backing it up. Luckily, it's one song that I like.

The Delgados album is nice middle of the road, pop-rock gathering of songs. It's a bit less grandiose than anything off of "Hate", but I think the songs are better for it - they seem a bit tighter and less meandering than any of their direct analogues on the previous albums.

I also attended a Stephen R. Donaldson book signing for the first book in "The Last Chronicles of Thomas Convenant". Donaldson was an entertaining speaker because he didn't hold back out of politeness when hitting out at more questionable aspects of the publishing industry (e.g. Lester Del Ray's insistence that you cannot have a female protagonist) or other undeservingly popular SF/Fantasy authors (e.g. Terry Brooks becoming the Shannara only author).

I picked up Donaldson's latest book, but I haven't cracked it open yet. Instead, I've been going through "The Daughter of Regals and Other Tales". The title story was a nice little fantasy piece with a nice lycanthropic twist on magic. I'm now in the middle of Gilden-fire, which is an outtake from "The Ilearth War". Given the amount of uninterrupted reading time I'll have over the next few weeks, it'll be much easier to digest short stories. Plus it doesn't hurt that I've become a bigger fan of the short story format.

Please note that all of these opinions are subject to change on further examination so take these scratchings only as snapshot opinions.