Lucy brought in a slow worm this morning. That’s nothing new, but it’s the first time she’s brought one in alive, in one piece. I shooed her away and picked it up to throw it outside. It immediately knotted itself around my fingers and squeezed with more strength than you would think a tiny thing could manage! I grabbed my camera:

The very tip of its tail was sharp. I wonder what it thought it was doing by poking me with it.

They’re a protected species in the UK, meaning it’s actually illegal to kill or injure them, so I put it down and watched it slither for a bit. It seemed to find it harder to move on stone than through grass.

Is it trying to tell me something? I guess a thank you would be nice.

Click for a closer look at the worm’s encounter with a woodlouse. Neither seemed too interested in the other.

It kept flicking its tongue out, doing its best impression of a snake, but slow worms are neither worms nor snakes. They are lizards. You can sort of tell if you look into their eyes.

I’m sorry to say that people often aren’t my first priority, so I am continually surprised when I decide to notice them.

Today I walked into town to buy some onions and carrots to make a risotto. In front of me in the queue was a middle-aged man. He looked like Ronnie Corbett. On the checkout were a small tin of mushy peas, a single-serving pork pie, and three large bottles of beer. Dinner and intoxication for one? Perhaps. But on the fourth finger of his paying hand was a wedding ring.

Fuck. I have a lot to learn.

I just finished reading The System of the World, the final volume of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. It took me 3 years, nearly half as long as the author took to write it, although admittedly I was hardly reading it full-time.

The cycle is a vast, sprawling mess. It’s set in and around 17th century London, and other exotic locations. The pages give a filthy, rotten, accurate account of life without modernity, from muddy battlefields and corpse-wading in Ireland and galley-slavery in the Mediterranean, to the climactic jailbreak out through London’s monumentally filthy sewers, busting up out of a whorehouse bog. The pages almost stink. It’s great.

The major characters are folks such as the Duke of Marlborough, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and the Hanoverian royal family, but that doesn’t stop Neal Stephenson from indulging in characteristic all-out geekery, naming a character after a UNIX command. The story may be set 300 years ago, and the author may overindulge in lurid descriptions of medieval swashbuckling, but it is nevertheless Science Fiction. This is quite remarkable, because only a single element of the entire plot is non-real; Stephenson has written a non-SF book in the style of a SF book. As a sort-of-prequel to Cryptonomicon, the geekery is required. There is a cross-stitch-based cryptosystem, steampunk computation, prior art to general relativity, and even what may be a sly reference to BitTorrent.

I bought all three volumes as they were released, years ago. They’re gigantic, hefty Tomes with gorgeous painted covers, and boy do they look beautiful on a bookshelf. I expect that’s where they’ll stay from now on. The series is 3,000 pages long - twice the length of War and Peace, another summer reading project (except that one only took one summer). These books are astonishing achievements, but my verdict is ultimately the same for both: they’re 5-10 times longer than an average book, but not 5-10 times better. If the author could’ve swallowed a little pride and hired a more ruthless editor (was there even a non-ruthless editor?), the dozens of incredibly clever, interesting, funny, and enlightening passages could’ve met each other without being separated by what ended up being the novel’s crucial flaw: too many words.