@alchematrix: When it comes to "fat" stories, I try to never read the comments anywhere except places like Jezebel, Feministing, etc... because anything about fat seems to make a large percentage of people lose their damn minds.

@funchefchick: Both pics were/are of Beth Ditto, lead singer of The Gossip.

The NY Times has a piece today about why there are still so few plus-size retailers. (I think, frankly, it lets the industry off the hook a bit too much. But it does make some interesting points, and doesn't condescend to fat consumers.)

I don't know if people have brought this up yet, but I thought the two chase scenes were the crux of the book—and masterfully done. The first in which Borlu is chasing and simultaneously "unseeing" the assassin who's in the other city; the second in which, because he's operating as Breach, he has the ability to…

Sorry, but sometimes as a adult it is absolutely your job to "control" your kids—not just for the sake of others, but to protect the kids (no running into traffic, for example).

@ibbers: I seem to recall that he famously called Tolkien a "wen on the arse of fantasy."

@Dr Emilio Lizardo: Fair enough. I was thinking more of fantasy, not noir/detective fiction in this case. And since I agree that this is less a fantasy book and more detective fiction, your point stands. (Though it does make me want to go back and re-read Jonathan Lethem's "Gun, with Occasional Music" and think about…

@cyberathena: No, I don't think it's always about money—and especially not in fantasy or sci fi.

@Briareosdx: I agree. It's also, I think, not just about utterly screwed up people, but about the utterly screwed up nature of late-stage capitalism when it comes to the creation of nations, national identity, personal identity, etc....and how those divisions are enforced through ideological means that serve the…

@bookwench: I can see how you'd be disappointed if you went into it expecting straight-up urban fantasy, but I don't think this book was really meant to be read as fantasy or sci fi (although I think he's playing with those reader expectations). I saw it more as urban detective fiction with kafka-esque (to use an…

I'm wondering how much inspiration Mieville took from Ernest Mandel's study of the history of the detective novel, "Delightful Murder." One of the things Mandel notes is the various "rules" of crime fiction and in particular, the concept of "fairness" —the idea that the reader knows what the detective knows, and…

So Loki is Jan Brady?

@BAngieB: I didn't accuse you of thinking that. As I said, however, the jury clearly did think the victim was asking for it...and I think there's a connection in the general public between thinking a woman is putting herself at risk and thinking a woman is "asking for it."

@BAngieB: Or the lesson could be that people shouldn't pull down a woman's top when she says no? And that a cameraperson who captures an act like that on film should delete the film (or, better yet, save it for the cops) because it's an assault?

There's a special place in hell for Joe Francis.

@Tyler Childers: They're strictly Old Testament, so to speak. None of that "turn the other cheek" business. More like "burning eternally in a lake of fire."

@magicwaffle: Ok, sorry for the overreaction and thanks for the explanation. (Sometimes my sarcasm-meter is off...and, sadly, I've met far too many people who think that all Muslims are woman-hating/woman-stoning extremists.)

@magicwaffle: Umm, what? That's pretty damn racist. Most Muslims DO NOT practice stoning. And in this specific case, Palestinian society is not uniformly Muslim, and the form of Islam that is practiced tends not to be of the fundamentalist/Wahabbist sort.

@lavenderstain: He might lie for the same reason, for example, that a small number of African Americans may have chosen to "pass" as white in the pre-civil rights era in the US, or some Jews living in various parts of the world would lie about being Jewish at various times: because Palestinians living inside of Israel…

@enderwiggin13: Until Mieville and Larsson came along, I doubt two Trotskyists had ever made it onto the US bestseller lists in the same year.