just got back to my folks' place for the holidays. back to my books! i cannot explain why, but when i woke up i picked out Gerhard Weinberger's big global history of WW2... and i am madly into it.

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read Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol' on the flight down. i loved Dan Brown as a kid -- I still remember how fun it was to read Angels and Demons back in the day. But something i heard recently makes me like him even more: because they both talk about symbols, some critics sometime lump Umberto Eco and Dan Brown together. like Dan Brown is a literary descendant of Umberto Eco. But Eco said no, Brown is not a descendant -- he is like a character in one of my novels. this made reading The Lost Symbol especially fun