My work lately consists of what I would call “eternal reading.” I break it up with video games every few hours to prevent myself from reaching critical brain-drain mass, but it’s still a ton of reading. Speaking of which, I finally beat Radiant Dawn yesterday. That game is long.

Anyway, back to reading. I can’t really update much here when my life is all about books for the next few months, although I suppose I could write about how Heath Ledger just died. That’d be neat, right? Instead, I’m going to do two things.

1) I’ve approved my friend Hannah to post a feature, and I’ll be finishing up the administrative aspect of getting that working tonight. She actually emailed this to me last week, before I went to the mountains. (holy crap, we left a week ago today? :-O)

2) I’m going to post some quotes from the books. Some of these I’ve mentioned elsewhere already, and I won’t repeat them, so for today here’s a previously-unreleased quote from The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton.

A favorite object was cats — cats tied up in bags, cats suspended from ropes, or cats burned at the stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, while the Courimauds of Saint Chamond preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. In parts of Burgundy and Lorraine they danced around a kind of burning May pole with a cat tied to it. In the Metz region they burned a dozen cats at a time in a basket on top of a bonfire…Although the practice varied from place to place, the ingredients were everywhere the same: a bonfire, cats, and an aura of hilarious witch-hunting.

So there you have it. France.