I spent the day in bed reading, as I’m wont to do when I’m all sniffly and sick.  I finished off M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, which was mostly brilliant (the book, not my finishing it*), and started on Charles de Lint’s Widdershins, because de Lint is, like Haruki Murakami, perfect sick-in-bed light reading.

I’m about two hundred pages in, and I’m not really sure I care for the plot, which is the standard warring fairy factions fare.  This is something I’ve encountered in a few of de Lint’s books, actually, this sort of vague apathy towards certain narratives, but I keep on going back for the characters.  De Lint is a master at creating characters you want to spend time with.

It actually goes beyond the notion of sympathetic characters, I think, and rather extends to that of likeable characters.  De Lint’s characters are clearly those that he wants to spend time with, too, which is something that can be readily seen in the undeniable similarity of their backgrounds and aspirations and the general Heart of Goldness emanating from even the most downtrodden of his characters.  They’re people you want as friends (which make you feel a little voyeuristic perving in their windows), rather than as characters to which plot (plot = bad stuff) happens.

*the internal ambiguity pointer-outerer can never be silenced, I’m afraid