Thank God It's Election Day!!  I am so sick of all the nasty advertising that has been going on around here.  And, I don't know if it's better or worse that most of the ads are for races that I can't even vote in.  It certainly makes me glad Minnesota isn't considered a "swing state" because I can't imagine having double, let alone quintuple, the ads I've been barraged with.  Still, GO VOTE!

I also finished reading "Foreigner" by C.J. Cherryh last night (it is this month's Geeks Read book http://beta.geekpartnership.org/wp/clubs/geeks-read/).  This is really a novel in two parts that don't really work well together.  The first part is comprised of the first two "books", each of which is essentially a short story.  The first one tells how a colony ship from Earth got lost, damaged and ended up at an unknown planet.  The second one take place and unclear time in the future (maybe 100 years) as the humans start setting up a base on the planet and make first contact with the indigenous people.

The second part of the novel (which is the third "book") takes place 200 years later.  We find out there has been a war between the natives and the humans that ended in a stalemate (or each side thinking the other won), which resulted in a treaty that put the human population on a single island, with promises to exchange technology for peace [the native had gunpowder and a preliminary rail system, but no computers or other 20th century tech).   The story centers around the human "paidhi" to the natives, which is their term for an advisor/ambassador (but with other nuances as well), who is the only human allowed off the island and is their single point of contact.  The plot revolves around an unlicensed assassination attempt against the human and the attempts to both protect him as well as find out the reason and people responsible.  The story revolves around the human's problems understanding the natives.  He can speak the language, but has a lot of problems understanding the culture (they have 14 words for betrayal but none for friend or trust, and they hide any sense of emotion as far as he can tell).

As I said, I didn't feel the two parts of the book worked together.  The short stories contain characters that are never mentioned outside the stories, and have very little relevance to the main story (they could have been left out entirely or covered in a couple of sentences of internal or external dialogue).  I did like the main/second part of the novel for the most part (I'm still unsure about the ending).  It gives a very good idea of what it is like to be a foreigner thrust into a culture they don't understand, the treading on eggshells to try and not give insult while at the same time not understanding is something said or done was considered an insult in the first place (or why).  This makes for interesting reading, but not necessarily quick.  I found myself reading for a chapter or two (or maybe a half hour at a time) and stopping and wanting to ask the protagonist why he didn't try explaining things differently (or asking in a different manner).

So, to sum up, it is a book that I found worth reading and am looking forward to discussing next week.  However, feel free to skip the early parts.