I've been fairly MIA largely due to work taking over most of my life and spending the weekends catching up on the sleep I don't get during the week. This week will be no different since I have to help the Asst. U.S. Attorney handling on of my cases write an opposition brief to plaintiff's motion for leave to amend/supplement. The plaintiff wants to turn the complaint into a Chistmas tree and add 9 more counts. And as a special treat, he filed the motion to amend without actually attaching the proposed complaint, because it's apprarently not a requirement under the local rules in the district the case is in. There's basically no case law on this issue, because noone ever does that, not even pro se prisoners with 6th grade educations. Needless to say, my main argument will be that I'm prejudiced by the proposed amendments because I don't even know what they are.

And to make things even more delightful, I'm pretty sure I'm about to have a third federal court case dumped in my lap while all this is going on, and i'm in the middle of a bunch of large scale research projects and trying to to write a memo to a Sr. VP, which means my boss is going to edit it 46 times, and we're about to enter the end of fiscal year crunch and my boss and one of the paralegals I work with are back in the "whatever happened to baby jane phase of their relationship" with me in the middle.

On the plus side, before all this blew up in my face, I was reading through a quite large number of books this summer and by choosing the not particularly thick books from my TBR pile, I've been getting through a book or two a week just on the commute to and from work.

I've managed to work my way through most of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series. Most of his backlist is out of print, so I ended up buying a lot of used paperbacks off ebay and half.com and from the DC library. Most recently i've been working my way through his short fiction collections, Duo, Casefile and Scenarios. The first half of the series is a bit uneven. The first book in the series The Snatch is a great Chandleresque detective story and an amazing debut for his long-runing series. The second book, ,The Vanished is very not particularly impressive but then the third in the series ,Undercurrent, is also a really, really good classic noir mystery. Most of the series falls into the solid but not brilliant category, and it's been interesting filling in the gaps of my knowledge from having read the books in random order when i could find them in the library. I'm pretty sure Pronzini has taken advantage of his backlist being out of print to shave at least a decade off of Nameless' age. A lot of the books are kind of bleak, which is fitting for a noir detective. Over the course of the series, his girlfriend dumps him (The Vanished/Scattershot), he thinks he might have cancer (the first 3 or 4 books), one of his army buddies betrays him (Blowback) he loses his detective license(Scattershot), he's stabbed (The Snatch), he's shot (Dragonfire), he gets in a fight with his partner Eberhart that breaks up their partnership (Epitaphs and Quarry) and then Eberhart commits suicide (illusions). On the plus side, he meets the woman who evenutally becomes his beloved wife (Hardcase) at a pulp writers convention (Hoodwink), takes on an assistant who brings him into the computer age (Hardcase) and eventually becomes a partner in his firm, adopts a kid (Crazybone), takes on a third operative in his business (Nightcrawlers) and generally develops a slightly less jaundiced view of life and humanity.