Back to work! It felt good to actually accomplish something for a change.

I finished No Angel by Penny Vincenzi last night--all 630 pages. The suspense builds and builds to the last page, so I was not able to put the book down despite the need to make a huge salad for the two of us, groom Sophie (she did not approve!), and vacuum up her dog hair. I heartily recommend it (the book, not the idiotic housework), if you enjoy sprawling English sagas. Vincenzi is religious about including only accurate historical detail; I was especially interested in all the information about life in a British publishing house in the early 20th century. Fun stuff!

News from Ebrary
This week's edition of Publishers Weekly includes a report on great gains at Ebrary.com. Evidently the "online information retrieval service," which I prefer to think of as an online library, increased its customer base by 300% in 2003. I signed on this year and find it valuable for all sorts of research needs. By posting only five dollars via credit card, I have access to its library of 20,000 books from over 175 publishers. Of course Questia offers many more titles, but it's also much more expensive.

I've found Ebrary rich in all kinds of computer books. It's less useful for historical research, my main game, but nevertheless has some titles I'm looking for. Brand new titles are included as well as older works. By the way, once you've paid the five-dollar minimum (you can pay more if you want), you can browse and read any book you want. Ebrary only charges the user for copying--twenty-five cents a page.