There really isn't a better distraction to morning traffic
than watching a slug make it's way across your windshield.
I noticed the slimy bugger around I35 and Johnson:
by I35 and 75th it was well on its way to committing self-slugicide:
I'd never been had the luxury of being on the underside of a moving slug and, with the sun shining at just the right angle, I could watch the rapid undulations that propelled it along my car. And that was some neat stuff. Fare well, yon slugster. I'm sure you're smushed on the highway somewhere around 95th and 69. May you provide a decent brunch for some brave bird.
Something that's not so neat: the Left Behind books. I got about 1/3 into the first one and then just couldn't take any more hackery. Besides, if I wanted to read a fictionalized account of the Ending to End All Endings, I'd read Revelations. Eschatology seems an idle pursuit.
Anyway, here's why I bring up these vomited books:
Having read 13 of the Left Behind novels, a popular series of 15 books selling around 70 million copies since the mid-1990s, I can certainly say the books are very novel-like. On the surface they seem to embrace all the elements novels contain: characters, plots, settings. They tell stories of past, current or future events. They claim to offer much in the same fictional substance as science fiction or thriller genre fiction, and in many ways they do. But below these veneers, there are important questions we should ask ourselves: Are these fictional and novel-like Left Behind books, in fact, novels at all? Can we call them novels, in the traditional sense? Or are they pseudo-novels, a form of manipulation of the novel for other means? Does it even matter how they are defined? Does the political coloring of an individual reader determine if that person sees the books as novels or not?