Bad Writing and Good Writing

I finally gave up trying to read Empress by Karen Miller. The writing was compelling for most of the book, but I never cared about any of the characters. I finally stopped about 20 pages from the end.

Also today, we had a pre-field meeting for some drilling we'll be doing next week. Our staff geologist from Japan was going down our checklist, and I noted something interesting about her notepad. While she was taking notes on tasks required of her for after the meeting in English, I noticed that the notes on the folded over pages were in Japanese. It just tickled me that she was doing that. It's like a totally different form of shorthand.