Read John Connolly's "The Infernals," sequel to his YA-ish "The Gates." I kind of like these books, except where I can't quite figure how much they're serious or not. They play it awfully straight every now and then. (The paean's to the protagonist's "pure soul," for example.)
Started reading "Deadly Invention," which so far basically posits that "race" as we understand it in the modern world is a fundamentally meaningless term that was constructed whole cloth out of a variety of political and social forces, and yet still continues to serve as a basis for a lot of ongoing scientific research despite the fact that, for example, three random people from sub-Saharan Africa are genetically more different from each other than from someone in Denmark. I think she takes a little long to rev up her actual point (such that I almost put the book down, since it was almost a chapter and a half before she admitted that, yes, there are genetic variances among the human population and it's just the issue that they don't map to anything remotely resembling what we think of as the major "races," i.e. Caucasian, Asian, Amerind, African, etc., and the first part of the book is just her repeatedly stating that race is meaningless without getting into her REASONS for making that statement. Now that she's talking science and explaining her thought processes, I'm with the program again.)
