I’ve got my spies on you!

So picking up about my life (from yesterday) I was going to say what I thought would be the most ideal thing in the world, but the truth is that I really don’t know anymore.  I guess it slipped my mind, but my life is kind of unsettled like that right now.

I do feel pretty accomplished, though, because my Twitter bot for the Daily Chum has been a huge success, and the flickr group I also started for the chum is looking like it might take off.  So that’s all well and good, but it will be pretty sad when the bot has more followers than I do, which it’s looking like it will happen pretty soon.  Also! I’ve been twittering haikus I wrote for Wendy’s Haiku contest over the past couple of days and I want people to vote on them here tomorrow, so be sure that you come back then!

On to the business of the day, my first book of the summer!  The book was Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History by Ernest Volkman; I really enjoyed it.  It was kinda panned in both the professional and amateur reviews on Amazon, but I suppose I’m just burnt out and easy to please because it was really fun to read.  The book is made up of very short concise biographies of significant figures in 20th Century espionage and they’re grouped according to what kind of agent they were.  In my experience (and I have some, I tried to create a fantasy-medieval era intelligence ring for a story) it is really hard to get any concise details on anything espionage-related (for good reason I think) but I feel like this book is a good way to become a bit more familiar with the language and terminology.  I generally prefer biography to straight up history because it tends to be more linear and I care more about it because there is a story.  I think this book is good for people with a general interest but no previous knowledge, it’s a little like reading the wikipedia entries on all of these guys, but I have derived hours of entertainment from reading wikipedia entries so I’m ok with that.  Also, because I bought the book at half price books, I think it’s a good way to do a little reading and discover what else I would like to read about in this field, I know now that I should look for stuff more specifically about historical espionage (there’s stuff on American Civil and Revolutionary War espionage) and if I were more interested in anyone in the book, I would then be able to track down longer biographies of them.  As it is I wouldn’t go seeking anything, but if I run across a biography of H.A.R. Philby or someone else at the library or HPB I would probably pick it up.