Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

When my evil twin tells me I need to go read a book, I listen, and I always find myself falling in love with yet another book! "Night Watch" is no exception and I can hardly wait to read the rest of the series! Originally written in Russian, the entire series has been translated into English for us by Andrew Bromfield. We're very fortunate that he did, Russian is a difficult language to learn, and I would be sad if I had missed out on reading this book because of that!

"Night Watch" begins a dark saga that pits the classic good versus evil, but with a twist. In this world there are what they call the "Others," people who can operate in the Twilight of the world, and these others are divided into agents of the Light and agents of the Dark. The agents of the Light form the Night Watch and it is their charge to keep an eye on the agents of the Dark during the night and make sure they don't cross any boundaries.

Now you're probably nodding along and going, "uh huh, I don't see anything strange about that." Well, the part that might throw you is that the agents of the Dark form what's called the Day Watch and their job is to make sure, during the day light, that the agents of the Light don't overstep their boundaries.

"Wait a second," you're probably thinking, "how can the good guys overstep their bounds?" Well, it's actually rather easy when you find out that the agents of the light and the agents of the dark formed and agreement years ago to prevent themselves from killing the world with their wars. Now each is allowed a certain amount of activity, but everything must be kept in balance, every good act means an equal bad act is allowable and so forth.

For many on the watch this is all part of the job, and they go about it without too much thought. When a mid-level agent named Anton finds himself pulled into the struggles for power and the intrigues surrounding them, he also finds himself questioning how the entire system works and the very nature of good and evil themselves.

Life Get's Complicated

Have you ever noticed that? Life can be super complicated some times. Mine sure seems to have a bad habit of doing that! Anyone who knows me would probably agree.

Lately the reason I haven't been on here is that I've been a wee bit distracted. Ok. More than wee bit if you want me to be honest. I haven't posted about it because at first we didn't really know anything. Then, once we did, I've been too emotional to want to talk about it.

My brother, I tend to call him Psycho, has stage 4 cancer. T cell hystocite rich B cell lymphoma to be exact. Don't know what that is? Well of course you don't! It's a rather rare form. It's a variant on a form of Non-Hodgkins lymphoma's that accounts for 40% of that category, but this variant accounts for only 1-3% of that. So yah, pretty rare.

The good news is that it tends to react like the larger group that it's a part of, so the docs have a good idea of to treat it, and they are very hopeful for his chances.

The bad news is that it's spread into a lot of places in his upper body. Just in the last two weeks he's had two more lymph nodes that have enlarged in his neck and we can feel them and see one of them. Don't know about you, but that shakes me up a bit.

We've had quite the adventure so far, and that's how I'm trying to take this, as just another adventure. It took the doctors some time to identify exactly what was wrong, so we could start treating it. So we'd get to appointments and it would be, "Well we know some more, but...." They ended up operating on his neck to take out one of the lymph nodes and that gave us the final diagnosis.

So now the next step in the adventure is to treat this. Chemo starts tomorrow, and I know we're all kind of waiting to see how it affects him. I know, deep inside, that we're not going to lose him, but the road to the other side might be really rough. We'll find out!

I'm so proud of Gordon, he's been really strong through all of this, and his faith has inspired me! He's spent the last couple of years taking care of me while I was really sick, now it's my turn to do the same for him.

I'll try to keep you guys updated from time to time, and I'm going to be trying to post more book reviews again. I have a back log in my files like you wouldn't believe! And the back log to write up is pretty impressive right now too. Or depressing :P

Books Read - January

I've been recording my books as I read them this last month. I thought it would be fun to actually have an  idea of how many books I've read, what they were, and what types of books. So here's the results for this month:

Just for the heck of it I made a pie chart. Why? Cuz I'm just that weird. Some books cross over into more than on category, like "How to speak Dragonese" is both Juvenile (JV) Fiction and Fantasy :)

I haven't figured out how to add the labels yet :P So the big purple section is fantasy - big surprise right? 14 books fall into that categories. The rose color is JV Fiction at 6. Scifi and YA are orange and light blue and they are both 2 books. The remaining 3 categories (Romance, Adventure, Dark Fantasy) account for the smallest sections at 1 book each.

And letting go of my type A personality now to go and craft LOL