Book Foo and a Meme!

Start off with a book foo:
Finished: Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower Book IV), by Stephen King (reread)
Started: The Wolves of the Calla (Dark Tower Book V), by Stephen King (reread)

Wizard and Glass is probably my least favorite of the Dark Tower books. I can also imagine it must have been somewhat unsatisfying for readers who read them as they cam out. (spoilers behind the cut, but only for up to this book)
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Finished: Tesseracts 4 (short story collection)
Started: Tesseracts 5 (short story collection)

Yes, more Canadian short stories. This one's a bit amusing because it contains two stories by people I've interacted with. Karl Schroeder (who I met for the library's Writer-In-Residence thing back in February) co-wrote a short story "The Toy Mill", about a little girl and an evil Santa (I believe they later turned it into a novel/novella), and Allan Weiss, who writes a story called "Ants", taught a class I took in "Apocalyptic Science Fiction". At the time I'd never read anything of his (that I can recall), though I was aware he was a SF writer.

Those two stories were among the better ones in the anthology, which is a little on the uninspiring side. Another writer who I've been exposed to mostly through the Tesseracts series that I'm becoming rather fond of is Elisabeth Vonarburg, a Quebec-based writer who writes in French (her stories are translated, of course, for I read very little french). They're a bit hard to describe, but there are some neat ideas and images in the ones I've read so far and unlike a lot of other-language translations, they don't feel especially stilted or awkward. Actually lately I've become more interested in SF in translation from other languages and cultures, just to see what ideas they have that I can steal... err, I mean, that might be missing in more mainstream works. (I suppose steal, too, but only in the sense that, particularly in SF, writers are frequently inspired by ideas of others, not stealing the story directly but one idea and going in a completely different way with it). Unfortunately I'm not QUITE interested in it enough to want to buy a new anthology or translated novel (though there are a couple of translated Japanese SF novelsreleased lately that sound interesting, they're all in hardcover or overpriced oversized TPB format. Publish in normal paperback, then we'll talk) , but I do try to keep an eye on used bookstores for things like it.

Now, off of books for a moment and to a meme: (although if you want to do it on a book character, you can!)
Name a character from one of my fandoms/shows/anything and I'll give you:

(a) Three facts about them from my personal fanon.
(b) A reason he/she sucks.
(c) A reason he/she is amazing.
(d) Five things that I'd like to see happen to them.
(e) Five people that I can't ship that character with and why.

Since I doubt I'll get many different people participating, and it seems like a kind of fun thing to do, if you WANT, you can ask me more than one.

And finally, I believe I'll be going to my work's XMas party next weekend. Yay for me being slightly less than a total hermit with no social life. Although I don't expect anything other than an awkward lonely experience in a bigger crowd than my usual solitary lonely experiences, at least there'll be a free meal thrown intp the deal.