Breaking up with Tom Clancy

Yesterday I woke up too early, my first Berlin insomniac attack.

I'd gone to see Miss Kittin the night before, got home at 3am, and thought I'd read a gripping tale of hate-crime-happy neo-Nazis and the international agents out to stop them - a Tom Clancy's Games of State - before falling asleep.

I've since stopped because that book sucked. I'm giving this whole crime novel phase one more try and then it's time to move on.

The point at which I threw Tom Clancy across the room was when the agent in a wheelchair, after escaping a high speed chase driven solely with his hands since he has no feet (love it), turns around and pursues the neo-Nazis into the woods of Wunstorf, Germany.

He's pissed that they tried to kill him, and fine, fair enough, but the whole wheelchair through the stream and mud and logs and up the rocky trail so steep that he has to drag it behind him while he presumably crawls with his arms was starting to make me go, "Really, Tom Clancy? Really?"

I wanted to believe it - I didn't want to TAKE HIS POWER AWAY - but I was gritting my teeth. Oh yeah, and a girl who the neo-Nazis had also tried to kill earlier dropped out of a tree WHERE SHE'D FALLEN ASLEEP and landed on the wheelchair agent's would-be assassin.

And THEN? She said in breathless chunks, "It's not...the first time...I've fallen for a guy." Oh God, make it stop.

How very witty for a 20-year-old college student who was innocently interning on a movie set when she got caught in Nazi crossfire and almost blown up in the wardrobe trailer. I would think she'd be shitting her pants just a little bit more than that. I wanted them all to be blown away, just get it over with.

I don't know how long it took for me to give up, I just know that at 7:30 AM I woke up, the sun streaming into my room, and I felt both completely sick from lack of sleep and totally wide awake. I hate starting days like that. I blame Tom Clancy.