I picked this up last Sunday after finishing HP6 at midnight of the day I received it (at 4:00), and began to read it this Monday when I realized oops, bookclub Thursday. I finished it on the plane, with One Hundred Years of Solitude-type anticipation, listening to Peter Gabriel's Long Walk Home over the Wasatch Plateau in Utah. I don't care if I loved it because it was a good vacation book; I loved it because I loved it and that's fine for me.
It had some Replay, and a bit of Sunshine and other Robin McKinley (I nearly automatically crush on long red hair, McKinley heroines and Polyhymnia O'Keefe alike). As Jeffrey Eugenides says in Middlesex, the gun on the wall in the first act must be used by the final curtain, and that happened, but I'm not averse to Standard Literary Techniques. The character of Kimy reminded me of Ruth Gordon. Also, House of the Spirits: Clara and Alba, though not Blanca.
At book club we discussed Clara as Penelope and Henry as Odysseus. Hmm.
Before my flight home, we hied ourselves out of Union Square, where the hotel hulked, into the Tenderloin for some real food. I thought I wasn't hungry, but I was wrong. Saag, naan, beef in one preparation, lamb in another, and I thought I was going to die of overstimulation of the palate. We've got Indian food in Denver, but not Pakistani, and not this good that I've found. It was a total hole in the wall whose primary business was take-out, so I shoved our leftovers into a bowl, paved the top with naan, popped a lid on it, and called it dinner. But then I had to leave the city where we ate tremenous dim sum for $18, spectacular Peruvian at all (Sabor Latino in Denver is yummy, but it's General South American), and perfectly flavored Pakistani. Sigh.