international nut of pastry - I think this lines mostly filler.

Two new books today, both by Chuck Palahniuk.

Rant - Rant is told in the form of an oral biography. The main character, Buster Landru "Rant" Casey, is already deceased. Various people discuss their memories of Buster and the world he lived in, presenting stories that occasionally conflict. In the first sentence of the first interview, a character says he "didn't meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead," setting the stage for the convolutions later in the story.

Lullaby - Lullaby is the story of Carl Streator, a newspaper reporter who has been assigned to write articles on a series of cases of sudden infant death syndrome, from which his own child had died. Streator discovers that his wife and child had died immediately after he read them a "culling song," or African chant, from a book entitled Poems and Rhymes Around the World. As Streator learns, the culling song has the power to kill anyone it is spoken to or even thought in the direction of. During his investigations into other SIDS cases for his article, he finds that a copy of the book was at the scene of each death. In every case, the book was open to a page that contained "culling song." Streator unintentionally memorizes the deadly poem and he semi-voluntarily becomes a serial killer (killing, for example, annoying radio hosts and people who elbow into an elevator when he is late for work). He then turns to Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who has also found the culling song in the same book and knows of its destructive power. While she is unable to help him stop using the culling song, she is willing to help him stop anyone else from being able to use it again. The two of them decide to go on a road trip across the country to find all remaining copies of the book and remove and destroy the page containing the song. They are joined by Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, and Mona's boyfriend, an eco-terrorist named Oyster. Streator now must not only deal with the dangers of the culling song, but with the risk of it falling into the hands of Oyster, who may want to use it for sinister purposes.

Still only half way through "Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made". Which is a series of stories by Andy Hertzfeld regarding the creation of the Macintosh computer. Some of the stories in the book come from this site.