When I don't enjoy reading, and when I do

Some of the stuff I've been reading for my MLIS course is sooo dry. Things I've found interesting were:
1. Positivism vs Post-modernism as applied to information managementm,
2. Public libraries as a symbol of democracy (or is it really just a typically American thing?) and
3. Whether public libraries should deal in pop culture, or restrict themselves to the 'serious' stuff.

What I've found boring includes very long articles on models of communication, and scholarly communication respectively.

I don't think it's impossible to present complex ideas in an interesting way - Carl Sagan did it really well. But most scholars don't write like Carl Sagan. Most seem to want to prove that they know lots of really big words, and can write really long sentences. Articles like that make me reach for the Buffy books. Even scholarly Buffy writing is usually readable.

On a happier note, I've finished two of the four novellas which make up Volume III of Tales of the Slayer.

The first is about a Slayer from an Anasazi community, who is disadvantaged by a complete lack of Watcher-ly knowledge. And she dies too soon for me to get to know her.

The second one I liked better - it's about a Chinese Slayer, set around the time of the Boxer rebellion. Of course, I immediately thought she must be the one of the two Slayers whom Spike killed. But this isn't ever made obvious, so maybe there were two successive Chinese Slayers? This Slayer gets more chance to develop, and probably the fact that she's Chinese made her more interesting to me. There's also a very strong feminist theme to this story - not surprising considering how oppressed Chinese women were at the time.

I'm looking forward to the next two tales, plus getting on with the other four books I'm in the middle of (and those are just the fun reads!).