between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I've given up trying to remember and record all the books I read while I was sick. They were Many, and I've forgotten most of their plots. Except in the case of Dorothy L. Sayers: Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night must be two of the best books anywhere, with Busman's Honeymoon running close in third.

But since my memory started working again, there've been a couple of books worth remembering.

Mary Gentle's Ilario: The Lion's Eye is one of them. Set in the same alternate history universe as her Ash: A Secret History, but earlier.

The main character is Ilario, a hermaphrodite and former King's Freak of the court of Taraconensis. I can't tell you what the story's about: Gentle is too complex a writer for me to do that; but I can tell you it takes place all over the Med, from Carthage under the Penitence, to the crumbling Rome of the Empty Chair, to Venice, to Alexandria-in-Exile - Constantinople, where Pharaoh Ty-ameny rules over the last remnant of Egypt. There are golems, and assassins, and eunuchs, and mercenaries, and artists, and kings.

I love Gentle's work with the very great love. Ilario isn't the book that Ash was: it's very, very different. But equally good.

Elizabeth Bear (matociquala)'s Carnival - well, what can I say? Diplomats, spies, remnant alien cities, a future about as strange as anyone could wish for, much plotty goodness, and, oh. So many twisted and conflicted loyalties.

It kept me up all night reading. Read it.

---

Eragon is an enjoyable film, if you aren't expecting too much from it. It suffers from, perhaps, a slight overdose of the clichés - ( spoilery, if you care ) - and an urge to offer homage to the LotR trilogy with every second sweeping camera angle, but the dragon is lovely and Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich are both extraordinary actors - Irons, in particular, is magnificent.

If you don't mind the - at times - outrageously stilted dialogue, it's actually quite a good film.

---

Season's greetings. Whatever holiday you're celebrating this time of year, have a good one.

Next week is Freshers' Week at college.

So I suppose I ought to do this now, else it will never get done.

( Books: Farthing, The Secrets of Jin-Shei, The Hidden Queen, Changer of Days, and Fires of the Faithful )

In other news, I've noticed that my cat, who got drenched when he went out, is now sitting on my bed.

Dry bed. Wet cat.

It's not such a dry bed anymore.


---

*Or, I should say, shelves.

Things done today: went running on the beach. Discovered that live firing exercises were in progress at the army-range-cum-airfield adjacent to the beach, and was turned back halfway through the run by a nice young man in uniform (I'll cop to being unobservant: I didn't see the warning flag) who looked like he'd been stuck with the boring job of turning back other people as unobservant as myself.

No one wants to risk being bullet-riddled by accident, least of all me, so I'm glad they had someone out there.

---

At the library this evening, I ran into someone I knew from school. She was three years ahead of me, but we were both members of the Bad Poets' Society (AKA the school writers' group: I cringe in memory. She wasn't a bad poet, though; quite the contrary, a prizewinning one.), so we were friendly enough. She's just finished her degree (going back this year to start a Ph.D. in children's literature) and she was telling me that one of her final year options was in Old Norse/Icelandic literature.

I am reconfirmed in my desire to read the sagas. Preferably in the original, should I ever finagle the time to learn Old Norse.

---

Brought home from the library: Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel and The Enemy by Lee Child. Can't remember whether I ever read this particular Child book before. Possibly.

I'm not really going for the brain food in books, lately.

---

Books. Well, the postman didn't perform the usual miracles. I still await Farthing and Fires of the Faithful. I suppose I shouldn't have hoped to have them earlier than the beginning of next week, but, well. An Post so frequently does bring packages to my door earlier than I ever expected them.

Instead, my reading this week consisted of:

The Invisible Ring, Anne Bishop. Set in the same world as Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy. Nicely paced, with well-drawn characters and fairly... lush, I think the word is... worldbuilding. Jared, a red-jewelled warlord slave who killed his last mistress, is bought by a rather infamous queen. All is not, however, precisely as it seems, and when Jared discovers that, he has a choice to make.

The book is more about Jared's internal world and his growth from slave into man than anything else, though the intrigues present in the background - and occasionally the foreground - are quite central to the character arc.

I've enjoyed the Black Jewels trilogy. I enjoyed this book, too. Despite that, I've a niggling bone or two to pick: I don't like the fact that Dorothea SaDiablo, antagonist, is Evil with a capital E. Mutilation and execution out of pure sadism don't get a ruler very far, particularly when such threats are deployed against your allies as well as your enemies. Cf. all the insane emperors, kings, and dictators of history, and just exactly how long they lasted, on average, when everyone knew they weren't safe from a royal or imperial caprice.

I don't like characters who are Evil for the sake of it. A little bit evil-with-a-small-e, fine, but chopping up genitals left and right is just a leetle bit too far over the top for me. It's right up there with the Bad Guy who tortures puppies and kittens.

Snake Agent, Liz Williams. A superb, and I mean absolutely superb, urban fantasy. Well, part fantasy, part science fiction, all fun. Chen is a detective inspector with the Singapore Three police department, with responsibility for supernatural crime. When a soul that was supposed to go to Heaven ends up in Hell, instead, Chen gets involved in a perilous investigation into the illegal trade in souls.

Oh, did I mention? His wife's a demon, his patron goddess is offended at him, his colleagues don't trust him and the other person investigating the soul trade is one of Hell's own vice officers, Seneshal Zhu Irzh.

And the stakes are getting higher all the time...

Read it. Read it now. Go forth and get your hands on a copy immediately.

I'll wait.

---

I've started Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides. Looks interesting, but it's not compelling me to read on. Bit like Robert Charles Wilson's Spin, in that way. I've been at page 106 of that for the last month. Yeah, yeah, pretty concept. I mean, it's really pretty, okay? But damn, man, Tyler is getting the hell all over my nerves, and Jason and Diane, as seen from Tyler's point of view, annoy me even worse.

Pretty, pretty idea. But please couldn't it have been done without the feels-like-a-trainwreck-in-progress soap opera character stuff?

Air is sitting on my shelf staring at me, too. The big red letters on the spine look kind of accusing.

The shelf of I'll-read-it-sometime-soon-but-not-now (IRISSBNN) books is all male authors, now, and has been for a while. Some of those guys have been there since the first week in August. Oops.

Soon, guys. Soon. Just not right now.

In the past week, there was running around like some combination of a headless chicken and a blue-arsed fly; a job interview*, some getting-up-early-to-go-running-barefoot-on-beaches - I need running for my sanity, and I enjoy it, but I'd forgotten how painful running is when you haven't been in practice, and how bruised your feet can get if you land hard on the wrong shaped stones - a small shipment from Amazon and a trip to the library.

From Amazon:

Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword. Having read The Hero and the Crown and very much enjoyed it, I went straightaway to get my hands on this one.

It is, alas, very much Not For Me. Lovely, lyrical language, smooth prose and progression, an interesting setup... And I felt not an inkling of connection with Harry Crewe, the heroine, who seems to spend the entire novel floating along on the road that Destiny foreordained for her, and not making decisions about her own fate. In that respect she seems like an anti-Aerin, and doesn't do much protagging for a protagonist in her own right.

Naomi Kritzer, Turning the Storm.

This always happens to me. Always. I pick up the second book in a series/trilogy/duology, promising myself that I'll wait, I'll wait until I have the first book... and yet, somehow, I never do.

With Turning the Storm I have completely spoilered myself for the first book, Fires of the Faithful (which, with any luck, will arrive before next Friday), but it doesn't matter**, because Storm - see here for book description - works very well on its own, I think.

And I will admit it: I love this book as much or more than I loved Kritzer's Dead Rivers trilogy, and as such am incapable of seeing any flaws. She seems to have the knack of hitting all the right spots for me. Loyalty, bravery, peril, treachery, that sort of thing. It works.

From the library:

Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand. Interesting, intelligent and nuanced beyond my usual experience of YA fantasy. The djinni Bartimaeus makes for a fascinating narrator, and Nathaniel is young enough and arrogant enough to make an interesting*** foil. Both of them get in over their heads in a plot against the government. The footnotes were occasionally irritating, though.

Manda Scott, Boudica: Dreaming the Serpent Spear. The final book of the Boudica sequence.

There are very few books that have made me cry. All four of the Boudica books have done so. Scott is very, very good at what she does. Very, very good. She writes with power and passion and a clear, sparse lyricism, and each book of hers I've read has left me quiet inside.

If you haven't read the Boudica books, you should try them. Really.

In non-fiction, I'm working my (slow, steady) way through Wolfram von Soden's 1985 German work (translated in 1994, which is the version I am reading, of course) The Ancient Orient: An Introduction to the Study of the Ancient Near East. I am learning many new things, including the dubious historicality of Semiramis (Semu-rammat) and the complicated nature of attempting to piece together three millennia of layered history when all that's left are shards and fragments and philologists' nightmares. Next up is probably Plutarch's Roman Lives and possibly Marc van der Mieroop's A History of the Ancient Near East after that, with a possible sidetrip through the biography of a Polish countess in WWII.

Yes, I'm still avoiding Thucydides. Why do you ask?


*for which I will not get the job, but if I don't keep trying to get one, then this winter I'll have a choice between a new pair of runners and food. That's not a choice I want to have to make.

**Not for enjoying Storm, anyway, and Kritzer's style is such that I imagine I'll love Fires anyway. She hits the right places for me.

***Words of the day: interesting, fascinating. Someone clobber me with a thesaurus, quick.

One book I read the week before last and didn't mention in my last post on such things is S. M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers.

Lancers is a book - see here for cover copy and Publishers' Weekly review - that at one level I enjoyed very much, and at another level disturbed me immensely.

As an adventure story, Lancers works supremely well. It has dashing young army captains, royalty, brave princesses, determined scientists, evil villains, cross-desert treks and fights on trains, not to mention airships. Airships are supremely cool. The story hits most of my favourite high points. But the world it's set in?

After asteroid impact rendered most of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable in the late 19th century, the government of Britain evacuated to India, where they assimilated into the caste system and rebuilt their empire.

And I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why the setup disturbs me as much as it does, until I remember that the last Stirling novel I read was Conquistador, an apologia for the segregated, bigoted society of Dead White Men.

Lancers isn't as blatantly - hmm. Now I must figure out how to put it - isn't as blatantly white as Conquistador, but it still supports a status quo that privileges Dead Western European Men over everybody else.

Why do I say white? Why do I take issue with it, anyway?

It's a term - an idea - that has taken on its immense cultural significance in the Americas, but western Europe has long been infected by it as well, and it's a term that feels appropriate, despite - or perhaps even because - the novel is set in a society composed largely of brown people. The dominant paradigm still seems to be Western European, with all its uneasy history, with all its colonial excesses and repressions.

Give me a good reason why the maharajas of India wouldn't have ended up in control of the Empire, rather than the emigrant Brits.

Just one.

And tell me, why, again, the Russians have to be the bad guys? Why are they the ones who turned to cannibalism and worshipping Chaos and the end of the world after the catastrophe that changed their world?

I'm serious here. I'd like to have that question answered.

It's a conceit of the story. Yep, I know that. But I'm not culturally conditioned to see things the same way Stirling seems to be seeing them, and I'm not liking what the assumptions implicit in both Lancers and Conquistador seem to say.

Privileging one group of people - whether they be united by religion, wealth, gender, or skin colour - above all other groups is to my mind a Bad Thing. I don't care what group it is. The Protestant minority in Ireland after independence in some areas suffered as much or more as some among the Catholic majority did during the Protestant Ascendancy. And yet, privilege is almost always invisible to the privileged, because it is a status quo that benefits them, and that couldn't possibly be in any way bad. Writing books that support this paradigm - whether that support be conscious or no - is likewise not a good thing. It reinforces the invisibility of privilege. Which in turn makes it harder for the less privileged to achieve equity or parity of any kind.

It seems to me Lancers reinforces the paradigm that presents the past and current western European (which has large similarities with the North American) cultural mode as superior. And that utterly ruined my enjoyment of the actual story part of the book.

---

In other news, I think I'm coming down with something. I ache, I sniffle, I'm tired all the time. Also, getting my brain to work in any adequate way is like winding a broken clockwork toy: it really doesn't want to go. I'm currently reading a memoir by Nanda Herbermann, a German woman who spent two years (1941-1943) in Ravensbruck concentration camp. It's thought-provoking, but now I really, really want (and can't afford) to get my hands on a copy of the history of Ravensbruck written by French résistante and camp survivor Germaine Tillion. I've checked, and you know what? My college library, probably the most comprehensive library in the country, doesn't have a copy.

This pisses me off. Books of this type and historical significance should be available forever. Even the book I've lusted after since I was fifteen and read twice over when my local library acquired it on loan from the British system for me, the one that would be the near ultimate adornment of my own personal collection, M.R.D. Foot's history of SOE in France is still to be found in print (I'd actually thought it'd been out of print for the last thirty years, and I'm surprised and pleased to find this isn't so), though for an abominable sum. But Tillion's seminal history of the notorious women's concentration camp at Ravensbruck? Out of print. Gone. Caput. History. Available from the barest handful of second hand vendors.

Colour me annoyed.

When you could be safe at home, free from all dangers?

In between dealing with bureaucratic crap from TCD and the body that deals with my grant applications, trying to stay alive and exercised, holding my mum's hand at the dentist, and being a lazy sod who watches too many episodes of Dark Angel all at once, I've been reading.

Surprise surprise.

Books:

Jo Walton, The Prize in the Game. Set in the same world as The King's Peace, which I've read, and The King's Name, which I haven't. Imaginative and talented use of the Táin mythos, with extra points for hitting all the right notes. Perhaps it would hit someone who didn't grow up aware of the Cú Chulainn legends, the tale of Macha, and the Ulster cycle less hard, but damn, it got me right where it hurts.

Damn, it really did. Definitely recommended.

C. E. Murphy, Thunderbird Falls. How can I really like the main character, voice, and basic set-up of a story, and then be irritated as all hell with it? Well, the number one reason was that I could see the main twist, the one the whole plot hangs on, coming ten miles off.

If your character is going to be stupid (albeit consistent with self, plot, and set-up), I really prefer it when it's the subtle kind of stupid.

Catherine Asaro, Ascendant Sun. Suffers from the same issue all the Skolia books (with the exception of Primary Inversion) do, namely the ending. Or lack thereof. Also, Kelric is a massively cool character, but so much of the plot revolves around him as a sex object. Not really my style of thing, lads. Not really at all.

L. A. Meyer, Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary 'Jacky' Faber, Ship's Boy. Reading quite a bit of YA recently. This is pretty decent fair, being about a girl from the slums who disguises herself as a boy to crew out aboard a man o'war.

Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness. Pretty good stuff. Contemporary YA, with magic or without, is not, for my sins, one of my most favourite genres. Still, Larbalestier writes good character.

Garth Nix, Shade's Children. I have a confession to make with regard to this book: I read it in two instalments, standing in a bookshop, and then didn't buy it. Which is very nearly theft, I suspect, and therefore unethical. But damnit, I couldn't resist.

I loved Sabriel and Lirael and was disappointed at Abhorsen. I hadn't read anything else of Nix's until this, but damn, it hooked me at the first page.

One day, everyone over fourteen disappeared from the face of the earth. The Overlords took their place, and once children hit fourteen, they're taken up for parts to be used in the machines the Overlords use to fight battles against each other.

Except for the handful who escape to fight back.

Nix is good.

Non-fiction:

Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves. Pomeroy is Professor of Classics at Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is renowned for Goddesses, one of the first - perhaps the first - text to seriously treat the history of women in Classical Antiquity. First published in the 1970s, it is a testament to how very neglected the social history of women in the classical world has been that it remains the most comprehensive work in the field today.

And, wow.

No, seriously, wow. Most historians fail to write with one tenth the clarity and enthusiasm that Professor Pomeroy employs in pursuit of her subject. And gods and little fishes, she is comprehensive. Well worth reading, even if you aren't a student of antiquity, simply for the sheer pleasure of watching a talented historian exercise her critical faculties in an under-studied field.

And ne'er a word I spoke, tumbling down

Lately, I've been reading for comfort - Procrustean reading, to borrow truepenny's terminology. Which means Air and Spin and A Dead Man in Deptford, among others, are staring down at me from my TBR shelf while I devour space opera and character-heavy fantasy. With one exception: Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds.

I don't read horror, normally. Or ghost stories, or anything in that vein. When I do read them, I don't enjoy them - I really don't enjoy having the shit creeped out of me.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is eerie as all hell in places, but it never crosses the line into 'Not reading this after dark. Hell, not reading this in daylight, either,' territory. Largely because the heroine, Eden Moore, comes across as so genuinely capable that I couldn't help believing that when she found out what was going on, she was going to deal it.

I can like a character like that. In fact, I can like a book like that, too.

( And yea verily, more books: )

...I've just realised something about my reading preferences. The books I really like, the ones I like best - they either have female main characters, or they're by female authors (or female co-authors). The ones I fall head-over-heels for, usually both.

( list )

Which sort of helps explain why seven out of ten of the books on my yet-to-be-read shelf are written by men. But not really, since I have no real idea why I go back to the guys less frequently and with less great enthusiasm, in general, than the women.

And now, the non-fiction:

Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac. Aubrac's account of her Resistance activity during the nine months of her second pregnancy, where she met 'Max' (the alias of Jean Moulin, DeGaulle's envoy to and negotiator with the various resistance réseaux, who was arrested, tortured and killed by the Germans in France), assisted with the running of the local resistance, organised an attack to break her husband out of prison after his arrest (his third and most serious, as he was arrested in the company of Moulin), taught classes at the local lycée, and keep her family fed and together. Fascinating read.

Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. A memoir of the gulag. Ginzburg recounts her arrest in the thirties (February 1937) during Stalin's purges, her initial interrogation, trial and sentencing (ten years under section 8 of Article 58 - the then maximum, it changed to twenty-five years with the year, short of death - the statute under which, ludicrously, thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people were charged with terrorism or counter-revolutionary activity); her time in the Butyrki and the Lefortovo, and, after her sentence was pronounced, her two years in solitary in Yaroslavl until her transfer to the Magadan and Elgen hard labour camps in the Kolyma region.

Ginzburg was and remained a committed Communist. Journey ends in or around the early 1940s, when she escaped death by starvation and overwork by getting a 'trusty' job as medical attendant to the children of inmates at Elgen. In the (very short) epilogue, she says she spent eighteen years in the Gulag, making this remarkably incomplete as an autobiography, and remarkably unsatisfying as either history or memoir.

It is, however, quite fascinating as both.

Next up... Hmm. Plutarch, I suppose. Roman Lives. Or maybe McIntosh's Sisterhood of Spies, or Rediker's pirate history, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Or A History of the Ancient Near East, if I'm feeling virtuous, or maybe Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity.

Or Harvey's American War of Independence history, A Few Bloody Noses. Or the one about Byzantine empresses, Herrin's Women in Purple. Or The Bible and the Ancient Near East. Or Ancient Mesopotamia. Or or or or --

-- Which to choose? So many books, so many. How am I supposed to pick just one (or two, rather, since the Plutarch is Designated Scholarly Reading Material, which really should be read for college)?

Um. Suggestions? Are solicited?


----

*Not all of these are precisely comfort reading, I must admit.

----

Oh, I'm reminded. The Admissions Office is pleased to inform me that the Senior Lecturer is permitting me to make the course transfer I applied for last May.

Last May. Oh, wheels of bureaucracy, who grindeth slow and exceedingly fine - thanks so much for letting me spend the last three months (three months!) worrying about this.

Anyone else think I read too much?

Steven Brust, Orca, Issola, Dragon.

Brust is an author of the kind most excellent. I enjoyed all of these three, but if I had to pick the one I enjoyed least, it would be Dragon, simply because I found it immensely distracting to be jumped back and forth through the narrative all the time.

Enjoyed most? Orca. Not only because of its interestingly twisty plot, but because it's told half from Vlad's point of view, and half from that of Kiera the Thief, which made it even more interesting, and edged it just ahead of Issola.

And I really regret that I won't be able to get my hands on a copy of Dzur for a year or two, damn it.

Catherine Asaro, Skyfall, Spherical Harmonic, The Radiant Seas, The Quantum Rose, The Moon's Shadow. Not necessarily in that order.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that Asaro has Issues with endings. Namely the fact that in all the aforementioned books, it feels as though almost more plotty-threads are left dangling than are wrapped up.

Skyfall reads as a bizarre mixture of semi-hackneyed (not hackneyed, as the characters are more than cardboard cut-outs) romance and space-opera SF. The SF is backgrounded in favour of the romance: Roca Skolia, mother of the Skolian Imperator Kurj, is stranded on a backwater planet while trying to get home in time to prevent her son from forcing a vote that will almost certainly lead to war, and meets and falls in love with said backwater planet's local bigwig Eldrinson Valdoria. Novel touches on a lot of issues, and deals with few of them in depth, leaving me very unsatisfied.

The Quantum Rose. Another SF-romance where the romance is the prime element. A lot of things made me uncomfortable with this book, not least of which was the difference in age and experience between Kamoj and Vyrl. One of the things that makes me uncomfortable with romance in general is the idea that Twoo Wuv (in this case 'mental resonance') wins out over all. Just because being with someone gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling doesn't mean that you can have a life together and make it work. Ack. Also, the lack-of-focus deal I had with Schism and Skyfall? Present here, as well.

The Moon's Shadow. Jai Qox-Skolia, son of the former Skolian Imperator Sauscony Valdoria and the former Eubian emperor Jaibriol II, a Rhon psion in a culture that makes all psions slaves, becomes emperor of Eube. Pretty good, even if the ending left me unsatisfied. And not a thoughtful unsatisfied, either. A 'Where the hell is the rest of the plot?' unsatisfied. Dangling plotty-threads, fine. Whole interstellar treaty negotiations? Not so fine.

Sperical Harmonic. Pharaoh Dehianna returns from an insubstantial state (sorry, Asaro's theoretical mathematics are beyond me) at the end of the Radiance War to find Skolia in disarray and most of her family in the protective custody of Earth. Many interesting events transpire, and the book ends with hints of future things. Which is damned unsatisfying to someone who likes a fairly well-wrapped ending.

The Radiant Seas. Undoubtedly my favourite volume of the series, because Soz Valdoria kya Skolia kicks ass (to use an American phrase that has also pervaded Irish slang). Bang-up space battles and interesting character dynamics. I do want to know what happens to the rest of her children, though. Again, I have Issues with Asaro's endings.

Margaret Collins-Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1944. A well-researched, thought-provoking, and at times fascinating account of the role played by women in the French resistance, interweaving the personal narratives (from interviews and archives) of women with historical analysis.

The percentage of French people involved in the resistance was lower than most people might realise, which makes the sacrifices of the résistants all the more amazing. While comparatively few women served under arms with the maquis, many were involved in publishing counter-propaganda and underground newspapers, in the vital work of running escape lines for Jews, downed allied airmen, and résistants for whom it was too dangerous to remain in France. They were involved in providing aid to prisoners and the families of the arrested; they did intelligence-gathering and courier work, forged papers, decoded and encoded messages, scouted sites for parachute drops, organised escapes, arranged for food despite ever-growing scarcities, and hid weapons, radios, and explosives. Much of this work was work that few French women had ever done before, and many did it while attempting to take care of small children or in the face of disapproval from their families.

They did much of the vital work that allowed the Resistance to function, and only recently are their contributions being recognised to any large extent.

Books catalogued: 700.
Books yet to be catalogued: An innumerable quantity. Just looking at them makes my head hurt.

And in the vein of 'Where did all my braincells go?' -

- I read another book over the weekend. C.E. Murphy's (mizkit) Urban Shaman. Fast, fun, and brilliant. Urban fantasy, new take on old tropes, orignal-as-far-as-I-know mixing up of Celtic and Native American mythologies, and one hell of a fast pace. Definitely recommended reading.

You can tell I liked it, right?

Books catalogued: 690
Estimate books yet to be catalogued: Uh. I dunno? 700, 800? More?
(Why do I keep buying books when a) I can't afford them and b) I haven't catalogued all the ones I own already?)

In the last week, my gmail address has been discovered by spam. The first day, this was a new and mildly amusing experience. By day three, it had moved from 'mildly amusing' directly to 'argh! Get these stupid phishers and advertisers out of my inbox!'

I mean, come on. I don't even have a paypal account.

My latest reading: Anne Bishop, Dreams Made Flesh. Four decent stories, all interesting. Her world, and worldbuilding here, however excellent, makes me distinctly uncomfortable. Still, it is very good.

Catherine Asaro, Schism. First book of Asaro's I've read: struck me as slightly off-balance and lacking in focus, but nonetheless compelling. I like the characters. Anyone out there have anything to say about her other books? I'd be interested in having a couple of extra opinions.

E. E. Knight, Way of the Wolf, Choice of the Cat, Tale of the Thunderbolt, and Valentine's Rising. The thinking person's post-alien-invasion, post-apocalyptic military fiction. Also a whole hell of a lot of fun. The series focuses on David Valentine, a soldier for one of the last free holdouts against the vampiric Kurian overlords. While the first book is very choppy and jumps around a lot, the rest are very well handled indeed.

Steven Brust, Athyra. Brust is always good: what else is there to say?

Regarding me: currently wallowing in self-imposed unemployment and the poverty brought on thereby, poking stories with sharp sticks to see if they'll roll over and cooperate. I need to start exercising again: I couldn't hack the job's eleven-hour shifts, and that, combined with the weather, has left me this past fortnight feeling rather under the weather and thus disinclined to anything more strenuous than going up and down stairs.

We improve and go onward.