sj, I quite liked T. Kingfisher's "The Raven and the Reindeer". [link] It's a retelling of The Snow Queen, with a lot of Finnish folk culture stuff. It's about 190 pages.

The first two books I read after having Rose, when my concentration was totally shot, were Tina Fey's Bossypants and True Grit by Charles Portis. Loved them both!

Everything by T. Kingfisher is great, as is everything under her other name, Ursula Vernon. I got my niece the first of the Hamster Princess books last week, and she's racing through it.

A lot of Robin McKinley's stuff, especially the earlier stuff, is pretty light going, if you haven't read it before. (Except Deerskin.)

Clifford Simak's Goblin Reservation is on my BookBub mailing for $1.99! Now to figure out how to get personal backups so I'm not dependent on Amazon being willing to keep downloading it to me.

OK, I have wrapped back around to Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen and that was absolutely worthwhile. I think I need to circle back once again and hit the Borders of Infinity (because the description in the timeline of the framing story is an itch in my brain even though I have read the individual novellas) and Barrayar (because I need recheck any references to Abelard, I'm sure I'm forgetting something and it is driving me up a wall).

I have really enjoyed immersing myself in this 'verse. One of the things I love are the casual references to Baba Yaga and magicians who keep their hearts in boxes and whatnot, but it wasn't until this read-through that I made a connection between Ivan-that-idiot and the Ivan the Idiot subgenre of fairy tales. More of a reference than a parallel, but a nice sharp click for the slavic brainstem. Barrayar is good for that, I find.

It's been interesting seeing what I remember. I read most of the stories as they came out, although there were one or two books that I know I decided not to read because of where my head was at the time, and a few more that I think I missed because I was confused by the publication of the omnibuses. There are also some that I am sure I read when they came out but remember only pieces of and/or remember wrong (interspersed with virtual word-forward recall some scenes). It's weird. And educational? Maybe. Miles has aged literarily as I have in reality in the same way that Harry Potter did more famously for younger folk. It makes for a ...thoughtful reread.

Also, there is a set of stories wherein the hero gets saddled with some hangers-on who always hungry or always thirst or some other problematic thing but then when the hero is in the midst of his three-impossible-things quest those guys come in handy. Mark reminds me of those.

Poor Mark. I worry about him still.

And I'm still on The Vor Game! I should step up my reading, apparently.

I kind of neglected everything else I had going on for a while to read. I don't exactly regret it, but I can't responsibly recommend it.

I wouldn't mind getting a little more detail about what Mark is up to and how he's doing these days. Although I also wouldn't mind if the next book jumps 10-20 years into the future with an entirely new POV. There are a lot of threads that could get super interesting down the road if she picks them up again.

Just finished Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. I'm in love with Ursula Todd and Atkinson's incredible voice. Going to reserve A God in Ruins at the library today.