Finished HP5 - and honestly, after rereading - it might win for best - JKR really captured that first time when you realizes that the world is truely fucked up. I have a friend who is really suffering because his daughter has changed from a a fairly frivolous social butterfly to someone who sees all the problems in the world. He is proud of her, but she has a really hard time seeing the joy in life right now. and that is where Harry is in book 5. I am really glad I reread it. (I also found that once I got past the first hundred or so pages, it was very easy to keep going). The first is always going to have a place in my heart. It introduced me to a world that I fell head over heels for.

Sox, I started in on LibraryThing (ZoneWombat is me), but I have about 5 billion more books to input and I didn't bring my CueCat.

I'm actually thinking about starting up a separate LT account for the boxes of books I need/want to get rid of.

I made an LJ post about The Good Soldier and Perdido Street Station.

I'm actually thinking about starting up a separate LT account for the boxes of books I need/want to get rid of.

That sounds cool - we could set up a buffista's book swap.

PC - China Miéville has a short story about feral alleys and streets that I loved - both for the concept and for the writing. Haven't read Perdido Street yet. Looks like that's soon on the list...

It's incredibly inventive. It's like, usually when you read these things, they're just variations on tropes, which is perfectly fine and neat. But it's like he ignores all existing tropes and does his own thing.

Question for y'all. I picked up Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword today at B&N (along with this!) and I can't wait to dive in. But is there something that comes in between this book and Swordspoint? The Fall of the Kings comes after this one, right?

I think there might be a short story set a bit between Swordspoint and PotS, but I can't remember where it is. Fall is after PotS, yeah.

I had a bit of synchronicity with a local author today. A year back, a member of a mom's group loaned me the book, The Prodigal Troll, a decent fantasy saga. I quite enjoyed it. I find him commenting in the LJ of one of DH's coworkers. So I told him I liked his book and where I got it.

His reply:

Thanks. I want to be the number 1 author in mom's groups everywhere! (Alas, the next book is about witches fighting in the American Revolution, and I don't know how moms will feel about witches, whereas the middle part of Prodigal Troll was very much about being a good mom.)

Witches fighting in the American Revolution. I told him he just found a member of his target demographic.

...AND passed it on to us lot, we're as demographic as all get out.

This seems like the right place to announce to my local book lovers that I have become a teenage girl's Reading Fairy. I started out by loaning her a copy of Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty because someone recommended it here once upon a time, way upstream. Maybe it was AmyLiz?

Now I've loaded her up with 10 YA novels including Tanith Lee, Charles de Lint and especially Clive Barker's Abarat, because I like the illustrations a lot.

Go me. I've enabled a literary addiction. Moooah-haw-ha.

I started out by loaning her a copy of Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty because someone recommended it here once upon a time, way upstream. Maybe it was AmyLiz?

Possibly! I adored it, but Teppy read it, too. I'm panting to get the last one in the trilogy, but she's been revising it, apparently, for almost longer than it took her to write the first draft.