Hey, I just added Gothic Charm School to my Librarything catalog and it was my 200th book.

That's it, Barb. They had to say the silly stuff first ...

Anathem is wonderful. I started it around Christmas, then stopped. Then started reading in snippets on the treadmill. Then got totally sucked in and was unable to do anything else for about 3 days.

My only quibble was that parts were overwritten - he kept hammering on the same couple points over and over. And yet I couldn't skip the long explanations, because there'd usually be something funny buried in them.

Has anyone else read Jacqueline Carey's latest one, Naamah's Kiss? I ended up buying it because I was in B&N and desperate for something to read on the plane, and dangit, my library holds hadn't come in before I left Seattle so I had to fly down with NOTHING IN MY BAG...

But while admittedly, I did end up staying up wayyyyy too late last night finishing it, I was kinda meh on it, mostly I think because (not really all that spoilery plot-wise or anything) while I liked the main character more than, say, Imriel from the last books, I felt, after a bit of thinking, that the *secondary* characters mostly didn't stand out for me. There were a few, but for the most part, they were random and seemed to lack motivation, to me. Whereas when the characters would talk about "oh, my great-great-great-grandmother was [insert random character from previous book here]", I'd actually remember that character, and be all, "Oh yeah, she was cool!" Which I don't feel like I'd really do from this book. Even the love interests, I was sorta like "...why the hell does she like these people??" (Heck, even the sex scenes I was mostly skipping) I enjoyed the plot, but it lacked something from the other books.

I haven't read anything by Anne Brontë. Apparently I should rectify this ASAP.

I have, but only because Anne was my mother's favorite Brontë and I was so shocked she had read any of them that I looked into it. I remember liking Agnes Grey quite a bit. More Austen than Brontë I'd say.

When I was a kid I read a book about the daughter of a Gardner at Palace of the ind. Or maybe just the palace of an aristocrat. She was friends with a kid who worked with his father in Goblin infested mines. She and the miner kid ended up playing key roles in defeating the Goblins, and part of that involved calling things by their right names. Anyone have any idea of what book I'm talking about.

"The Princess and the Goblin," maybe? By George MacDonald?

Interesting, but no. My memory is not perfect on this but she was definitely a gardner's daughter or granddaughter. One of the key revelations that led her to save the day was dream or vision os supernatural encounter where she was told "a gardener's daughter should know call a spade a spade"

Ahh... I focused on the goblin and the miner thing, and passed by the gardener. It sounds interesting.