But not that song; I've got Peter Wolf version somewhere, but not as effective. Although, since the Hungarians tend to have the highest suicide rate of any country, a few dozen in a year doesn't seem that odd.

I think the only real oddity was how many people the song in particular was the final nudge for. But yeah, grim Eastern European nation to begin with, just came through a Depression that made ours look like a party, and then staring down the barrel of Hitler's panzers... you can see how the population might have been primed for the song when it made suicide seem all romantic and soothing.

Really, the tacked-on third verse so dispels the gloominess of the song that I think Billie's "Strange Fruit" ends up being more morbid and creepifying.

It may be a while, Cindy. And I may wait till I've read The Solitaire Mystery. This is, you realise, after I finish HP OoTP, Sorcery and Cecelia, Mairelon the Magician, the Sharpe DX loaned me, and Fast Women, all of which I'm in at the moment. But I'll try and let you know when I start it. Or you can just arbitrarily pick it up and tell me....

Beverly and Cindy pass away at a good old age, never having cracked the cover of Sophie's World...

Sci Fi Wire has a snippet of HP + the Half-Blood Prince.

Or you could try to figure out how to get there on the JK Rowling website.

One of the books I finished this weekend was Anne Kelleher's Silver's Edge. This is a book from Harlequin's Luna imprint -- which I heard bad things about upthread -- well people seemed unimpressed with the Mercedes Lackey book from them. I really enjoyed Silver's Edge except that as I got nearer to the end it became more and more obvious that it wasn't going to finish in one novel. Drat!

However, it is the first half in a duology not a trilogy which is a relief. (I've only recently picked up the fifth book in what was supposed to be the Crown of Stars trilogy.)

I loved Sophie's World, Bev. May have to dig it out again one of these days.

Sophie's World just moved a notch higher in the TBR pile. Cindy, take note.

Thanks, guys, for the recs. It passed my usual method of "will it bore me to tears by 50 pages in?" test of opening to the middle and reading a half-page at random in the store. So I should be good to at least that point.

Something that turns me off before I ever get to being cranky about the content is the writing. I've thrown many books with promising storylines across the room because I couldn't get lost in them for the clunky sentence structure or a particularly bothersome habit of slipping a word of contemporary slang into period dialog. Or persistently using a bad grammatic habit, "Not that big OF a thing," for example. Sophie's World seems free of those, at least on a quick reconnoiter.

Or persistently using a bad grammatic habit

Loathe The Shipping News. Enjoy having subjects to my sentences. Only finished because friend gave it to me. Notes left throughout by her better than book.

Hey Kate and P-C -- you're not crazy. In looking for something else, I just stumbled across this:

Murder Ink
1 Whitehall near Water.
A branch of the original. The usual suspects, plus a nice magazine selection

Huh.

Loathe The Shipping News.

My brother! I've tried reading it three or four times, since is my mom's favorite book (or was, until I steered her towards Kavalier and Clay ). My beef with TSN was not so much the style of writing but with the fact that I just couldn't get interested in the character and his problems.