I picked up Paladin of Souls at the library yesterday and put a request in for The Hallowed Hunt.

I just reread both The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls before reading The Hallowed Hunt last weekend. I vote for Paladin of Souls as the best of the three.

You know, the one complaint I have with Curse of Chalion is the paladin named Palli. That's...unfortunate.

So, for my trip (I'm currently killing time before heading to the airport here in Saigon), I had a friend trade me for some mediocre science fiction--I specified mediocre so that I would have no compunction tossing them when done. One, I ended up not even reading, as it looked awful. I've since been trading them in at hostel bookshelves, or just leaving them behind (gave one to an Australian in the Seoul airport...), etc. But I was amused when I saw Raquel say "I often buy books just for their page count", cause that's so what I"m doing here...I went yesterday to a used bookstore, gave them my current books, and got three more for today and the flight to Egypt, which I mostly picked by length, rather than any goodness in them (I'm reading trashy crime books now, as they're easier to get than bad sci-fi, though one hostel did have two of the Deryni books. Why is it that serial killers in books ALWAYS start stalking the cop/coroner/psychologist??).

Because then you can do that he-said she said chapter thing. And because in bad books you can't leave Quantico without being babelicious.

And because in bad books you can't leave Quantico without being babelicious.

Hah! This is SO TRUE. All cops/FBI/CIA people in these books are either super hot(your protagonist or those he/she is attracted to), old (generally the boss, who might be "hot for an old guy"), or assholes-who-are-conveniently-ugly.

But I was amused when I saw Raquel say "I often buy books just for their page count", cause that's so what I"m doing here

Pfft. I have never seen you pick up a book that was skinnier than a grapefruit.

I am impressed that you found an English-language used book store in Saigon!

Oh sure (hi, I'm in Singapore right now...la la la the tagline that lasts forever...), there were ladies wandering the streets with a stack of plastic wrapped books (I mean to say, teh whole stack was plastic-wrapped as one, which puzzled me, as I don't think they were trying to sell the whole STACK). Mostly travel books, and not necessarily all in English, but....

Yeah the used bookstore was a block from my hotel. It was in the back of a travel agency. It had English and German and French and Chinese...

Hec, I've totally read small books! Just...very quickly. So quickly you may not have seen me read them. :)

I had a John Dunning moment yesterday. I was at the embassy, waiting for the consulate hours to start so I could pick up the baby's passport. There's not a lot of places to hang out and wait there, so I decided to go look at the lending library. I've pretty much completed the SF/Fantasy shelves and most of the fiction shelves, so I was desultorily looking at a non-fiction catch-all shelf.

And there, between a PJ O'Rouke and Martha Stewart's Just Desserts (which, ha!)...was The Story of the Stone, by Barry Hughart. The second Master Li book, nigh impossible to get these days. And it was in book club binding, which means it's been on the shelves here for 15 years, when the core of the library was laid in.

That's 2 plate-of-shrimp things between this board and my universe in the last week. I don't know what this means.

(I also found Bellairs' The House with a Clock in its Walls on the non-fiction shelf)