I liked Perfect Circle too, sumi. Although it also creeped me out, it was pretty funny, and had an excellent sense of place (the dregs of Houston).

I am 100 pages into Little, Big and cannot yet describe what it is about. I almost said it was a novel about Edwardian fairies, but that's not really true, and the setting and characters are almost all American. Anyway, it's the sort of novel that invokes but does not define theosophy, and the sort of novel where people have mysterious numinous experiences and sort of stagger back, blown away by the mysteriousness of the world. There will be elves, later, or I miss my guess. (Not the gurly kind with the hair gel, either.)

Ahh, the sublimeness of Little, Big. Odds are, when you've reached the end, you still won't be able to say what it was about. Well worth the trip, though.

The Face in the Frost is one of my all-time favorite novels

Mine too! I've only got it as an e-book though.

There will be elves, later, or I miss my guess. (Not the gurly kind with the hair gel, either.)

As I recall, you may be right. Certainly I don't remember any hair gel.

I really need to reread that, it's been years. Has anyone else read Crowley's The Translator? I loved it a lot.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good long book out in paperback to take on vacation with me? (Being on vacation, a good ol' romance would not be out of the question.)

I got The Time Traveler's Wife from the library! Damn, it's long.

Also, for those of you who like YA lit and/or Veronica Mars, I've reviewed Rob Thomas's books.

TTW is an excellent book, P-C. Well worth reading.

The Time Traveler's Wife is fantastic. Let us know what you think.

I just read All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown, which my friend picked up for me at BookExpo. It comes out in October. Rachel Manija Brown spent a major part of her childhood growing up on Meher Baba's ashram in Ahmednagar, a dusty backwater town in central India. It's a great story, and she tells it skillfully and with a great sense of (mostly black) humor. Her mother is an especially compelling character, what with her total devotion to Baba and her willful ignorance of the awful things that happen to Rachel (being beaten in school, for example). Of special note to Buffistas: the parts where Rachel discovers science fiction at age 12, and her fascination with stories about a local warrior hero that eventually lead her to study martial arts as an adult.

The book is getting a lot of comparisons to Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors, another blackly humorous story of a bizarre and often horrifying childhood, and I think the comparisons are well-deserved. (As it turns out, Running with Scissors was largely responsible for Rachel Manija Brown's decision to tell her story.) Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed both books, and I highly recommend this one.

Oh, hey, I know her! Sort of.

Okay, for a moment there I thought I was going to have something to add, as I've just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. But it turns out Debet and Kate have said exactly what I thought. I loved it. Even my grandmother, who doesn't like science fiction or any of that weird stuff, loved it, so it must be a pretty widely appealing book.