Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Recent reading

I've finished Sharon Shinn's Twelve Houses series - ended with Reader and Raelynx. Left me wanting to go back and read the first one again. Such nice, friendly, romance-fantasy-friendship comfort reads. The second - The Thirteenth House -was the best, I think- there was a little more tension, and she wasn't quite so kind to her main character.

Elizabeth Bear's duology - Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water - was something quite different. At least, I thought it was a duology - looks like there's another? This is not an author that could be accused of being too kind to her characters! A very harsh, elemental version of Faerie. I then picked up her earlier book Hammered, but so far haven't really gotten into it.

I picked up The Queen in Winter, a collection of four romance/fantasy novellas. Enjoyable, but not as much so as the earlier To Weave a Web of Magic, which had an utter gem of a story by Patricia McKillip. The Sarah Monette disappointed me the most, mostly because my expectations were high. I think romance isn't really her natural milieu.

Anything else? A romance or two from the library on the plane to a conference, but I can't remember the titles, so they were probably neither great nor terrible.

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