That crosses The Thirteenth Tale of my immediate list, because I need to recover. I’m currently reading The Doomsday Book, as recommended here (or Giraffe…I get confused) and also working through the stories of Lovecraft from www.dagonbytes.com. Love online texts – free reading!
I liked that one, and I liked The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay even more.
Thanks for the heads up! No, it’s not too late, as I’ve not started it yet. I’ll set that aside for now and look for Florida Roadkill. Meanwhile, I’ll start Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins instead, lent to me by the same person.
Oh man, I was at the library and I saw a book that made me say to myself “Hey, someone mentioned this in the SDMB March reading thread” … but when I got home, what I picked up was The Spiritualist by Megan Chance, and also seems to be about fakey séances. Darn it! Well, maybe this one will be good as well, and I can always look for The Séance later.
Finished. Very little fantasy, really; and it really was not alt-Cooperstown: the only thing changed was the name. Everything else was exactly as it is, down to the layout of the town.
The Spiritualist looks like it has some potential… I didn’t pick it up because I’m not much into crime-solving, but let us know what you think!
Earlier I mentioned I had almost finished Plait’s Death From the Skies!, about potential threats to Planet Earth. In an amusing coincidence, one of the last perils mentioned in that book turned up at the end of the other book I was reading, Bright of the Sky:
The disaster in question was a spontaneous collapse of the cosmos to a lower energy state, annihilating everything in the process. The rulers of the novel’s other universe were revealed to be planning a deliberate collapse of our universe to provide a power source for theirs.
Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold was a satisfying conclusion to the Sharing Knife series. I know it’s primarily a romance, but there’s a terrific monster (villain?) to battle before the end, so I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this volume to a reader who would otherwise be put off by the “R” word.
I also read A World Too Near by Kay Kenyon, the sequel to Bright of the Sky. I was mildly annoyed when the ending copped out of a conclusion it had been building towards, but I’m going to read the next volume anyway. On the “losable books” front, I finished Enchanter by Sara Douglass and I have the third volume ready when I need something to read that won’t cost me twenty bucks to replace.
I liked this book very much, it was one of my favorite reads of 2008, but I was a little disappointed by this point. I had been looking forward to figuring out how to match up fictional things in the book with real things in the town, and it turns out … it was just the real town with a different name.