bunrab | Recent reading

A mixed bag of stuff.
First, the books:
White Nights, the latest volume in the Harry Dresden series. Pretty good, though it might be a little incoherent for someone who hasn't been following the series - you have to already know who the players are for it to make sense. There are some VERY funny scenes in there; my favorite is perhaps when Warden Carlos Ramirez meets Lara Raith.

A couple of Regencies or post-Regencies: Stephanie Laurens' The Taste of Innocence, which has a plot having to do with land profiteering during the building of England's first railroads in the 1830's, and Mary Balogh's Simply Magic which is another in her series about the teachers at a girls' school.

Allen Steele's Spindrift - did I mention this one already? Homage to Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, as well as a spinoff from his Coyote series. Good old-fashioned style straight-ahead plot, in the style of Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, but it's not dated fuddy old-fashioned; it does have some up-to-date subtle overtones to modern political and religious fanaticism, as the whole Coyote series does.

Irresistible Forces - a romance anthology which I guess you science fiction readers are also going to have to buy, because the first story in it is a 70-page novellette (novella? who knows) by Lois McMaster Bujold, in which Miles and Ekaterin finally get married. If you're a Miles fan, you gotta have this.

An anthology of mystery stories called Baltimore Noir, all set in, you guessed it, Baltimore.

Also several knitting books - the Vogue Knitting 25th Anniversary anthology of articles from the Vogue Knitting magazine; some less interesting stuff. A collection of the comic strip "Unshelved" which is about a library. A collection of the comic strip "Stone Soup."

Newspapers: Tuesday 7/31/07 issue of the Baltimore Sun, article on the first page of the state-and-local section, headlined "Inserted gene turns mice schizophrenic." It's about researchers at Johns Hopkins (which is, you'll recall, local to me) creating genetically engineered mice that carry a human gene linked to schizophrenia. What I object to is the headline - they are NOT schizophrenic mice. I mean, how would you tell? Can the mice describe their hallucinations or voices in the head? Do they "have difficulty performing simple mental tasks such as reading a bus schedule"? Do they have delusions? Come on now.

I *know* there's been more that I've read; I'll have to come back and edit this post as I think of it. I am sure I read a couple of murder mysteries from the library, but what they were totally escapes me!!

ETA: Aha! Sweet and Deadly by Charlaine Harris - one of her non-fantasy murder mysteries, not in any of the series she's writing. Recent re-release of one of her older books. It was OK, but not great; set in the south, as most of her books are, and the plot deals with racism. Worth reading if you can find it used or in the library, but not as good as her more recent writing, and I wouldn't pay full price for it.

And Spanish Dagger, latest in Susan Wittig Albert's series about China Bayles. Murder mystery, involves drug trafficking from Mexico. It was OK, but not the best in the series.

Oh, and did I mention Freddy's Final Quest by Dietlof Reiche? It's the last volume in the Golden Hamster Saga, a five-book series for kids about Freddy the hamster and his pals Sir William the cat and Enrico and Caruso the singing guinea pigs. Very funny.