Sequels Now in Love; Wicked Woolf, Scourge of Whispering Middle

[maribou]

Sequels: Third Edition, edited by Janet D. Husband and Jonathan F. Husband
A tad out of date - the next edition is due out in February - but still gave me a lot of "OH YEAH I WANTED TO TRY THOSE" moments; actually the out of dateness probably helped with that. A bit heavy on mystery, light on SF, as far as I could tell, but the annotations were excellent. This one and the next one, I'm only counting for 1/2 because I kind of skimmed them, but I gave them far more attention than I would normally give a skim. I confess I probably wouldn't use this as a reference when there are far more up to date sequel lists online, but it was fun to poke about in.
(231.5/300)

Now Read This II: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction, 1990-2001, by Nancy Pearl
I've sort of fallen away from reading much mainstream fiction - so many books, so little time, eh? - but Nancy Pearl, being Nancy Pearl, has not only given me a long list of books to check out I'd never thought much of (or in some cases even heard of before). Also, I'm eventually going to go back and poke through the previous volume of this, going from the 70s through 1998... so she has me wanting to read mainstream fiction dating back to the years of my childhood. Impressive...
(232/300)

The Ghost in Love, by Jonathan Carroll
Jonathan Carroll remains one of my favorite writers. This book is kind of difficult to explain, not my most favorite of his works, and you should really start with Land of Laughs if you're trying to find out if you like his books or not. That said, I ate this one up like it was ice cream.
(233/300)

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, by Alison Light
The best kind of personal history. Intensely researched and delicately written. One of my favorite books this year, for sure.
(234/300)

Scourge of God, by S.M. Stirling
I'm still having a lot of fun with this series - it pushes my post-apocalyptic buttons AND my mythic/religious fantasy buttons AND my geeking-out-about-the-past buttons. Whee!
(235/300)

Wicked Game, by Jeri Smith-Ready
An interesting premise - what if a con struggling to go straight got a job at a radio station where all the DJ's were vampires? - well-executed. The romance angle worked for me too - especially since the protagonist didn't miraculously find that her low pain threshold disappeared in the glamor of being bitten. Refreshing to have a vampire romance with a mortal protagonist who very much does not want to be bitten.
(236/300)

Stuck in the Middle, edited by Ariel Schrag
Comics about being in middle school. I liked it. Some of them were gross, some sweet, some funny, some painful - the few comics that hit all those notes were the best of the lot.
(237/300)

City of Whispering Stone, by George Chesbro
I read some of this series a loooooooooong time ago, in junior high I think, and have now started over. This was the 2nd in the series - the investigator is an ex-circus acrobat with a Ph.D. in criminology and a black belt in karate. And he's a dwarf. It's a fun noir series with elements of science-fiction here and there and lots of action. Kind of like James Bond only wry and with heart. Also fewer gadgets and more thinking. Anyway, I'm not sure whether the series is not quite as good as I thought it was, or whether the writer just got better as he went along (since I originally read later volumes in the series out of order)... I'm leaning toward the latter view since I think this one was better than the first one. Looking forward to the next one!
(238/300)