Silverwing, by Ken Oppel; Jackal Bird, by Michael Barley; War of the Flowers, by Tad Williams; etc

[maribou]

Silverwing is a charming kid's anthropomorphic fantasy about bats.
35/200

Jackal Bird was weird. It's Canadian scifi, set on a long-after-colonization planet, and I didn't decide to like it until at least halfway through. But I think I did. The characters were sympathetic, but in that way where you suspect really you oughtn't to like them. And it's a bit exposition-y in places.
36/200

War of the Flowers was very yummy. If you like Tad Williams, you'll like it. If you like Charles de Lint or George R. R. Martin, you'll probably like it. If you like Charles de Lint and George R. R. Martin, why haven't you read it already?
37/200

Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy, by Dorothy Allred Solomon. This was fascinating. An emotionally balanced look at fundamentalist Mormon polygamists that managed to avoid sensationalism without being a paean to strange religions.
38/200

The Silver Sword, by Ian Seraillier. A realistic kid's story about WW2. Since I only read this on a non-specific but emphatic recommendation, I had no idea what to expect. Was good. Felt like I was in 4th grade again while I was reading it.
39/200

Running from the Devil, by Steve Kissing. This was an odd little book. Engaging and funny. Not quite as good as Mark Salzman's Lost in Suburbia and very much in the same vein, though with different quirks. The reviews all push the Catholic aspect of this coming-of-age memoir, but (perhaps because I was raised Catholic myself) I was much more intrigued by the first-person naive perspective on epilepsy.
40/200

Alphabet of Thorn, by Patricia McKillip. This is a little gem of a book about magic and love and letters. She's a beautiful writer, always, but some of her books pierce me more deeply than others - and this is unfortunately not one of my very most favorites. Still lovely though.
41/200

The Bug, by Ellen Ullman. An odd book about programming in the 80s. A novel, though. I really enjoyed it, I suspect anyone who was ever even marginally a programming geek would enjoy it. As a novel, it's slightly flawed, but good enough, and the feeling of 'you are there' is omnipresent. I was highly amused that someone had marked up some of the code in this library copy with penciled in corrections, but I don't know C well enough to know if they were being funny or pretentious to do so.
42/200