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22. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Often, you can figure out where a piece of writing is going by asking yourself "What does the author want to be true?" Pullman wants The Church to be evil. And thus you have a series in which The Church is pure, unvarnished evil.

Story-wise, the series isn't bad, but there are definitely moments in which I had to stop reading and ask "Seriously? You think God is responsible for all that? WTF?"

This book is clearly the second of a trilogy, and feels weak. It's chock-full of setup, in which Pullman ties up loose ends from the first book (the body count is shockingly high by the end, and not just faceless minions, but characters I knew and liked) and puts some guns on the mantle so that they can go off in the next book.

In addition to the "that could have had more to it" moments, I was actively disappointed in how the entire-book arc of "Will is looking for his father" ended. Really, Pullman? Why even bother?

But I still plan to read the next one, partly because it's already been lent to me and partly because I want to see if the third is as good as the first was.

Wondering what happened to the books in between the numbers? They were moved over to the Wordpress blog

I stopped reading during the busies parts of the spring and summer, and I'm getting back into it with a vengeance.

16. Long Hot Summoning by Tanya Huff

Maybe it's just been too long since I read the first couple of books in this series, but I had a hard time getting into it. Or maybe it's just that what Huff excels at is giving her characters depth, and I simply don't like the main character. At all. Regardless, I was largely disappointed in this book.

16 1/2. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Continuing the theme of "characters I do not like", Fat Charlie is a whiner. CJ borrowed this from the library, and I snagged it from him when he was done. But I could never bring myself to read more than a little bit at a time, because after a few pages I wanted to slap Fat Charlie. Eventually, the book was due back to the library and they wouldn't let CJ renew it any more, and I simply couldn't be arsed to care enough to go with him and check it out for myself. I'm told that the book gets better, and that it largely about FC's transformation from whiner to someone who actually DOES something with his life, and I may someday pick it up and give it another try. For now, I've got a shelf full of books that need to be read that actually look interesting.

17. Remember Me by Mary Higgins Clark

I've avoided MHC for a while, because her mysteries tend to be tinged with horror, and I don't like horror much. I picked this one up because I was going out to get the car maintained, and it was on the top of the stack. I'm glad I did. There's definitely a bit of horror, but not as bad as I'd imagined there would be. I was gratified at the end [minor spoiler alert] when it turned out to not have any supernatural explanation at all. Also, she's not as crazy as she was being led to believe. What I didn't like? The motive for tormenting the main character seemed weak and petty. Also, the parts that were written from the POV of the killer showed emotion that didn't match what it should have-- it's one thing to include the killer as one of the perspectives, it's another to spend his sections writing about how much he's grieving and having him wonder what happened. MHC had shown the death scene incorrectly, too, and that pisses me off.[/spoilers] And yet? Still a decent book. I liked the rest of it enough that I could forgive the ending.

18. The Cartoon Introduction of Economics by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman, PhD.

Cute. Economics is one of those "I sort of get it, but not really" things for me. This was a general introduction, and was well done. I got a bit lost during the last real chapter ("Elasticity"), but I suspect that a re-read later will help.

19. Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris

Another of Harris's non-Sookie books. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this one. Once again, I didn't feel that the motivation for killing was strong enough, although I suppose it's intended to be partially an accident. At least there were proper clues; the reader could have solved it very early on, if they were paying more attention than I was. This is clearly intended as the first in a series (and according to the intro pages before the story, there are already three or four others), so what I felt irritated about was the need to set up recurring characters and potential love interests. Lily is interesting, but her past is over-the-top. I confess that I'm curious as to whether Harris has plans to bring back pieces of Lily's past, or if she was just looking for something so horrific that she could justify anything she wanted to have Lily do later. I will probably continue this as a "get from the library" series for a bit, and see which way it goes. If Harris actually USES Lily's backstory, then I like the pre-planning and weaving things in early on. If it's just a method of justifying increasingly odd or stupid behavior in Lily, then I'll drop the series.

15. Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer

One of the books that magically appeared with the rest of the Stephanie Plum novels from Julianna. It's a fairly light-hearted romance, with a twist of intrigue and some missing pieces of backstory. I like the main character most of the time, which puts it a step ahead of a lot of romances. Much of the story required an awful lot of suspension of disbelief, but that's light-hearted romances with twists of intrigue for you.

12. The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers

Remember when I said that I dislike murder mysteries that the reader has no hope whatsoever in solving for themselves? This is one of those mysteries.

I don't think I would have been quite as annoyed about it, except for this bit on page 21, which just happens to be in the middle of the initial crime-scene investigation (the victim is not even dead until page 12):

(Here Lord Peter Whimsy told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)

I kid you not. I as the reader am supposed to know everything there is to know about the situation and note that something is missing from the contents of the victim's satchel. And if I happen to have a different set of interests than painting and fishing (which are the pursuits of the townsfolk, as established in the first chapter), then I'm not even going to be thrown a bone.

Worse? Whimsy assumes that the item is missing because the murderer has a particular habit, and then spends a substantial amount of time later in the book observing the suspects to see if they have that habit. So it's not like "Hey, whoever has the item is the murderer" (though the murderer is later found to have the item, and I didn't pick up on that at all because I didn't know that it was fucking missing in the first place). There is no reason they couldn't have told me what the missing item was. Then I might have been able to form my own conclusions about why it went missing, and I'd have been able to observe the suspects along with His Lordship.

Now add in a thick Scottish accent that sometimes seems to be exaggerated for the purpose of confusing the reader and making them go back over it slowly. ("bluidy"? Seriously? If you had written it as "bloody" in with all the "ach"s and "aboots" and such, I'd have supplied the accent in my head, thanks. No need to make me sit and puzzle it all out.) The result is a book that I finished out of sheer stubbornness rather than out of any sense of enjoyment.

10. Naked In Death by J.D. Robb
First, it's obvious that it's written by a romance writer ("J.D. Robb" is a pen-name of Nora Roberts)-- the sex scenes are written with as much detail as the murder scenes. Since it's the first book in a series, you're hit over the head with the main character's background story, which of course ties into the murder. Robb also likes to flip the point-of-view into other people's heads with no warning. I have mixed feelings about that, because it added a lot when she went into the head of the murderer, but she showed things from the male romantic lead's point-of-view before he was fully cleared as a suspect, and it was jarring. Despite this, I stayed up until 2am to finish the book, and I'll be begging Carol to lend me the rest of the series, because the murder mystery part was just that well done.

There's really only a couple of ways to write a mystery. The first is the classic manner, employed by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle and probably dozens of others that I don't even want to pick up and try because I hate the method: string the reader along until the very end and then pluck the murderer out of thin air with virtually no clues given earlier. I threw up my hands in disgust and swore off Ms. Christie after Ten Little Indians (which is now And Then There Were None because "Indians" isn't PC), in which the final reveal is done by a letter from the murderer confessing, and there was no possible way for anyone to pick up on any clues whatsoever.

The second method is to give the reader all the clues that the detective in the novel has, and let them solve the crime alongside the book's main character. This is a balancing act, because some readers are smart and some aren't. If your reader is yelling at the main character to figure it out already, you've lost them. Most readers are willing to go back a bit and go "Oh, yeeeaaaaah, I see it now" once you've handed them the answer, but if you don't give them enough, you start becoming a "virtually no clues" first-method author. It's easy to go either way.

With Naked In Death, I *knew* in my gut who did it by halfway through the book, only it didn't make sense. I convinced myself that I was wrong, that it couldn't be him, that he was just a red herring. So did Eve, the book's detective. She went through a series of possibilities, and I went right along with her. In the end? It was the guy my gut said, and the pieces that didn't make sense fell into place thanks to Eve's (and by extension, my own) investigations. That makes for a very satisfying ending.

7. Eleven On Top by Janet Evanovich

The latest in my "read the books I borrowed so that I can return them and get them out of the house" quest. I'd been avoiding this one too, but this time I know why-- I'd borrowed Ten Big Ones at the same time and was starting to get bored with Stephanie Plum. I understand why series writers try to avoid a lot of character development, since if there's too much, you change the character so much that it's no longer the same character and you lose readers. The big attraction to Stephanie Plum is the bumbling bounty hunter who is way out of her league. If you let her learn too much and get better at it... there goes the major attraction. But after a while, I got really tired of the same "jump in without thinking" bullshit, and the same two-dimensional love interest(s).

Which is why I found Eleven On Top to be such a pleasant surprise. Stephanie actually LEARNS something. She does real, honest-to-god investigating instead of stumbling into the answer, though she still manages to find herself in mortal danger and in need of rescuing by the end of the book (well, I did say earlier that you can't change TOO much without losing the spirit of the character). She still jumps in foolishly, but there's a small conversation between smart Stephanie and stupid Stephanie beforehand, and you get the feeling that she's making progress. Joe stops being quite so much of a stereotype, and works a little on anger management. (Actual quote: Stephanie: "You're pretty calm about all this." Joe: "I'm a calm kind of guy." Stephanie: "No, you're not. You go nuts over this stuff. You always yell when people go after me with a sledgehammer." [That makes sense in context, honest.] Joe: "Yeah, but in the past, you haven't liked that." Go, Joe!)

Grandma Mazur still rocks my world. Stephanie still loses cars at an alarming rate. Ranger is still strong, silent, mysterious, and sexy. Lula is still... well, I'm hoping that in future books the character development will extend to Lula too, though in fairness she did stop and listen to Stephanie and do what she was supposed to do once near the end of the book, so that's progress as well. I laughed more with this book than I did with any of the prior Stephanie Plum books, and it's restored my interest in the series.

5. Real Murders by Charlaine Harris
A quick read. I started it around 6:30 this evening, when I got tired of sitting in front of my computer and wanted to do something else. I finished it a few hours later. It wasn't a "omigod I've got to know who did it!" sort of thing-- I put the book down to eat dinner, and a second time when I decided that I wanted a shower tonight instead of tomorrow morning. It was good but not the gold standard of excellence. The heroine was more "real" than many, and I may pick up more books in this series just because of her (though shame on her for not telling either of her beaus that she had accepted a date from the other).

Incidentally, murder mysteries are books that I consider not-worth-keeping, in that I can't be bothered to read them a second time, knowing who did it. So if you're local and interested in a free book and like mysteries, let me know. Otherwise it will end up in a library book sale or something.

2) Hangman's Holiday by Dorothy L. Sayers

I've been tagged in another meme, when I still haven't finished up the last one. To kill two birds with one stone, I'm calling this one of the 25 Things. This one is:

"This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose."

Never one to play by the rules, I refuse to tag anyone. Also, I don't see any point in a list that doesn't include at least a brief description of why you liked a book.

1. A Wrinkle In Time
1. The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe

I do not honestly remember which of these was my "introduction to fantasy", as I'd read both of them at a very young age. I particularly remember being enthralled by the idea of folding space in A Wrinkle In Time. I read the first three books in L'Engle's series, but got bored with the fourth and stopped. I read all seven of the Narnia series. Narnia is still on my bookshelf to this day, in a nice hardcover set that was a gift from Brian (minus one of the books, which Brian swears up and down was in the box when he gave it to us, but wasn't.)

3. Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
4. Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
5. Life, The Universe, And Everything
6. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

When I was 12, my best friend Sue and I were in our school library, musing over books. She picked up HHGTTG and said "This is the *best* book, you *have* to read it." While I love the entire series, my absolute favorite part is still a throwaway line in the setup of the first book: "And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..."

You may note that Lewis and L'Engle only get one entry on the list for their entire series, while Adams gets four. That's because, while I enjoyed all of the series, I could not immediately name the titles of other books from Lewis or L'Engle without looking them up, and if you named a particular scene out of the Lewis or L'Engle series, I'm not entirely certain that I could tell you which book it came from. Not so with HHGTTG. Also, I'm aware that Adams wrote a fifth book in this series. He shouldn't have.

Hitchhiker's Guide is the book I loan out to people most often. It's also the book I get back least often. I've taken to just buying a new copy immediately upon loaning it out.

7. I Want To Go Home

This is the first book I ever read that I actually had to put down because I was laughing too hard to continue reading. It's geared towards pre-teens, and I'm sad to say that re-reads as an adult have not elicited the same fits of giggles that I used to have as a kid reading it.

Korman has several other books, including an entire series about a boarding school, and they're all pretty funny, but this book was the best of the bunch.

I still someday want to hold a scavenger hunt like the one in this book, and see what people come up with.

8. The Family Nobody Wanted

The true story of a minister and his wife who adopted twelve children, most of whom were considered unadoptable. I first read this when I was about ten, and for the longest time afterward I dreamed of a large family of adopted children.

9. Castle Perilous

Have you ever read a book, or a series, and then when you'd finished with everything the author wrote, you made up more in your head? This is that series for me.

The series itself is only okay. It's light fantasy, in a world with gates to thousands of other worlds. It suffers from being able to do anything it wants, so oftentimes it feels like the characters are tumbleweeds rolling around in a world too big for them. But something about the dynamics of the ruling family lit up ideas in my head, and I was off and running.

10. Elf Defense

I was standing in the library's sci-fi/fantasy section one day, picking up books, reading the back cover, and putting them back on shelf, unable to find something that sparked my interest. Another woman came over, picked out a couple of books for herself, and then handed me Elf Defense and said "have you read this one?" When I said no, she said "Try it. It's one of my favorites."

Now it's one of mine, too. Friesner is my absolute favorite author, and I wish she'd stop editing short story anthologies and go back to writing novels. Even though most of them are geared toward teenagers (Harlot's Ruse being a big exception), I still love her work. Except the Star Trek novels.

11. Pyramids

By rights, Pratchett ought to have a lot more slots in this list; I gave Adams four, and Pratchett is right up there with him. But honestly, by the time I got this far into the list, I was tired of picking out which books should qualify out of any given series.

Pyramids made the list because it was how I finally got into Discworld. Years before I read this book (which is #5 or 6 in the series), Steve had raved about The Colour of Magic, and on his recommendation I had picked up the first three books in the series from the library... and HATED them. There was too much going on, too many characters, too many aspects of the world, too many annoying characteristics of the main character. I couldn't wrap my head around it, and I strongly suspected that the author couldn't either. (In Once More With Footnotes, Pratchett admits that he doesn't like the main character of the first two books very much either, and that his only purpose in life is to run into other people who are much more interesting than he is.) When I bitched about the books to Jim, he said "Oh, no, don't start with the first book. Here, try this one" and handed me Pyramids. It's slow, by Discworld standards, but it takes place in a small corner of the world and is heavily based on Egyptian themes-- which meant that Pratchett didn't have to take three chapters to explain the culture. Once I got the hang of that small corner of the world, it was easier to expand outward, and I did eventually make it back to the first couple of books, which made more sense by then.

12. The Bromeliad series (Truckers, Diggers, Wings)

Well, I did say Pratchett ought to have more than one slot. I chose a different series, in part because it irks me that no one realizes he wrote more than just Discworld, and in part because it's a really good series.

The series is about small creatures who are forced to move out of their home when a department store closes and their resources dry up. I remember very little about the details of what they do, because the part of the story that stuck with me was how their society threatened to splinter when change was forced upon them (some resisted change so strongly that they would prefer to stay and starve), and how the challenges of rebuilding sparked new advancements. But what I remember most strongly about the books is the frog. The series is named for a flower, in which tiny frogs live their entire lives, and are used as a metaphor throughout the books. One of the frogs starts to wonder what's outside the flower, a concept that is so foreign to other frogs that they can't comprehend the concept of "outside", much less something in "outside". At the very end, the frog finally makes it to the edge of his flower, and looks out into the vast "outside"... which is a sea of other flowers, each of which has a colony of tiny frogs in it.

13. On A Pale Horse
14. For Love Of Evil

If you've encountered Anthony via his Xanth series, you may be inclined to run screaming from any of his work (though I would point out that the first half-dozen or so of Xanth aren't all that bad, and then Man From Mundania was good. It's just the other 20 or 30 books in the series that are terrible.) This series is easily his best work. The first book will make you look at the Grim Reaper in a whole new light. The sixth will make you look at the Devil in a whole new light. The central idea that certain mythological personas are actually titles of office that get passed from person to person was an eye-opener for me (these were high-school reads for me the first time through). Don't read them in order, though-- the second book is about Time, and is highly confusing. It makes much more sense to skip over Time and come back to it after you've read the fifth book. Knowing who all the other people in the series are helps tremendously in figuring out what the heck is going on in Bearing An Hourglass.

15. Organizing From The Inside Out

The only non-fiction book to make the list. I'm a natural-born clutterbug, with a desire to live in a clean and organized house. This has prompted me to read all manner of organizational books, and I can assure that most of them suck. This one skips over most (though not all) of the So F'ing Obvious It's Ridiculous Bits (Get rid of stuff you don't use! Put everything away in the same place every time! No, really?) in favor of a kindergarten philosophy-- namely, that kindergartens work, and work well, because they keep things together that get used together. Most of the book is about stepping back and figuring out how you really use items, and then creating work and storage spaces centered around activities. It's surprisingly effective.