I can't believe it's taking me so long to get through 50 books, remembering the days when I used to read 8 or 10 a week, never mind 50 in a year... At this rate, I won't succeed in this challenge :(

I think I need to spend less time online. Oh... maybe I'd better keep these comments fairly short.

Anyway - here goes ( #23 Neil Gaiman, The Sandman Preludes and Nocturnes; The Sandman The Dollshouse )

( Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog )

Catching up with my reading log (and yikes, I'm doing okay, but I'm going to have to get my skates on if I'm to read 50 books this year):
( The Hunger Games )

A trio of fantasy/sf

#8 Anne Osterlund, Academy 7In a universe far, far away, but obviously a distant colony of ours (they celebrate Christmas!), Dane and Aerin are two misfits - one, the son of privilege, the other a refugee with a mysterious past - who find themselves against the odds at an exclusive Academy. Not unpredictably, they become ( Read more... )

Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones

I think from now on, DWJ is moving off my "buy immediately in hardcover" list. There hasn't now been a book that I haven't been slightly disappointed in since Deep Secret, which was the last of the "true" genius DWJ novels, imo ( Read more... )

Connie Willis, Blackout

Connie Willis is one of my absolute favourite sf authors, always reliable, but sadly not prolific - I can't remember exactly how long it's been since the last novel, but I do remember that my mother was still alive when I was reading Passage. This long-awaited new novel did not disappoint, except to the extent that we are ( Read more... )

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

This was a birthday gift, so I'm glad to be able to report that I enjoyed it very much. It's a quiet, graceful book. Somehow very Japanese in its understated elegance and slight oddness. It is about - yes - a housekeeper who looks after a professor who, although a mathematical genius, can remember ( Read more... )

Kristin Cashore, GracelingWHOOSH! (That's the book galloping by ( Read more... )

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin

Lavinia is austere, meticulously researched, beautifully written, but for the most part curiously uninvolving.

Perhaps my greatest complaint about it is that although Le Guin sets out to give a voice to a voiceless character from Vergil's Aenead, the king's daughter whom Aeneas wins in order to found the Roman empire ( Read more... )

Hilary Mantel, Wolf HallMMMMmmmm. So good ( Read more... )