Recent reading
While I'm waiting for the episode 15 of Time Between Dog and Wolf download to finish, I might as well write this post about my most recent reading :).
(131.) Burning Bridges is the fourth book in Laura Anne Gilman's Retrievers series. There were quite a few interesting developments in it for both Wren and Sergei's personal life as well as for the Talents and fatae in general. The main forces behind the big threat that has been targeting Talents and fatae were finally identitied, but not without great cost. I'll be very interested to see how things will develop in further books in this series.
After that I decided that I want to read something in Finnish for a change and read a couple of old Guy de Maupassant books, (132.) Maalaispiika ja perhetyttö, a short story collection, and (135.) Mont-Oriolin kylpylä, a novel set in a French spa town. Both were okay, I think I have a few more short story collections by him and might read them as well in the near future (the books used to belong to my mother's father and were originally published in the 1920s).
Yu-Chin Lin's (133.-134.) Vision of the Other Side 1 & 2 are Chinese historical wuxia manga (or manhua as they are described in the back :)) in which young Princess Nan-Fan is contracted to marry the conquering Li's second prince. She isn't that keen on the marriage and decides to escape the palace at the first opportunity. She had previously met an intriguing barbarian warrior on the market, who, of course, turns out to be the man she's supposed to marry, even though she doesn't know that...
The first book didn't really grab me at first, but I liked the second book more when Nan-Fan finally got out of the palace. The introduction of the evil brother and the Lady Macbeth character also made things more interesting. And I can't help being constantly amused by the name of the publisher of these: "DramaQueen" :).
(136.) The Dragon Quintet edited by Marvin Kaye was nice timepass reading. The anthology contains five very different dragon stories written by Orson Scott Card, Mercedes Lackey, Tanith Lee, Elizabeth Moon and Michael Swanwick. I liked all of the stories in their own way, but I think my favourites were the Card and Lackey stories the most and might even check out the book Lackey wrote set in the world of her novella.
(131.) Burning Bridges is the fourth book in Laura Anne Gilman's Retrievers series. There were quite a few interesting developments in it for both Wren and Sergei's personal life as well as for the Talents and fatae in general. The main forces behind the big threat that has been targeting Talents and fatae were finally identitied, but not without great cost. I'll be very interested to see how things will develop in further books in this series.
After that I decided that I want to read something in Finnish for a change and read a couple of old Guy de Maupassant books, (132.) Maalaispiika ja perhetyttö, a short story collection, and (135.) Mont-Oriolin kylpylä, a novel set in a French spa town. Both were okay, I think I have a few more short story collections by him and might read them as well in the near future (the books used to belong to my mother's father and were originally published in the 1920s).
Yu-Chin Lin's (133.-134.) Vision of the Other Side 1 & 2 are Chinese historical wuxia manga (or manhua as they are described in the back :)) in which young Princess Nan-Fan is contracted to marry the conquering Li's second prince. She isn't that keen on the marriage and decides to escape the palace at the first opportunity. She had previously met an intriguing barbarian warrior on the market, who, of course, turns out to be the man she's supposed to marry, even though she doesn't know that...
The first book didn't really grab me at first, but I liked the second book more when Nan-Fan finally got out of the palace. The introduction of the evil brother and the Lady Macbeth character also made things more interesting. And I can't help being constantly amused by the name of the publisher of these: "DramaQueen" :).
(136.) The Dragon Quintet edited by Marvin Kaye was nice timepass reading. The anthology contains five very different dragon stories written by Orson Scott Card, Mercedes Lackey, Tanith Lee, Elizabeth Moon and Michael Swanwick. I liked all of the stories in their own way, but I think my favourites were the Card and Lackey stories the most and might even check out the book Lackey wrote set in the world of her novella.