BOOK: Elantris is a stand-alone fantasy novel by Brandon Sanderson, the author of the Mistborn trilogy I mentioned a few weeks ago. The story's told in close-third-person POV, focusing turn by turn on a mysterious & dynamic outcast, a rigid & ambitious zealot, and a clever princess struggling to find a place in an unfamiliar kingdom where she's ( Read more... )

BOOK: As the season turns toward fall, this seems a nice moment to recommend one of my favorite curl-up-with books, YA adventure novel The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. Heroine Harry moves from an ersatz-Imperial Britain out to a distant desert colony, where the conquered people have unusual powers. Taken from her bed at night for reasons unknown ( Read more... )

BOOK: My father, who for years sneered at fantasy and did not even read novels, demonstrated this weekend how much he's changed. I was returning a fantasy novel to my sister, Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, and he asked how I liked it. "A lot," I said. "It was really interesting." "I read it first," said Dad, smugly ( Read more... )

BOOK: I recently listened to an audio book of P.G. Wodehouse's How Right You Are, Jeeves. I've read some Jeeves & Wooster before and though they're funny I find that several in a row have too much of a sameness. I enjoyed this short novel more, since it had some entertaining minor characters (including one named Kipper Herring) and some ( Read more... )

BOOK: Reading about Sherlock Holmes, I came across a reference to "the best-selling mystery novel of the 19th century." Was it by Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens? No! It was by a man named Fergus Hume, and though time has forgotten it, his The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was the Da Vinci Code of its day. Of ( Read more... )

BOOK: I know I mentioned on here how much I loved Kate Ross's Cut to the Quick, but it never made it into a RecSun proper. Reading some other historical mysteries has reminded me of how much I love Julian Kestrel, the Regency-era sleuth introduced in this volume. He doesn't just arrive fully-formed; we get to see his transition from a good- ( Read more... )

BOOK: It's been a while since I read a book as absorbing as Graceling by Kristin Cashore, recently recced to me by soniag. It reminded me of my later teens, when I was really into girl-power fantasy and would stay up half the night, deep into a world created by Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, or Diana Wynne Jones. This is, in fact, exactly the kind of ( Read more... )

In honor of Independence Day, I will be recommending... stuff not from America. Because freedom of entertainment is what liberty is all about?

BOOK: Read any Sherlock Holmes lately? If it's been a while, or if-heaven forfend!-you've never read any, now's always a good time to read about the original Great Detective. I'd recommend The Adventures ( Read more... )

BOOK: Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is about as funny as a book for book nerds could be. In an alternate universe 1980s London, where one massive corporation owns almost everything and dodos have been cloned, literature has become so valued by society that a branch of the police force has been assigned specifically to stomp out literary crime. ( Read more... )

BOOK: Thanks to winkingstar for reccing Katherine Sturtevant's At the Sign of the Star when I asked for Fun Summer Suggestions. It's a pleasing middle-grade level book about a 12- or 13-year-old child of a bookseller in Restoration Era London. The light plot simply concerns the girl's fears about her widowed father remarrying, but the heroine, though girl- ( Read more... )