Friday, January 22, 2010

Light reading miscellany

This seems to be the first week of rest and relaxation I have had for an almost inconceivably long time - I am still battling the last bits of a lung ailment, but have hopes I will shake it soon...

Various light reading from the humane society stack:

Frances Fyfield's Seeking Sanctuary (a bit too much in the vein of Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine novels, which I'm not crazy about, but not at all bad).

Natasha Mostert, Season of the Witch (a bit goofy, but I really enjoyed it - I want to write a novel of the occult sometime!)

Mary Renault, Funeral Games - it was fortuitous to find this at the shop, as I had plucked my old copies of the first two Alexander books from my mother's bookshelf over Xmas and brought them with me to read on the plane. I think the middle book in the trilogy is much the strongest, but I still enjoyed this one quite a bit...

And last and best, a truly enthralling book, Lian Hearn's Heaven's Net is Wide. I remember discovering the first of the Tales of the Otori in the Columbia bookstore some years ago and basically just reading it in a mesmerized fit, then having to traipse all over town to get the next installments RIGHT AWAY, I could not wait - they are very lovely, reading this one (a prequel) makes me feel that I must reread the others...

2 comments:

  1. Wait...doesn't The Explosionist have occult elements? Mediums and spiritualists.

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  2. Yes, definitely occult elements, but not perhaps a FULL-BLOWN novel of the occult!!!

    ReplyDelete