Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Lightest of light

reading and rereading (mostly the second): Victoria Clayton's Past Mischief (Clayton's the closest any living author I know comes to the pleasures of Georgette Heyer, but with a sort of 1970s upper-class English setting instead of Regency, and rather more complex and realistic); Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword, which I have read a ridiculously large number of times already but can always read one more time; Diana Wynne Jones, The Merlin Conspiracy (I love all of her books, this one's very good but not quite up to the standard of the one it's a sequel to, Deep Secret, one of the absolute best). Also one I hadn't read before, really excellent and startlingly similar to--not in a derivative way, just in a same-wavelength thing--Phil Rickman: City of Masks: A Cree Black Novel, an excellent ghost-busting mystery novel. What is in the air with this? I have never in my life met a paranormal investigator, but these novels (bristling with common sense and realism, BTW, and Susan Howatch has this too) foreground them. On the other hand, I have never met a homicide detective either. It may be a question of social circles.

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