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Finally done catching up on what all you people were up to this weekend, which means I can start typing the Very Long Entry about my Independence Day celebrations. To keep everyone convivially distracted, I'm posting the annotated list of the ten and a half books I read in June.

Ten and a half. I desperately need to get a life.

Start With a Digital Camera: The Indespensible Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Digital Camera (2nd Edition) (John Odam): The basics for using a digital, with a fairly heavy emphasis photomanipulation, using software like Photoshop. Somewhat dry, and occasionally cramped by use of too-small pictures; to show details like depth of field, a 1" square just isn't large enough.

Sun in Glory, and Other Tales of Valdemar (Mercedes Lackey, Editor): If a line were drawn between the fiction section of the library and the checkout desk, it would pass about two feet from the "new paperbacks" display. This is my only excuse for picking up this collection, which proudly announces in the introductory blurb to the first story that the author is twelve. (And she writes like it. In ten years, if she has the determination the blurb suggests, she'll be a really strong writer. Right now she's writing about the wizard's apprentice who saves the day.) This is an OC fic collection, along the lines of the Darkover and "Honor Harrington" anthologies. The author who created the universe contributes one or more stories about a main character; a number of other authors chime in with stories set in the "background" of the universe. In this case, Mercedes Lackey wrote a "Alberich, Talia and Dirk are asked to Karse by Solaris" story, and everyone else wrote stories about Heralds or the impact of Heralds on people's lives.

The collection struck me as very fan-centric. It's authors dabbling in the shallow end of the universe. Which means they have to be really, really clever to send out a wave that stirs the deeps of canon. None of these stories did. The one that came closest was Michelle West's chancy "Winter Death", which, with one more scene - five sentences in the right place! - could be used to handwave the lack of Heralds with an empathic Gift in Talia's time. Clever backstory retcons (as opposed to the more familiar really dumb and pointless retcons) are something I adore in fiction. The lack of follow-through on that in "Winter Death" drives me mad.

The stories that know they're light and fluffy are a lot less frustrating, but still remain very minor. Points for stories like "Icebreaker" which try to show why the Valdemaran Everyman might enjoy not being a Herald. And "The Cat Who Came to Dinner" is cute in a relatively not-annoying way, even if I guessed the plot twist long before the protagonist did. But overall, the anthology's skippable if you're not a Lackey die-hard. Check it out of the library for "Sun in Glory" but save your money for stronger fiction.

Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider (C. J. Cherryh): Reread. Because it was there. Because it's such a summer pleasure to read one novel that starts on the edge of winter and the sequel that kicks off with an ice storm. Exactly as I remember them, and why do I always get to the creepy parts at one in the morning?

Learning to See Creatively: How to Compose Great Photographs (Bryan Peterson): Nifty book that does what it says. Focuses on applying the basics of design (line, shape, form, texture, pattern, color) to photographic composition. Since it's focused on the use of film cameras (not surprising, in a book published in 1988), some of the suggestions for changing film speeds, f-stops and lenses was wasted, but the extensive use of large photographs with clear explanatory captions was very useful.

The Art of Seeing (The KODAK Workshop Series): Introduction to film photography. It's a fairly short overview, with lots of hints about which Kodak products would be useful in different environments (some of which probably aren't in existence anymore; the book was published in 1984) in case we weren't sure who the publishers were or where they hoped to make substantial money. It's not bad, but the same material's covered elsewhere in more contemporary books that include sections on things that weren't available in the '80s, like use of home computers in image editing.

Last Herald-Mage Trilogy [Magic's Pawn, Magic's Promise, Magic's Price] (Mercedes Lackey): I had a few minutes before I had to check out and hop the bus home, and I was a little annoyed by earlier reading in the month, so I started skimming Magic's Pawn to see if Lackey was attacked by the Author Emeritus bug or if my mid-teen memories inflated her novels' worth.

To my shock - no. And yes.

This writeup grew to be as long as everything else up together, so it's getting its own entry. Pruning side commentary about personal hot buttons and how well or poorly the Valdemar series integrates its worldbuilding leaves out all the interesting chatter.

Deep Secret (Diana Wynne Jones): Reread. Magic and SF cons and a Byzantine empire looking for the emperor's heirs, oh my. The novel's very workmanlike. Reads smoothly and includes some fun with the Babylon children's rhyme. I mentioned once to samthereaderman that I wasn't a huge DWJ fan and got a nice double take out of him. I think the reason I'm not a fan is that DWJ began writing long before many of the current crop of "magic hidden in our world" authors, and (I suspect) broke a lot of ground for them. So where he sees her doing something fairly unusual, I see a retread of familiar themes. I suspect that this is like whining that The Lord of the Rings is exactly like Terry Brook's novels: a case of reading the newer stuff first. Sam, correct me if I'm wrong.

*Defender (CJ Cherryh): I came, I saw, I nabbed. I read a hundred pages before realizing I inhaled it one afternoon in December 2002. I don't see Cherryh taking the Foreigner series anywhere she hasn't already been, which has bumped it way down my reading priority list. The library's lack of the next (and currently last) Foreigner novel, Explorer, hasn't helped.

*Abandoned midbook, poor thing.