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The worst part about these long entries is spellchecking them. Apparently I am incapable of implementing the "i before e" rule with any sort of consistency. And in my defense, I finished four of these after finals. I still need to get out more. To save people's friends pages, I'm cutting for length. No spoilers under the cut unless noted.

Edited to add: Not a bit of nonfiction this month. Have no fear: by the end of June I should have finished Unweaving the Rainbow, another Dawkins book. (And much lighter than The Selfish Gene. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed.) By the way, is there a Stephen Jay Gould book that won't insult my intelligence? I stalled in the preface to Full House around the fifth assurance that the "disappearance of the .400 batting average in baseball" would be explained later in the book. I would've settled for the one paragraph explanation of batting averages and a footnote explaning why I should care.

Anyway. On to the actual content.

A Darker Place (Laurie R. King): Alternative religions expert Anne Waverly gets around to integrating her shattered personality during an undercover investigation of a religious community.

( Minor spoilers. )

If you like LRK, you'll probably enjoy this. I can't speak to mystery readers in general, since I don't know how well this conforms to or defies the tropes of that genre.

The Knight (Gene Wolfe): Our boy Able chases cloud castle out of America and into seven worlds of legend and myth. ( Interesting worldbuilding, everything else take-or-leave. )

I reread The Beekeeper's Apprentice (Laurie R. King) instead of packing for a wedding and studying for my evolutionary bio final. Since I got an A in evol bio and I was still packed (late) Friday night, I don't feel that bad about the wasted time. Its charms and flaws remain as they always have; great comfort reading.

Swords in the Mist (Fritz Lieber): Continuing my gradual assimilation of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" series. Two adventurers meet strange (yet alluring) women and go questing in ancient Earth history. The prose is deliciously purple, the plots absurdly direct, and the essentially serial nature of the stories baldly apparent. Great school-season reading: you can say, "gee, it's late," and put it down. Try doing that with Tolkein or Bujold. (By the way, may I just say how relieved I am that Hallowed Hunt came out after finals?) One mistake: don't rush it. I tried to hurry the last few pages one night and it just fell apart.

People are getting so psyched about the Miyazaki adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones) I snagged a copy for plane reading. ( I can see why they're buzzing. )

Folly (Laurie R. King): A crazy woman, a house, a tragedy and a granddaughter. Think A Darker Place with multi-generational family issues and a history of mental illness. There's a heavy investment on the theme of folly instead of alchemy, obviously, with somewhat less subtlety. I don't know that psychological thrillers are really my thing; I keep waiting for things to start blowing up. And I'm not talking about the psychological stuff.

The Hallowed Hunt (Lois McMaster Bujold): Ingrey kin Wolfcliff is charged to convey a murdered Prince's body and the subdued murderess to the Weald's capital. Easy, right? If only life could be that simple.

Fairly random comments follow, because I am definitely still in the ponder-and-reflect reaction stage. Comments even more strongly encouraged than usual.

( 'Wild accusations,' murmured Lewko, 'a questionable source, not a shred of material proof, and the third highest lord in the land. What more joys can this day bring me? No, don't answer that. Please.' Spoilers ho! )

Overall, I think this is my favorite book in the Chalionverse/Five Gods universe. I like my plots twisty, oh yes.

See? Not as late as July! Go me!

Cutting for major spoilers and some space. May come back and cut for space more once I post this and see how much space it hogs.

(Nine books. Nine. Shoot. Granted, some of them were short, but others were five hundred pages. Probably won't read this many novels again until I get another insane commute like August's. Given where I live, it shouldn't be more than three years... anyway. On to the stories.)

The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson (Nominated for the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel): The Black Plague devastated Europe in the Middle Ages, killing an estimated third to half of the continental population. What if it had wiped out 99% of the European population? How would history play out if Chinese and Islamic culture dominated, rather than European? And what if souls reincarnated, grouping together in multiple lifetimes, so that stories set a thousand years apart might be the adventures of the one protagonist? Kim Stanley Robinson throws a monkey wrench in the mechanics of history and writes down how it might play out. Sort of.

( Spoilers? What spoilers? You mean the ones under this cut? )

On the balance, it’s KSR. If you like his relaxed writing style and socialist/environmental politics, you’ll probably enjoy The Years of Rice and Salt.

O Jerusalem, Laurie R. King: Mary Sue Russell and her mentor/partner Sherlock Holmes temporarily escape a messy and potentially lethal case in London, risking their lives in the Holy Land in January 1919. Set smack in the middle of The Beekeeper's Apprentice, the first book in the series, but written between The Moor and Justice Hall (see below).

If I recall correctly, I first read this during a Laurie King binge a couple years ago. Beats The Moor hands down.

Justice Hall, Laurie R. King: A very direct sequel to O Jerusalem. The most striking thing about it, for me, is a theme it shares with LRK’s Martinelli series: an authorial love of generational continuity and expensive houses intersecting with some less rooted or more ambiguously rooted characters. Russell gushes about the centuries of history imbued in Justice Hall's very walls; Kate Martinelli and her partner Lee sink sweat, time and money into Lee’s dead... aunt’s? mother’s? house on Russian Hill. The central mystery, such as it is, unfolds with authorial deliberation and enjoyable twists, but is almost incidental to LRK’s interest in continuity and the changing British social landscape of the 1920's.

The King’s Peace, Jo Walton: Would you believe I didn’t pick up that this was an Arthurian retelling until two hundred or more pages in? Comments waiting on finding and finishing The King’s Name the second half of the story.

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin: Everyone dreams; most people’s dreams don’t affect reality. George Orr’s do, and it terrifies him. The state-assigned psychiatrist he is forced to see after a drug overdose read as an apparent suicide attempt is fascinated by these "effective dreams" and uses George to rewrite the world a bit. Okay, more than a bit. George is disturbed. The reader resists the urge to earmark and pencil in examples of Le Guin’s bulletproof literary kinks pet ideas.

Dawn, Octavia Butler: The War is gone, as is most of the human race. Lilith Iyapo (people famliar with Bible-based religious traditions will note the significance and irony of the name) is one of the survivors saved by the Oankali, aliens without the human biological imperative for conflict, but with an imperative to "trade" genetic structure with other species, willing or otherwise. The novel narrates Lilith’s reluctant acceptance of a role as the resentful bridge between the humans and the Oankali.

The Oankali have a classically cool S.F.nal idea going for them: a three sex reproductive system, involving up to five participants. They also subvert a lot of classic memes. Their behavior toward humanity is peaceful, benevolent and more invasive than any "conquer the puny Earthlings" military campaign. Their trade imperative is read by most of the characters as infecting the human genome with frightening, alien characteristics. Science fiction has reiterated the clash of cultures theme from a dominant culture’s point of view plenty of times; Dawn is about the effects on (and by) the "weaker" culture. Humans hate and fear the Oankali, but are prized by that species of assimilators for their adaptability and creativity.

This has some obvious applications to the history of the United States, and the Americas at large.

Ill Met in Lankhmar, Fritz Leiber: All hail the adventures of the indomitable Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser! Old school sword-and-sorcery of the type much mocked by The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, but with a flair for dramatic language and humor. The city of Lankhmar has probably inspired a number of D&D games, and several series currently in production, such as Steven Brust’s Vlad novels and P.C. Hodgell’s Jaime books, very likely also trace some roots to Fritz Lieber’s novels. If you find any of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novels, they’re slightly dated in attitude and their use of language, but very much worth reading for their lively protagonists and fantastical plots.

The Service of the Sword, David Weber et al: latest collection of stories set in the Honorverse. People who have read the previous three collections know the drill: Weber writes a story about Honor, the Navy, or the treecats and other authors fill in gaps that interest them. ( This time, Jane Lindskold, Timothy Zahn, John Ringo, Victor Mitchell, and Eric Flint step up to the Honorverse. )

A Wolf at the Door, and Other Retold Fairy Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds: Short story collection filed under YA at the library. I checked it out for the Garth Nix story, a rather gruesome retelling of Hansel and Gretel, but really enjoyed several other stories in the collection. A fast, easy read, including contributions from a lot of big name authors, including Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee and Jane Yolen. Possibly my favorite story in the collection was "Swans" a retelling of the same myth used in pegkerr's The Wild Swans, which was about family, love, noise and silence when I wanted to hear about those things.

Edited Sept. 12 to add: The Cinderella retooling annoyed me, though, smacking into current buttons regarding the importance of self-motivation and determination in life.

Edited Oct 17 to add: Forgot about Sorcery and Cecelia, which I had to have read sometime in August.

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September's book list will almost certainly be shorter, unless people are keenly interested in a blow-by-blow account of my struggles with functional groups in two different courses, but I've got some good stuff on hand: more Octavia Butler, The Paths of the Dead (finished it this weekend, and... oh. Even fangirl squeals fail. I think Brust may be leaping up the purchase priority list as soon as I confirm the pub date for The Enchantress of Dzur Mountain. And oh, thank any and all deities and divinities for interlibrary loan, which granted me Paths and will eventually eventually land The Lord of Castle Black in my trembling hands.)