palace of winds

May wasn’t a good reading month for me. I was incredibly busy and pretty stressed out, and trying to get through One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. (Which I’m still not even halfway through, but I am determined to finish it dammit.) Lennie rescued me toward the end of the month, though, and lent me the latest Sookie Stackhouse book: Dead in the Family, by Charlaine Harris. I devoured it in a couple days.

If you like the rest of the Southern Vampire series (or the True Blood series, or whatever you want to call it), you’ll like this one. I didn’t think it had as much zip and plot as the earlier books, but I did think it felt like less of a set-up book than the last one. I thought Dead and Gone (the one right before this, with Sookie’s unusual great-grandfather [don't want to spoil anyone so I won't say more!]) was treading water, setting things into place for a bigger something. I don’t feel like that something really came, but I’m hopeful that it’s still on the horizon, and that Harris has some kind of overarching vision she’s writing toward.

Continuing the theme of series that I will stay up half the night reading, this month I checked out the audiobook of Robin Hobb’s latest, Dragon Keeper, read by Anne Flosnick. Not my favorite narrator choice for this book, and I briefly considered ditching the audiobook entirely and ponying up for the book version instead (the waiting list at the library for it is ridiculous right now), but I was already sucked into the story and it was too late. This is the first volume of two in the Rain Wilds Chronicles, but it’s in the same world as almost all of Hobb’s books, and continues the story started in Assassin’s Apprentice. I’ve already read some nine? books (I pretty much think Robin Hobb hung the moon) in this world, so I have a rather strong idea of the voices of the characters and her writing in my head. Anne Flosnick has some other ideas about it, but I was able to mostly ignore those.

Anyway, before I go off on a tangent about how wonderful Robin Hobb’s books are and how you should halt everything in your life (maybe even your job) to read them all right this second, I will just say thumbs up. And that the Rain Wilds Chronicles are really one big book split into two volumes, and I think I’m going to wander over to Amazon right now, even though I prefer paperbacks to hardcovers for fantasy books, and it will mean I only own one, which will eventually have to be remedied…

2010 Book Count: 13 (+4 fluff)
January: 2 (+3 fluff)
February: 4
March: 3
April: 2 (+1)
May: 1
June: 1