Folly of the Faithful Canine

I had never read any of Sue Grafton's Alphabet series. My mom read a few of the books long ago and doesn't remember what they were like. Not knowing how they compared, I started on the first free copy I found.

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Up for another high fantasy, I'm starting The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon. I don't know many inspired by Southeast Asia....

Great, another book without a Wikipedia page. Even author Davinia Evans doesn't have one, because she's too new on the scene, with only two published novels afterward and none before. At least I can refresh my memory with others' reviews.

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Now I've started The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. At least it got a screen adaptation, however unpopular.

After nearly six years, I still remembered Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb pretty well. The main hole in my memory pertained to Fitz's condition at the end of the novel: bedridden and having lost the independent use of the psychic Skill, thanks to an abortive attempt on his life. His illness dominates the early chapters of the second volume, until he finds the strength and courage to return to the royal palace after months.

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After those 675 pages, I feel like reading something shorter. That'll be H. Beam Piper's Cosmic Computer.

For some reason, I thought I'd read The City of Brass much longer than four years ago. I could remember the general outline but none of the character names, nor the circumstances at the very end. An in-book synopsis would have helped, but I settled for the cast pages, plus Wikipedia and a brief browse of the first volume.

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Nor do I know what I'll read next. Let's see what I get for Christmas.

I rarely read a book in its year of publication, especially when the author (Antonia Hodgson in this case) is brand-new to me. I think I was just eager to get one of the largest tomes off my shelf, tho the story doesn't run for quite as many words as I thought.

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Looking for sci-fi, I picked up Larry Niven's N-Space. A similar number of pages, but I'm not reading all of them.

A decade after watching a movie of King Solomon's Mines and nearly a decade after reading She, I finally got around to the other novel in the same binding. I would not have named a sequel after an already established protagonist, but I guess that sold back in 1887.

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Next up is Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic. Maybe I'll finish by the Day of the Dead.

Despite the title's implication, this is the fifth Thursday Next novel, not the second. That said, it reportedly kicks off a second series. While published in 2007, only 2 years after the previous entry, it's set 14 years later, in 2002.

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My next read is A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher, whom I recently discovered is Ursula Vernon. I've been enjoying her Hamster Princess kid lit (not reviewed here), so now I'll try a darker fairy tale take.

It's been more than five years since I read The Lies of Locke Lamora, the first book in Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard Sequence. Fortunately, I remembered the plot pretty well and was never confused for long when the sequel made reference to past events. You might even choose to start here.

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My next read is The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna. Back to a focus on country folk.

I first heard of George MacDonald from his appearance in C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, serving a guide role similar to Virgil in Dante's Inferno. Years later, I caught some clips of MacDonald's own writing on a Facebook group (now disbanded) dedicated to him, Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton. When I found one of his two stories I could name in a Little Free Library, I finally gave him a try. It helped that at a mere 201 pages with frequent chapter breaks, I could easily finish the book right before my beach vacation.

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Speaking of dark fantasies, I've picked up The Blood Trials by N.E. Davenport. So far, it has an angry tone.

I don't recall where I first learned of Jenny Greenteeth, the dangerous amphibious fairy from English folklore. It wasn't in A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits, which I still check on occasion. Regardless, Molly O'Neill's 2025 debut novel sounded promising.

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On a whim the other day, I picked up a Silver Age collection of Doom Patrol comics. It may be a while before I pick up a non-graphic novel.