I just finished reading Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. It was awesome just like all of his Tiffany Aching books, well the Disc World novels in generally are happy things. And if that Disc World novle happens to have Death or his grandaughter Susan all the better.

On my list of things i should really read is The Looking Glass Wars by Frankbeddor. I have it I just need to start reading.

I'm currently reading Gayle Greeno's The Ghatti's Tale trilogy. Now... these books are a happy gooshyfest for me, for one reason: BIG TELEPATHIC KITTIES. The author also seems to be a bit more in love with her telepathic kitties than she should be, but if you don't mind that, you'll like these books. Other than that, the books are a little easy to predict, but they're also well written, with sympathetic characters and an interesting take on a colony society on a planet other than Earth. The history is pretty well thought out, and the books seem honestly more like fantasy than science fiction.

Raven Nightshade wrote:

I finallly started reading the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. Actually, I'm about halfway through it already. Seems I can tear through a book each week, so I can finish the series by Easter, most likely. If you liked Buffy, you'll love this. If you hate Buffy, you'll still love it. Lots of sex, lots of angst, lots of violence, plus there's a plot. And it's not one of those series where the heroine has to fall for some guy in every book. She is, however, being relentlessly chased by a centuries-old French vampire who behaves like an undead Pepe Le Pew.

Jean-Claude is much like Pepe Le Pew, yes. However, I still have to confess, I find him the hottest character in there because he won't take no for an answer. Those books are fun to read, but after a while I got annoyed with the way she repeats descriptions... and I wasn't satisfied with the later books.

Yasha wrote:

Jean-Claude is much like Pepe Le Pew, yes. However, I still have to confess, I find him the hottest character in there because he won't take no for an answer. Those books are fun to read, but after a while I got annoyed with the way she repeats descriptions... and I wasn't satisfied with the later books.

I'm reading Blue Moon at the moment. And I have to agree, the descriptions are almost verbatim in every book. I just kind of scan them, although to be honest, most of them don't have faces to me. Anita's the only one that actually has one, but it keeps bouncing between random brunette and Faith from BtVS even though Anita looks NOTHING like her. I almost hope it never gets picked up for a movie or TV series because the casting would only piss me off.

Did your dissatisfaction have any connection to the moment where you started yelling at the top of your lungs, "Damn it, Anita, shut the hell up and do what they tell you for once?!"

Oh, and I'm at the part where Richard keeps accidentally ripping his shirt from all the muscles.

I'm reading Elizabeth & Mary. ...and hell, for someone who loathed history in high school, since moving to England I seem to read nothing BUT historical fiction and outright history textbooks.

(...and er, that book is about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Depressing as hell, really, but slightly less so than reading obsessively about Katherine of Aragon. )

Yasha wrote:

I have a secret to confess-- I'm a whore for biographies.

Especially of queens and other powerful women.

Eva Peron, Marie Antionette, Queen Elizabeth, Athenais... more, more!

I got into trouble at the York Castle Museum the other day because they had statuettes of Henry VIII's wives, and I wanted Anne of Cleves, Anne Boleyn, Catalina d'Aragon and Katherine Parr. But I couldn't have even carried one home so now I have none.

...and yet I am still considering going back to York expressly to get Catalina. Damn you books look what you make me do!

Yasha wrote:

Eva Peron

I've read a biography on the life of Eva Peron, but at the moment, I can't remember what it was called. I was just rewatching the movie "Evita" a few moments ago. I'm not among those who think that she's a saint, but I've always loved the music in the movie, so I wanted to learn more about her, so that I could understand the movie a little better.

She certainly did live an interesting life. My music teacher described her as, "A whore who slept her way to the top and scammed over an entire country," so I was surprised to see that she had actually done a lot of really good things. It's also ironic how in the movie they have a song called, "You Must Love Me," which is about how even when she was dying and useless to Peron, he still loved her, though in reality he completely ignored her when she was dying.

At the end of the play, it says, "Money was raised to build a tomb, a monument to Evita... But as soon as the pedestal was completed, Evita's body disappeared, for seventeen years." I didn't know what had happened until I read that biography, and that was just plain disturbing.

I recall finding how her husband gave school children red mopeds in exchange for sex to be rather disturbing as well, but after watching SKU, all I can think is, "Why don't Utena and Touga get mopeds?"

Means Saionji wouldn't take it in the ass.

I just finished reading A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin, book four of the Song of Ice and Fire series. Best. Fantasy. Ever. No goodie-two-shoe hero, no good vs. evil, no happy sappy love story of joy. And interesting sex scenes, short but graphic, several lesbain ones included.

I also recently finished The Last Unicorn by Petere S. Beagle. I'm now starting The Princess Bride.

Giovanna wrote:

Right now I'm reading Lord of the Flies. Oh it's so funny what kids do without adult supervision.

I taught it'd be a lot rougher than it was - the modern media has made me numb to sufferings of novel characters...

I felt my classic bone tingling and dug out Dumas' good old Count of Monte Cristo. I didn't remember the book directly compared the Count to a Byronian vampire...

In between reading sessions of The Hobbit, I am reading the manga version of Alien Nine by Hitoshi Tomizawa.  Now, I've already watched the anime version, and that was delightfully weird, even mind trippy at times.  The manga is proving to be just as much so.  It's got a few more details (as I expected), so this has been just as interesting a read as it was to watch.  I'm almost done with volume one, with two volumes to go.   I have noticed that there's a sequel manga that's just one volume, so I'll probably have to get that soon as well!

Giovanna wrote:

Oh, and because it was such fun, the last book I read was At Home with the Marquis de Sade, by Francine du Plessix Gray. A biography about, well, a very kinky dude. I honestly rather liked the Marquis de Sade before (Quills is one of my favorite movies), but by the end of this biography I liked him a whole lot more. He's been demonized by history, and not without reason because he's quite a pervert and does pretty nasty things aside from writing all that smut, but about halfway into the book you just start forgiving him. He turns out a childish result of the hideous spoiling awarded to the French aristocracy at the time, plus, well hey. Naughty priests go back a long way. Also I found his ruthless food snobbing to be quite adorable.

(Hey, links to the amazon.com pages would be awesome, even if you don't buy on amazon they put a lot of info on their pages like page number, blanket price, publisher, etc., and a lot of books have a few pages you can sample read.)

Ah, yes, I've read a book by Marquis de Sade. Crazy stuff. It's called Francon Duclos: The Memoirs of a Paris Madame. It's got it all: whipping, pedophilia, and, what I found very surprising, shit eating (which kinda grossed me out a little).

As for my favorites, I love reading Sherlock Holmes stories. I also had a think for Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles for a while a couple years ago. Right now, I'm reading Memnoch the Devil, which is believed to be the most popular of the Chronicles.