Crivins!

In lieu of posting, I have been reading Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett and The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones.  Neither one was a disappointment.  Wintersmith is the third Tiffany Aching book and seems a wee bit more mature than the first two, mostly because of a touch of romance.  Tiffany is brought along to see the Black Morris dance (which begins Winter) and breaks all sorts of rules by jumping into the dance herself.  This manages to not only bring her to the attention of the Wintersmith, who begins to fall in love with her as only an elemental spirit can, but also puts the coming of Summer in jeopardy.  A very good read for the beginning of Winter!

On Sunday I also bought Television Without Pity: 752 Things We Love to Hate (and Hate to Love) About TV and have been amusing myself reading it in bits and pieces.  Do yourself a favour and check out the sample entries in the book link.  I did the silent giggle thing on the subway for about three stops while reading (and not so silent when I read the entry for the A-Team) and when I got up to leave saw that some dude had been staring at me.  How embarrassing!  That didn’t stop me from continuing to read it on the bus afterwards, though.  Fun book.  I was sad to see that although Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers both made the children’s tv host entry, Mr. Dress-Up didn’t rate.  Or did they even air that show in the States?  Whatever.  I adored Finnegan growing up (the silent little puppet dog) but Casey freaked me out a little.  He was too much like the creepy puppets from Mister Rogers for me… and the puppets on that show were the reason I never watched it.

I was looking up the correct title for Summers at Castle Auburn for Melrose earlier and saw that Sharon Shinn has two books that I missed: Dark Moon Defender (the third Twelve Houses book featuring the King’s Rider Justin) and Dream-Maker’s Magic which has been out for months.  I somehow never remember to check Sharon Shinn for new books… and she seems to put them out faster than I expect.   It feels like I just read The Thirteenth House!

I’ve also been updating my new manga list from a few days back with very mini-reviews and I put the new manga from the TPL October release lists on my manga-at-the-library post.   I don’t think I ever mentioned it, but one of the behind the scenes things I did in August was run another set of publisher searches and pick out a batch of new titles that were in the catalogue.  As always, the list is not complete, only what I’ve found, blah blah.  Although I discovered (to my vague annoyance) that this is how they list the Fushigi Yugi manga if you do a title search:  Fushigi yugi (Television program).  I thought it was the anime series, but no.  It’s manga.