Bibliomania

A huge asteroid is going to hit the earth and kill us all within six months. It's been hiding behind another asteroid, which is going to miss the planet.

Luckily, the magical Gale family is on the case. Unluckily, they are also dealing with Allie, who is apparently destined to have the seventh son of a seventh son. And Charlie, who can walk between worlds and is apparently destined to be start-crossed lovers with Jack, who is a dragon prince and also WAY more then seven years younger than Charlie.

This is good, but very convoluted. The ending is so confusing that it seems right out of Diana Wynne Jones. Fun read anyway.

I really love this book, so I don't know what to say about it. Here's what happens:

Bryony was visiting a gardener friend about rutabagas. On the way home she and her pony hit an unseasonable blizzard. Just before they froze to death, they stumbled across the gate of an enchanted castle. Bryony is wary, but also doesn't want to die. So they go in, and the pony immediately takes a dump on the floor. Still, there is food, and warmth, and they go to sleep.

In the morning, Bryony takes the rose on her breakfast table for her sister, and there's the Beast.

So yeah, some of this is Beauty & the Beast, but it's not in the best ways. You should read it.

Spark goes to New York to hang out with her brother on vacation. Almost as soon as she gets there, she meets John Stone, who offers her a job cataloging his papers. Spark also gets a crush on her brother's roommate, who leaves right away.

Back in England, Spark apples for the job, gets it, moves in with Stone and his weird staff, and catalogs a bunch of stuff in code.

Meanwhile, Stone is writing his memoirs, which start in France, in the court of the Sun King..

This book is 529 pages long. I am not sure why I didn't stop reading, but I guess that felt like too much effort. I'm extra-tired, lately.

The Strega-Borgia family lives in an old castle in Scotland. They have an alligator in the moat, Beasts in the dungeon, a witch as nanny to the children, a cook who can't cook and a butler, who they find passed out on the doorstep when they return from vacation.

Only the nanny realizes what happened to the butler, and she must investigate and plan on her own.

This book was a fun, fast read, and you probably don't need to read the three that came before to enjoy it.

I was trying to read the first Sookie Stackhouse book, but I couldn't get through it. So I skipped forward a few years.

There's gonna be a conference of vampires, and the Queen of Louisiana wants Sookie to go as a hired telepath. No-one else wants Sookie to go, but she wants the money, so they're off.

Sookie is written inconsistently. This gets annoying. She has all this insight into people, but not enough common sense to realize something could be, say, a bomb. It was another of those books where before long I knew the exact plot and what would happen.

Also Harris does not know if she is writing a thriller or a novel about vampire politics.

So I probably won't be reading any more of these. Which is a shame, because I have a stack.