Long time, no post. As if you again missed my deathless prose. <g>

The wretched foot is getting better, but aggravatingly slowly. We have our taxes done, thanks to TurboTax and electronic filing, and already have a jump on next year, having been to Goodwill twice already. We'll get this house decluttered yet.

Meanwhile, I've whiled away some time reading:

The Good:

The British Century: Coffee table book James bought me when Wordsworth in Chamblee went out of business. It looked long on pictures and short on brains when I first glanced at it, but the text is remarkably good; have just finished with World War I and the resultant horrors.

The Bad:

The New Century: Another British-oriented retrospective I found for a song on the remainder aisle. This one I know why; the photos are great, but the text is reminiscent of those horrible social studies books from school, replete with graphs and figures and dismissive writing. Urgh.

The Good:

Peppermints in the Parlor: Never adverse to reading a good children's mystery, I picked this one up yesterday at the Discount Book Sale after having heard it mentioned on rec.arts.books.childrens and ended up galloping through it in one night. The author is Barbara Brooks Wallace and the story is a page-turner about eleven-year-old Emily, who expects to arrive at her aunt's and uncle's loving home after her parents die and finds it's become a horrifying place, with her aunt relegated to housekeeper and a forbidding woman running a terrifying home for unwanted elderly people in the house. Great stuff; may have to look up Wallace's other novels.

The Bad:

How I Survived My Summer Vacation: Look, I know this is "only" a young adult book, and a TV novelization to boot, but I've come to expect more from these Buffy the Vampire Slayer books, and this one simply ain't it. It's a series of short stories taking place between first and second season, while Buffy visits her father L.A.: a couple of stories revolve around the young slayer, others are about "the Scooby Gang" back in Sunnydale. I had to quit after three stories. The characterizations were so dreadful I couldn't pay attention to the plots any longer. The New Century had more scintillating narration.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:39:00 AM

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