The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

Best contest ever.

And no, I'm not telling you my answers. Even though there are probably half a dozen "right" answers for a few of the questions, and I could defend them all if necessary. Any contest that lets me bust out with the Art History is OK by me. I'll be sad if I don't win...

And speaking of Cossette and wine glasses, one of the goblets I almost bought at PARF last weekend looked exactly like the Cossette glass - rainbow swirly bowl, clear stem, green base. It was great. But...expensive, and not actually blown in the Venitian style, so it wasn't quite perfect. But...I may pick it up (or commission one similar) next season. ^_^

Let it be Henceforth Known that Anansi Boys is quite possibly the best book I've read all year. Dammit. How the hell do you follow that up? The pacing was perfect, the prose was perfect, the story was delightfully perfect, and it kept me guessing until the end. Also giggling and wanting to quote things, but I ended up wanting to quote pretty much the whole book. But "it was doing the best it could" is brilliant in context. Brilliant. As was the rest of it.

Just go read it - if you're on the fence for some reason, get off and just go read it. Now. I adored American Gods, but Anansi Boys was, if anything...better. A perfect example of what a writer on the top of his craft can do.

Also, Anansi != Anasazi. That is all.

[EDIT] It's not getting any shorter. Books are coming in from diverse sources faster than I can read them...I should finish up Shadowmarch tonight, though.

*snickers* Read the description here. Then read the description here. See anything interesting? I guess somebody is paying attention. *gags*

PET PEEVE OF THE MOMENT!! I can understand companies not putting color pages into their manga. I can understand that sometimes, books just don't sell enough to justify the cost of the color pages. HOWEVER! Having a full color ad for another book in a title where the color pages have been replaced with grayscale ones is...annoying. To say the least. Thanks, Viz!

"I know I'm being a thorn in your butt."

Buck interjected with the correct usage of the idiom, to which Fu-Master responded "I don't know your King George talk!"

*THUD*

*eyes SFBC Featured Selections* Wait - so you're telling me that Robert Jordan still hasn't finished that series yet? The hell? Someone wake me up when he does - I'll read it for kicks, just to see how many books he can write that contain no actual plot progression. At all.

I also find it Very Odd that Alan Dean Foster is still writing Pip and Flinx books. I read those when I was in middle school. Or possibly elementary school - and I still have my dad's first edition copies. *evil* From the sounds of the description, Foster's fallen into the trap that he built himself - what do you do when your character continues gaining more and more phenominal powers? If you're Anne McCaffrey, you turn your dragons into Magical Swiss Army Dragons, can't figure out where to go from there, and start writing crappy books about a unicorn girl. If you're Foster?

And when the aid he offers involves his vessel's medikit, Flinx suddenly finds himself in a role he's hardly qualified to assume: Godhood.

Still, I suspect I'll enjoy this book for nostalgia's sake, if nothing else. They're VASTLY better than the other books I read at around the same time period - E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series. *shudders* Or Doc Smith's Skylark series, which was, amazingly, even worse - "golden age" sci-fi tripe at it's very tripest. Aging fanboys swear by them, I just swear at them.

Oh, and Zooba rocks. They have the vast majority of the SFBC books I was interested, for much cheaper, with no shipping. I like. A lot. Why, you ask, am I buying more books when I have untold numbers that I have not yet read cluttering my shelves? I don't know. Book collecting is a sickness, I tell you!