Oh, and since I've been mentioning American Gods so much, I just want to say that it's really really good. There are some parts that seemed a bit superfluous, but for the most part it was very very good. It's kind of like Men in Black or Harry Potter in that it's set in the "real world," except there's a lot more going on than most people know about. Anyway, I find that sort of setting to be a little unrealistic (much as I read them and enjoy them anyway) but Gaiman really pulls off the realism. Though part of it may be because so much of it is set in the midwest, where I live, whereas a lot of other books with a similar setting are in big cities which I know nothing about. Anyway, I was a little worried when I first bought it. I've read a couple of his other books, and while Neverwhere rocked, Stardust struck me as something you'd give a little kid, though it's in the regular section and is really big for a kid to want read.

I've also read a couple of Mercedes Lackey books this week. I'm kind of getting tired of her.... I still read and re-read some of her old books, but I'm not enjoying her new books very much. Her characters seem to be flat to me nowadays. And her books keep getting fatter and fatter (which I don't mind on it's own) without the stories being elaborate enough to fill the new space. Anyway, I read the sequel to Knight of Ghosts and Shadows and Summoned to Tourney (Bedlam's Bard if you get them together in one book), and I was really sad because the original two were so great and this one's so dull.

I also read this other one, Serpent's Shadow. The premise is pretty unique, there's this half-indian half-english lady trying to bust through predjudice and become a doctor in England during the 1800's. She actually mainly came there, because something was after her in India, and of course, this being a fantasy novel, magic is involved. Anyway, the ending is pretty anticlimactic, and kind of "why didn't you just do this before the whole buildup?"

Also, it was so damn preachy, which I hate, even if I agree with the preachiness. If you have a message, do it subtly, I say. Though it comes nowhere near the Queen of Preachiness, Ayn Rand (where the characters stop every few pages to give long, self-important speeches about how rich people are good and poor people are poor because they're incompetant and lazy--at least in Atlas Shrugged), I still didn't need to constantly hear about prejudice in the 1800's and how they didn't treat poor people nice throughout the book. It's like, duh.

Also, her villians are beginning to highly annoy me. She writes huge swathes of the novel from the evil person's perspective. Which, wouldn't be that bad if they were the clever villains you love to hate, or some person who isn't entirely evil they have reasons and rationalizations for what they do, though they're still bad. No....her evildoers have started to be Hitler-bad. They enjoy torturing people and stuff. And go on and on about it. Which is 1) a bit creepy, you wonder why she sits there and thinks about this awful stuff and 2) boring after the first couple, because they keep doing the same sort of crap to innocent people over and over again.

Also, I read Catch 22 not long ago. Good stuff--some of the time changes I couldn't follow very well, but I didn't mind. It's funny and sad at the same time, which I seem to enjoy quite a bit.