Cherie Priest's Fathom

As you can see from my other reviews, Cherie Priest is firmly planted at the top of my Authors Y'all Should Be Reading Already list.  If you're not much for steampunk or psychics, try Fathom, which is about

Faerie Tale by Raymond Feist

This book was recommended me to quite a while ago and the cover looked neat, so I broke ranks with my pre-designated Jane Yolen  and went for it.

Seriously, not judging a book by its cover is hard to do when there's not only a creepy hole in the barn wall view but also... a big spidery thing drooling over

John Dies @ The End - the title with the cool "at" sign - by David Wong

Thank you to my friend Jolie for mentioning this book with the cryptic warning "weeeiirrrrd stuff, that one."  That got me motoring to the library and I've never regretted it.  I haven't read anything this funny since my serendipitous meeting with Christopher Moore's You Suck: A Love Story a few years ago.

One Mississippi

I've been - for whatever reason - denying myself  Mark Childress's book One Mississippi and it was like falling out of yogurt into Dairy Queen Chocolate Cherry Cheesequake Blizzards.  I don't even care how my thighs look.

Mapping Cherie Priest's Chattanooga: the Eden Moore trilogy

After reading Cherie's most recent work, Boneshaker, I was completely caught up in the north Pacific coast.

So I picked up her first book about Eden Moore and was completely blindsided that it was set in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  (Ha, I hear my friend Joe groaning.)

Project 17

Old-schoolers like me may recognize the author Joan Lowery Nixon, who wrote YA back in the day (80's, for all you youngsters). One of the few books I read as a kid that scared me mindless

Boneshaker

I have long resisted reading steampunk.  Possibly because I'm not very mechanically-minded and all the cogs and steam made me nervous. Maybe because I have a fear of goggles and seeing the extra layers and straps in the costumes made me feel fat.

The Mad Cook of Pymatuning (which, sadly, cannot be eaten with a tuning fork)

Picture it: a New England summer camp in 1952.  (Give yourself a high-five if you thought "...Sicily" instead!)

Toss in a bunch of white boys who are 99% completely uninterested in bonking the one chick who is not on the staff but somehow allowed in the camp.  Next, add a Token black guy who pops up with the exact history book needed to identify weird crap that is going on with the camp's new 'guide', a kooky Indian touting the bad mix of loinclothery and sadism.  Frankly, the fact he was like 50 years old and perfectly ok

Jack and Ma: reviewing Room

Emma Donoghue's new book, Room, is full of wonderfully unique surroundings such as Wardrobe, Bed, Rug, Plant and Bathtub.  For five-year-old Jack, there is no more than one of anything, so articles got tossed out (imaginary)Window.

Greetings and salutations

I write to you from an incompassible mountain of words. Vistas of verissimilitude. Rivers of .. um, riverishness.

Well, OK, actually it's just my office. But the mountain of words is here, if you look at the overflow from the shelves behind me. No, really, there are shelves in there.