Finally finished Lords of Dus. The first half of the anthology continued to annoy me, but I can almost say that I enjoyed the last half. Ugh. Like I said, I really, really like LWE's other stuff... but this was bad, as evidenced by the month it took me to finish it. I had to force myself to keep picking it up.
On the opposite side of the spectrum: I bought Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler yesterday afternoon; and finished it yesterday evening. I'm not a huge vampire fiction fan. But, I've liked Butler's other books so I picked it up. It was quite good. From the Washington Post review on Amazon:
"I awoke to darkness," the narrator begins. She's naked, badly burned, starving and without any idea where or who she is. She comes upon a group of homes destroyed by fire, but nothing looks familiar amid the cloud of pain and confusion. She can remember basic concepts only by trying to articulate what's missing: a bed, shoes, food. As a narrator, she couldn't seem more helpless, more vulnerable, more innocent. Then she chases down a deer and eats it. We're not in Kansas anymore.Also purchased with the Barnes & Noble gift card was The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. My brother-in-law gave me Powers' Last Call a couple Christmases ago, which I quite liked. Hopefully this will last me a bit longer than a single evening.
