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I tried, folks. I’m not usually one to jump on whatever the literary bandwagon of the moment happens to be — despite my love of a good conspiracy tale, preferably involving the Knights Templar and the secret history of Jesus and the Catholic Church, I still haven’t read The Da Vinci Code — but I figured, hey, I like vampires, and I like well-done teen angst. So I gave Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight a try. The qualifier there is well-done teen angst. Twilight, for those who haven’t succumbed, is the tale of a teenage girl named Bella who moves from PhoenixDown the rabbit hole….

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Kushiel’s Dart is the first “fat fantasy” I’ve read in a long time; and I enjoyed it so much, I may find myself shying away from the genre for a while for fear of disappointment in whatever Fat Fantasy book I pick up next. Jacqueline Carey has crafted here a novel that put me in mind of Guy Gavriel Kay; in fact, I thought more than once while reading it that this is what GGK would have written if he’d been a woman. This was a wonderful, wonderful book that only let me down at the very end, when itDown the rabbit hole….

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Sometimes you feel like reading a romance novel, right? OK, I’ll assume by the chirping crickets I just heard that I’m wrong here. But anyway, sometimes I want to read a romance novel. But not just any romance novel, mind you; I’m not looking for those books with the titles printed on the covers in flowery script over a picture of some long-haired guy whose chest is just a-heavin’ in the wind. No, I want at least some modicum of muscle in my romances! So I was happy to discover Linnea Sinclair, writer of space opera romances. Yes, you readDown the rabbit hole….

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One of my most beloved literary traditions, the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror volume, will not be published this year. Those books are worth their price just for the introductory essays alone; they are chock full of reading recommendations and reviews of the year gone by in Fantasy and Horror, with long essays on graphic novels and music and movies as well as literary F&H. I get hours of pleasure from those essays each year, and their information always goes a long way to shaping what I read over the coming year. And that’s before I even mention thatDown the rabbit hole….

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[I make no effort to avoid spoilers for a couple of the books discussed below.] I’ve long established on this blog my predilection for mushy romance stories of all types, usually in film. But it occurred to me a few months ago that I wasn’t exploring the world of mushy romance stories in book form enough, so I figured I’d start with one of the Big Heads of the mushy romance tale working in books today. I figured I’d go with someone whose books have been made into at least several movies and who can be found at nearly anyDown the rabbit hole….

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Here’s another quiz, that I found a few weeks ago at Sheila O’Malley‘s place. It’s about books. I’m writing this a few weeks before my return from posting, so a couple of answers may technically be inaccurate by the time this sees the light of Blogistan, but here we go! What was the last book you bought? On my birthday I treated myself to two items at Borders: this year’s edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, and an Everyman’s Library edition of the writings of Kahlil Gibran,Down the rabbit hole….

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It’s been a while since I recapped what I’ve been reading lately, so here’s a, well, a recap of what I’ve been reading lately. (Reading a lot makes me a gooder writer, apparently.) :: Do other readers have writers who never quite reach the level of “Favorite Writers” but rather stay at the level of “Oh, yeah, that writer, I should really read more of him/her soon”? And it’s not even the writer’s fault that they stay at that level just under our radar screen of “Holy S***, a new book by XXX!”; it’s that I’m often-times so all-over-the-map inDown the rabbit hole….

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So Entertainment Weekly has made two lists: one is a list of its Top 100 movies of the last twenty-five years, and the other does the same thing with books. You know the drill: the ones I’ve seen or read are in bold, with occasional comment. (However, a couple of provisos: yes, I’d include the Star Wars prequels, so sod off, haters. And as T & C point out, the list excludes The Shawshank Redemption, which is well-nigh inexplicable.) 1.Pulp Fiction (1994) (Wouldn’t be my best, but I’m not going to quibble.) 2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03)Down the rabbit hole….

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WARNING: This is long, and quite likely boring. Passions come and go in this life, don’t they? Things we are just so passionate about when we’re young may remain passions throughout our adulthood; others may fade into memory of something that was important to us once upon a time, while still others can find themselves subject to complete reversal as we realize that the new “Me” hates the very thing that the old “Me” found so amazing. This is about two passions of my life, both of which I found at the same time, but only one of which hasDown the rabbit hole….

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I have a bit of a problem. At bedtime, The Daughter and I have been reading through The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper, and The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. We’ve been alternating through the series, and tonight we finished The Black Cauldron, putting us at the two-books-down point in each series of five. OK. However, it didn’t occur to me that I might have this particular problem until last night, when we read the last chapters of The Black Cauldron. If you’ve read the book and know the story, you know that a particular character executes aDown the rabbit hole….