The links lead to longer reviews. 22: Skim : This is very good, but not my sort of thing. An understated graphic novel about a teenage girl dealing with various Stuff. Others have reviewed it better... but even as a white australian woman the idea of a black African man whose predator nature shines through his magical eyes as he turns into a leopard a bit..dodgy. It didn't put me off too much, YMMV

She's a fiddle player with Voodoo magic, he's a sex slave Merman. They fight crime! Overall I thought this was ok but underwhelming. I wrote a short review on my lj . A question for people who've read...it in this one, and I vaguely recall someone complaining about a similar problem with another of her books. Given that these are romance novels it's not much fun if I find the romance unengaging :

I loved The Iron Hunt , and was eagerly looking forward to the sequel. (Has it really only been a year?) I'm happy to report that Darkness Calls is a worthy successor. This time around, Maxine and her...is rarer in the genre: a long-term relationship that works . Maxine and Grant face tons of problems, but you get the sense that their love and commitment are a match for whatever comes their way

Warning! This book features a heroine who cons a would-be assassin into thinking she’ll bribe him to let her live, and then strangles him with the strap of her fiddle case. You have been warned! Moving...together as Liu grooms them to eventually get their own inevitable books. Koni I loved because he was so incredibly cranky, which was very entertaining. I’m sure he’s getting his own book, too.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running I haven't read any of his novels, but I enjoyed this memoir about running and writing. As a beginner runner, I'm rather threatened by his insistence... but I was struck by the sweeping generalisations. It mainly depressed me on a personal level, as it became increasingly clear that the only thing I've spent 10,000 hours working at is reading books

Not part of her cracktastic Dirk & Steele series, this novel is part of someone else's series but stands on its own and is actually rather less cracktastic, featuring vampires and werewolves (plus a demon...is a 300-year-old steppes nomad vampire executioner of vampires. Together, they fight crime! I don't have a ton to say about this, but I enjoyed it. See it on Amazon: A Taste of Crimson (Crimson City)

Supernatural romance set in Taiwan. This was flawed but a lot of fun. I wrote a longer review at my lj (since we've had a bunch of reviews of her stuff here recently). Yay for this comm introducing me to a new awesome author :)

# 34 Marjorie M Liu, TIger Eye, 2005 This book was a real change of pace for me. I had read some reviews before and I thought I would try her out - http://community.livejournal.com/50books_poc/tag/a...pages. I’d quite like to have had this process take a longer time. He had canonically been abused by his masters for thousands of years; I would have thought it would take a while longer to get over this

I've been slacking on writing reviews, so now I have to do ten in one gulp. Here goes. 1. Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams Literary fantasy, and very good. Full of complex, real, family... where Narayan explains how he had the idea. He mentions finding a bookmark with a picture of a tiger and the caption "I'd like to get into a good book," and thinking "I'll put you in my book.

In a fit of procrastination last night, I looked up which authors had been most frequently reviewed here. All the authors I've read are great, so if you haven't yet jumped on the bandwagon and checked...is afraid of intense and dark material, but romance and teen angst is also nice. And being President doesn't hurt review counts, but writing sf might boost them even more - around here, at least. ;