Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig

I blame my long absence on the excessive amounts of time I've been spending sleeping and reading. Sorry about that. School is properly over until August so now I'm not technically too busy to update here; I'm just distracted by my suddenly copious amounts of free time.

I know I haven't posted any new book reviews in a long, long time now, my apologies, but I really wasn't able to get much pleasure reading done at all during April-May. I am trying to make up for that now. So in the coming weeks look forward to reviews on these books as I finish them (I'm over halfway through them all already): Titus Groan, Time Quake, Royal Assassin, Throne of Jade, Crown of Stars, Wives and Daughters, Shadow of the Wind, and Deathless. I read The Night Circus last week but it was ultimately disappointing after a very promising beginning. The book had a lovely mood of slowly brooding tension, and a gorgeous playground for the reader's imagination in the form of the circus itself, as well as some promising characters, but then fell apart greatly in the last act. The tension doesn't lead to any appreciable climax, most of the characters never reach the potential promised for them in early pages, and everything ends up feeling too rushed, too skimmed. Which is a pity. I imagine this could be a more effective film than novel since it's so very visual on the page and seeing these characters visually might help give them a bit more of an emotional impact than what the author managed in the book.

Lately I've also been RE-reading--Plain Kate, The Scorpio Races, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, all books I have earnestly recommended in the past and which I will enthusiastically recommend again now. Is anyone else almost unseemly excited about the prospect of a sequel to Fairyland being published this Autumn?

I should amend what I said above; in addition to spending my time sleeping and reading I've also been doing a lot of swimming. The weather has been glorious so far this summer, aside from today which has turned out to be a bit gloomy and cool, and so my brothers and I have been walking to the pool and then swimming in said pool pretty much every day since I came home. This means I'm actually getting a little tan; how strange for a girl who usually stays paper pale due to her spending most of her time in her favorite habitat of libraries and other places where books reside and the sun does not.

It's very pleasant being home.