I have packed for vacation Do Androids Dream by Scalzi, On Basilisk Station by Weber, and Ender in Exile which I found on a cart at the library today and grabbed up.

Meanwhile, the kids and I have been listening to Harry Potter books on CD (love Jim Dale's reading of them. and love that someone else can read to my kids for a while - for whatever reason, I find reading aloud to be somewhat exhausting.) We're midway through book 3, and borrowed book 4 from the library today. We'll see if we have much time/interest in playing them on vacation. I hope so, I really enjoy the stories, both as a reader and a writer - seeing how the details make the story come alive, how the plot elements are laid in book 3 for items that come up in books 4 and 5, etc. It's really quite a feat.

Book 2 (which I'm still reading) seems like the author has come into his own. It's an incredibly beautifully sad and poetic book. I would highly recommend these books, volume 2 being one of my favorite books in recent years. (besides OSC of course)

The books are also a great writing example of the simplicity and depth of a story. How the smaller hidden tragedies can be much more devastating then the obvious.

READ THESE BOOKS

Robin Hobb: The Farseer trilogy (the assassin books) and the Tawny Man trilogy (the fool books). I recommend these, although most here have probably read them. Hobb does a good job with creating interesting characters, and although it bogged down at the tail end, the story stayed interesting for a long time.

Nicholas Sparks: A Walk to Remember. Recommend, a nice story and enjoyable voice.

Nicholas Sparks: The Notebook. Good, better as a movie, I didn't care for the way the plot moved although it was fundamentally a great story.

Ah, Fitz.

Okay, so, I'm reading the new trilogy by Gail Z. Martain, Chronicles of the Necromancer. I'm still on book one, The Summoner, but I'm really enjoying it. Interesting magic, and good solid characters.

I just finished Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn. I hadn't read any of her books yet and I'm definitely going to be reading more.

My only major beef is that it's been seven or eight years, and Volume Two is still nowhere in sight. Giddins hinted at a number of fascinating stories that would be told in Volume Two, but the cutoff date was (more or less) 1940. I was looking forward to it but it still hasn't appeared.

This is a problem with serious biography. It's not the only one I'm waiting for. Two volumes of a life of Orson Welles only take things up to the end of the 1940s. And Robert Caro has promised the next volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson "sometime in this century."

Meanwhile, I occasionally look online for some further info...and I nearly always check the biography sections of bookstores in case I've missed word of it.

Yes, that was an impressive set of stories. I thought the relationships between Fitz and Nighteyes and Fitz and the Fool were remarkably well done. Really, the relationships he had with all the primary characters were extremely well done.

But meanwhile, I read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (in anticipation of the movie coming out.) it's a compelling read, fast-paced, but honestly I don't know if it's just me, the genre of mystery/thriller, or what, but I found the way the MC kept eeking out of disaster or just-in-the-nick-of-timing things (though not everything, which got annoying sometimes) or remembering something just at the right moment or what have you to be grating. I'm actually going to pull examples from it for my in-person writer's group for our next discussion. I still liked the book and would recommend it, but with a caveat to other writers that you may find the plotting annoying. I did find the intricate plot engaging, but it was the way the MC got through each of the traps the author laid that annoyed.

I'm looking forward to the movie, though. Huge Tom Hanks and Ewan McGregor fan.

I didn't love Good Omens on the first reading, but when I read it the second time I found it a lot funnier. Expectations I think.

I could kind of tell where Gaiman began and Prachett left off, and that distracted me from the story the first time through.

I've selected some quotes and posted them in the quote topic--mainly because I think they have application to writing.

Did you ever think you'd be traveling so much for your first book?

I haven't finished Sam Barone's Dawn of Empire, it has just been phased off to the side. I've noticed a quite a few redundancies in that story, and they slow down the events and squash the tension. I'll give it a final vote later (keeping in mind it's a first novel), but as of now it's mired--and that's not good.

I've also started Natsume Soseki's I Am a Cat, which I'd recommend to anyone, especially if they enjoy humorous and/or satirical stories.

Started The Whale Road by Robert Low. It has a great hook: Runes are cut in ribbons, like the World Serpent eating its own tale. All sagas are snake-knots, for the story of a life does not always start with a birth and end with death. My own truly begins with my return from the dead.

I'm also in the midst of Harry Potter 7 with the kids, on audio CD. They have gobbled up the audios, and my 7 year old is even keeping pace with us by reading the book as well as listening to the CDs (asynchronously - he'll get ahead in the book, then put it down and we'll catch up with the CDs, then we'll get ahead of where he is in the book and the next time he reads he'll catch up, etc.)

My son (7) broke his arm this past weekend so I'm planning to do a lot of summer reading with him in the mid-grade genre. Lightening Thief is first on our list, along with the Wright Three, books 3 and 4 of City of Ember series, Magic Thief...and probably Artemis Fowl.

It might be a little old for your son, KayTi, but who knows? Some of the stuff on your list would bore my 6 year old silly.
(We were listening to Harry Potter in the car last summer. One day in the fall when the BBC news came on the radio, she heard the British reporter, clapped her hands over her ears and started screaming "NOT HARRY POTTER!"
Melanie

It does have wonderful details for daily life in that historical period, and an engaging story. I could do without the rape scenes.

IB, I am eager for those two villains to get their just reward! William never lets up.

Downgrading it to Good.

Before that I read HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON and THRONE OF JADE by Naomi Novik. I'd rate the first as GOOD. I really enjoyed it and was only slightly put off by a style that seemed to try a little too hard to emulate C. S. Forester.

But I have to say NOT IMPRESSED to the second. I just never could get into it, even though I already liked the characters. And reading the blurbs for the next three books, it's obvious that she's taking the story in a direction that doesn't appeal to me.