I am DETERMINED to keep doing this 'til at least the end of the year, okay. Even if it sometimes just depresses me that I haven't finished more.

War of the Oaks:

I bought this just before Racefail, whereupon I suddenly had reason to hate nearly all the writers I'd been reading. So I kind of buried it away and forgot about it. And now I have actually read it! And for the most part I liked it. I don't know. I found the romance (sub)plot really annoying, it reminded me of being a kid reading O. R. Melling and just wishing we could get back to the exciting faerie battles and forget about the boring heterosexuality. Uh. Also I sort of halfheartedly shipped the two women, so. (Shut up you are totally surprised.)

But other than that well. It is a book about a rock band that are secretly faerie spies. Of course I was going to like it. There were a lot of \BAND/ moments that made me really really happy because I am easy for that sort of thing. I didn't find a lot of the plot twists very twisty, but I think that is at least in part Tolkien Syndrome, in that I've read a lot of things that came after this and were undoubtedly influenced by it... I don't know! Has anyone read this and been surprised when half the band turned out to be faeries? Because I really, really wasn't!


I Met The Walrus:

OH MY GOD THIS BOOK. I AM OVERCOME WITH LOVE. Okay, you know Almost Famous, and how it's about how it's bad to meet your childhood heroes because then you find out they're just people and people sort of suck? This is like, the anti-Almost Famous. It's about a fourteen-year-old boy who scored an exclusive interview with John Lennon AND IT WAS ACTUALLY AS AWESOME AS THAT SHOULD BE. And this is FOR REAL.

John is by no means my favourite Beatle, but even Levitan's occasional sting at George fans was sort of adorable for some reason. I just. I don't even know, this book just turned my eyes permanently to stars. ALSO it is like the only Beatles related thing ever that is SANE ABOUT YOKO. He openly talks about how shitty the world was to her and how fucked up and sexist and racist that is/was! John and Yoko come off in this as not perfect people, but people who are doing their best. And people that are undeniably in love. I don't really believe in true love, but I swear, for those two I make an exception, they were SO CUTE and John was SUCH AN ASSHOLE but then Yoko MADE HIM LESS OF AN ASS THROUGH CUNNING USE OF FEMINISM AND WEIRD ART and gahhh I am not really very coherent am I. Uh. READ THIS BOOK.


Stevie Diamond:

So when I was a kid, before I even got into fantasy, I was big into mysteries. My big two were Trixie Belden and Stevie Diamond; Trixie was who you WANTED to be (she got to travel all over the world and all her friends were millionaires and she got to ride horses and generally had a pretty sweet life) but Stevie Diamond was ME. She was sarcastic. She leapt to the wrong conclusion a lot. She called people on their sexist bullshit. She was CANADIAN, even! (This was one of the first books I ever got signed by the author, maybe THE first.)

This one is about Stevie and her best friend and detective partner Jesse trying to avoid day camp by hanging out with their apartment's resident Mad Old Lady. BUT THEN! Said Old Lady goes suddenly missing, and nobody believes them when they think she's been kidnapped! It is funny and adorable and she gets kid logic PERFECTLY, in a way very, very few kids-book-writers seem to do. All her characters seem like real people, people you might have met before. Even the side characters. And the plot... Well, I've read and reread this enough times that I still remembered the ending, but the mysteries are decent. It's no Westing Game, but it's way better than the formulaic intrigue of your average Nancy Drew book.