Top Five Reads

by Allison Pang

To tell you the truth, I nearly forgot to post this today - mostly because I've been in a post Christmas whirlwind of all things either Hobbit or Lego. Or Lego Hobbit. (Yes - I own all of the Lego Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit sets. Yes, I have a problem.)

Anyway - so dragging myself away from all that wonder to discuss books? Yes. Of course. So here we go:

1) The Hobbit - predictable, I suppose. I've read it before, of course, but we're in the process of reading it with my son. (It's a nice bit of timing, actually, because we went to see the movie last night and we're up to about the same spot in the book as the movie ended, so we were able to talk about it afterwards.) In either case, although I sometimes find Tolkien a bit ponderous at times, I definitely enjoy my son's questions and watching him put it all together with what he knows from the LotR movies.  (The Hobbit movie started out a bit slow, but got better as it went - even the six year old was able to follow along easily enough - although, again, she's seen all the LotR movies on TV multiple times, so she's got a pretty good grasp of what's going on.)

2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemsin - I ended up reading all three of these books back to back while in New Orleans for AAD (The Broken Kingdoms and Kingdom of the Gods make up the rest of The Inheritance Trilogy.)  While I admit that I liked the first two better than the last one, all three are exceedingly well done and like Jeffe said, they didn't end the way I expected them to - which is very refreshing on a number of levels.

3) Casket of Souls by Lynn Fleweling - I have an utter soft spot for the Nightrunner series, particularly the first few books. But I was really happy with this latest book, which seemed to get back to its roots of political intrigue and nightrunning. Plus, Alec and Seregil are fabulous, as always - I adore the pair of them and their relationship, which has slowly grown over several books from friends to lovers.

4) The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes - This was a fun caper heist book - basically a fantasy version of Ocean's 11. Including a unicorn. 'nuff said.  (Plus I got to meet Patrick at WFC - and he's a super nice guy, who also happens to write for Bioware's Mass Effect games. Win, all the way around...)

5) Ashes of Honor - by Seanan McGuire - I very much enjoy the Toby Daye series, and this book was an excellent addition. I've been waiting for some of these events to happen for quite some time, and I wasn't let down at all. Tybalt, the King of Cats, is in rare form and we finally get a chance to see a bit of who he really is and how he's going to fit in Toby's life from here on out. (I hope!!!!)