The Mirrored Road into the Interior

Ooh I got a library card at the Bloomington public library! Very happy.

I inaugurated it (have I mentioned how much I love Firefox's spell checker?) by grabbing a very short stack of books. Since it is about a 2 mile walk home, I'll probably seldom get more books than fit in my backpack. Sadly, at least two books weren't the ones I was on in their respective series. On the other hand, two of them were new books by Elizabeth Bear. The first, New Amsterdam, was a good read, though I already knew I liked the characters since one of the sub-stories had previously been published.
It is likely that New Amsterdam would have been the best book of the month for me if I hadn't grabbed her other new book.

Whiskey and Water surpasses Blood and Iron (which I loved a lot) as a work of art. I've heard complaints that these books are very confusing and hard to follow. I didn't think so, but then if you've ever heard me present a non-preprepared explanation of something, you'll know that I think in twisty bits. There is a scene near the end with Lucifer and the unicorn that hits a fair chunk of my oh yes triggers.

Oh yeah, and I grabbed something by Diane Duane. Diane's name is one I've come across a lot in various nodes connected to eBear's blog. It always sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. It turns out that she wrote the Star Trek book that convinced me to keep giving Star Trek books a chance for at least a year after I would have probably quit reading them. She wrote Spock's World, which is possibly the best Star Trek novel ever, and definitely the best one that my 10-13 year old self had ever read.
Well, I've now read the first book in her young wizards books, So You Want to be a Wizard. Again, very cool, and now I am going to find more of her writing.