Read: David Sedaris - Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

This was my second David Sedaris read, and I liked it better than the first - the quality of the writing was more even. There were not, however, as many hilarious stories about the French language, which I had been hoping for.

Read: Charlaine Harris - Dead Until Dark

The somewhat limited options of ebooks available at the Toronto Public Library gave me the excuse to finally check out the Charlaine Harris series on which the tv show "True Blood" is based. I wasn't expecting too much, but they were still surprisingly bland. The dialogue that comes to life with rich characterization and baroque settings on the tv show is too terse and plain to have any life on the page. I won't bother to read the next book in the series - it really was a waste of time.

Read: Lindsey Davis - The Jupiter Myth

I've fallen behind in reading Lindsey Davis' detective Falco novels, which is a shame, because I love the historical detail of the ancient Roman setting, and the banter between the characters. This one felt a bit formulaic in its banter, but the detail was great as ever - London in its early days as a frontier town. And since I checked it out of the library as an e-book, it gave me some English reading material at my convenience while I'm located in France. In fact, just yesterday I saw some ancient Roman artifacts at the museum here in Grenoble, and I'm trying to remember if any of Davis' books have been set in this part of the Roman Empire.

Read: Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

This is a re-read - probably my fourth or fifth time. I brought it along as my one fiction read for the airplane, and chose it because in it the main character, Kivrin, goes back in time as an historian to study 1320s England, but when she arrives finds that she can't understand anyone - the archaic English sounds completely different from what she anticipated (appropriate as we head off to live in France for four months). Then she finds out she's not in 1320 - she's in 1348 and the plague is killing everyone. It's a pretty dark tragedy in the end, and yet it is a beautiful story.

Connie Willis' novels are quite possibly the most rewarding to re-read of any author. There are certain plot mechanisms, such as loss and miscommunication, that show up in her stories over and over - seeing them re-used and repeated in different ways becomes a very layered reading experience. I just discovered that her recent novel "Blackout" is available as a e-book download from the Toronto Public Library, so I'll be re-reading that for the first time soon.

Read: Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Here's an interesting factoid: in North America it's "Hornet's Nest" (possessive singular) and in Europe it's "Hornets' Nest" (possessive plural).

Much like it's prequel, I couldn't put the book down because of the fast-moving plot development, even though the quality of writing wasn't that great. More than anything it makes me want to see the second and third movies.

Read: Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Played with Fire

I wasn't necessarily planning on reading this book, although I was intrigued - I'd been to see the first movie last spring, and quite enjoyed it (in spite of the brutal rape scenes - how many movies have this many rapes?). I had a suspicion that this might be one of those books that is better as a movie, and I was right. The book is almost all plot, very little atmosphere, and the characterization can be blunt and repetitive. But Larsson does know how to move along the plot! I gobbled this book down over the course of a day - but I'm unlikely to ever re-read it - you get everything out of it that there is in one read.