Warrior & Witch

I'm pretty much agreeing with Keishon and May: Warrior & Witch has an excellent idea at its heart, but the construction of the book is lacking. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book, and I'm about to give up. If I could just read the chapters following Mirage/Miryo, which are full of action, I'd be okay. But that's only half the story; the other half is politics, following the POV of the Void Prime (whose name escapes me right now)...and it is slow and boring as hell. And there are still gaps that are never explained, like how Mirage survived, and how exactly the split souls work. Maybe they'll be explained in the future, but I'm not hanging around for a third book. The first book's weaknesses I could forgive, because it was a debut novel, but they needed to be cleaned up for the second and weren't. Brennan could use a really good critique group and an editor to crack the whip.

Liberty & the kitchen & Arabic

First, the kitchen. The ceramic backsplash is beautiful -- it is perfectly plain, because I was bewildered by the options, so I stuck with something simple. It already looks so much better than that rubberized paper that was peeling off...plus it was ugly. [Cindy, I'm not sure if my photos will show how heinous that paper was. If I can get a swatch from the debris, I'll take a close up.] And the kitchen is huge, now that it is empty but for the porcelain double sink (original sink, I believe) and the upper cabinets (that now look extremely dingy and must be sanded and painted ASAP. Looks like I'll be returning a bunch of tile to The Home Despot, too. Only bad thing -- how did they manage to track dust through the entire house? It's a mystery.

I noticed yesterday that Liberty, a new gladiator historical romance, got a very poor grade at AAR. I don't think I care, because the concept of the book still appeals to me. It's next. I've also bumped up The Women of the House in the TBR pile.

Right now I'm re-reading Nora Roberts' Night Shield, because I was feeling brain dead after last night's Arabic class. The different emphatic sounds (3 different "th" sounds, 2 "s", "d" and "t" sounds) are confusing me. I'm okay during the lesson, because I know what the lesson is concentrating on. But without that context, I have a hard time distinguishing between the sounds. I'm used to English, where "th" is spelled "th", no matter if it is the th-sound of thin, or of the or of thud. :sigh: Each of those sounds has a different letter in Standard Arabic.

The Splendour of Silence

I just noticed that Indu Sundaresan's The Splendor of Silence is available at fictionwise for $13.59, much less than the hardback cover price. Anybody read it yet? I've started Sundaresan's The Twentieth Wife, but this looks like a much more modern-set book.