I've been doing a good bit of reading lately - I tend to alternate between crosswords and reading at night. I used to keep a webpage dedicated to my opinions on my recent reading, but I haven't kept up. So I thought I'd share my thoughts below.

I must admit to never making it through George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books. While so much about them is good, and I especially like that events are revisited from other characters' point of views, they are slow moving. I grew impatient after slogging halfway through.

I'm also ashamed to admit that I read a few cheesy romance novels, all involving Scots. The Great Scot is a followup to Bad Boys in Kilts. Cheesy? Maybe, but amusing light reading. Unrelated, but by the same author, was The Legend Mackinnon. If it involves a handsome Highland warrior, I'll take it ;)

I've always been a fan of historical fiction, so turn of the century Japan sounded right up my alley with The Teahouse Fire. I'm fairly certain I read a review in some women's magazine while getting my nails done. Regardless, it's a beautiful story told by an American orphan taken in by a family running a teahouse. Her struggle to reacquaint herself with Western culture after Japan opens its doors to the West shows what a unique situation she is in. I also found it intriguing that the author made the main character a lesbian. As arranged marriages were the custom, the book mentions that wife and husband should not like each other. Urako seeks comfort at might by curling up with her "older sister" and later becomes intimate with another female.

I've nearly finished A Great and Terrible Beauty, which has been excellent up to this point. It revolves around a Victorian-era girl who grew up in India and is sent to boarding school in London after her mother dies. She comes to find she has strong supernatural powers and a greater responsibility than she was prepared for. Couple that with the amusement of rebellious boarding school girls, and you have a curl-up-under-the-covers kind of book. However, as I near the end of the book, the plot continues to build, and I was worried that it would have a premature conclusion . When I looked it up on Amazon for the link, I learned that it is a trilogy, so I am now committed to two other books.

Regardless, my plan was to next read The Sari Shop next, and it looks like a quick read. I did purchase this one online, and Amazon's recommendations led me to fill up my wishlist with a whole slew of related books for future reading.

I also picked up The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, which I've been wanting to read for a while. Not only am I fascinated by the era in which he did business, but he was just an incredibly powerful man. There have been other bios, but this particular author also wrote a bio of Andrew Carnegie, and just reading snippets of his work, I really enjoyed how... elegantly he writes.