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When it says Currently Reading at the top that means literally, so far this month. The day job has been so exceedingly demanding that my usual ferocious reading pace has been diminished to tiny slivers of time wrenched from the ongoing flow of demands. I read stuck in traffic, stuck in lines, stuck at work between tasks where there is an unclained two minutes or minute and a half. So here are the books I've got going--one is too heavy to lug around, another is an overseas book so I don't like to let it out of the house, because I'd had a copy each of two of his other books, took them to school and they vanished. Luckily I have no trouble keeping track of several books at once, so anyway, here's what I am reading.

First is a kids' book called Calypso Dreaming. Charles Butler is somewhat new on the kidzbook scene; at least I believe this was his first book, and it only came out a couple of years ago. I wanted to read it because his next book, The Fetch of Mardy Watt, was--and still is--one of my absolute favorite reads of this year, and I have read many enjoyable YA books (most of which have gotten a lot of attention so I haven't gone on about them here, repeating what everyone else is saying). I talked about Mardy before--it hit all my childhood reading buttons, and they still work: takes place in Ireland, which has always had magical connotations for me. It concerns a girl who can see things others can't . . . including a shadow of herself. A shadow with its own mind? It was beautifully written. No, I have to say the writing is so good there were parts that stunned me, and I had to go back and reread them for sheer pleasure after I finished the story. Well, that same splendid writing is evident in all three of Butler's books. (There is also Death of a Ghost, which was quite good though a tad dark for me. I'd say it's for an older reader--in fact a great read for a boy maybe ninth grade and up).

Back to Calypso. She's got these eerie eyes, and webs between her fingers. She's very strange, and when she dreams . . . well, let's just say that the veil of reality around Sweetholm, a little island somewhere in the UK, is very, very thin. All unknown to Tansy, who is coming over with her parents to house sit. Her parents are tense because their marriage is in trouble, and they are trying to work things out. Tansy is tense because she and her best friend have been playing around with magic--not very kind magic, and it has, maybe, possibly, worked. Tansy's friend Kate is okay with doing horrible things to a pet and maybe even to people, but Tansy is not, and she's relieved to get away from Kate, and magic. But then she meets Calypso . . . And there I will stop. Charles Butler writes so well, his imagination is so amazingly subtle and his stories so different I'm surprised he hasn't been discovered by the mainstream, but I think that's only a matter of time. So faboo a writer is bound to become popular, and that is why I am not letting his books outside my house.

The big book I've begun is Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire. His first book, Elantris , I talked about here--a first novel that showed a ton of talent, imagination, and promise, even if it had a few bumps. Sanderson is a new author on the scene, and gives every evidence of becoming a master storyteller. I have only gotten into the first third or so of Mistborn--and would love to have a full day to sit and sink into it. So far, it reminds me somewhat of Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora in that the main characters are thieves and rejects under the thumb of nobles, the action takes place in the slums and crumbling houses of an ancient capital city, there is much elaborate scamming involved with political repercussions, and the leader of the thieves is a brilliant man. But that's as far as comparison goes. Sanderson's world is lit by a dim red sun, there is constant ashfall, the present government has been in place for a thousand years and is called The Final Empire. The Emperor is presented as a deity who cannot be defeated--especially by the enormous underclass of slaves and downtrodden workers called skaa. What divides the upper classes from the skaa is Allomancy, the magical use of ingested metals. Kelsier, the leader, finds Vin, a little thief girl who is scrabbling perilously for existence in a horrible thief gang because being outside the gang would be even worse. He shows her that what she thinks of as her "luck" is actually allomancy, and changes her life.

That's as far as I've gotten. Now, what drew me to this novel, besides wanting to read Sanderson's next, was this statement he made, which you can find on the book jacket: What if the prophesied hero failed to defeat the dark lord?. I love most of the famtasy tropes. They became tropes, after all, because they work. But to see them twisted and looked at afresh is so much fun. I also like Sanderson's voice. Though his prose isn't as whipsharp with trenchant wit as Scott Lynch's, he has a wonderful touch with humor. Lynch is also rather more unflinching with amorality and senseless violence, though it would be a mistake to say he does not write about emotion and connection between characters--one of the themes of his book is the bond of brotherhood when everything else in the universe is either indifferent to you or actively against you. But there is a sense of order and even a moral justice that I sense in Sanderson's book--nothing heavy-handed, no sermonizing, but it's there, like the sun in an eclipse: you see tiny glimmers of light along the edges of leaves, a glint in the glass, with the promise of light to come.

Hopefully I can get back this month with some more reading. Now I'd better get back to the pile of overdue work on my desk.

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