Another over-loaded month of work and little reading time.

I'm still trying to get time for the Zunshine book I mentioned last month--chock full of good ideas, which makes me read slowly so I can think. Because I always have several books going (I keep them in stations: upstairs, downstairs, travel in schoolbag) I'm also rereading Patrick O'Brian for the dozenth time. I've reached The Fortune of War, which is one of my favorites: some of the story takes place in Boston, and the details are so vivid. I've walked those streets, I've stepped aboard the Constitution--so carefully described here. O'Brian relied on ships' logs for the battle sequences. I love that ripple of the real. And the story is so romantic as well as adventurous.

As for new books, I finished Catherine Jinks' Evil Genius in an advanced reading copy form. Though I liked a lot of this story--and admire the sheer talent and inventiveness of the author--I wonder how kids will like it. I did give my copy to a boy at exactly the right age, who loves fantasy and sf--reads a book a day. (His parents, a doctor and a lawyer, can afford to buy him a book a day!) You should have seen the grin on his face when he saw the title, and I told him it was about a boy who is smarter than anyone else (my young reader feels that way about his classmates) who has a stupid adoptive family, who finds himself in a school for evil geniuses. He golloped it down in two days. Impressions: he agreed with me that some of it was rough sledding, especially the unresolved last portion. He said he skimmed a lot of the math talk that I thought would be way beyond most kid readers. He didn't mind the adults being pretty much all caricatures. (You always know who is a bad guy because he or she has vividly-described rotten teeth, frex.) I figured kids wouldn't mind that--they don't mind the adults in Harry Potter, for example, being curiously useless and blind until way after all the danger is over. Well, I felt the same when I was a kid reader--all those stupid, bumbling villains in the Enid Blyton adventure books? Perfectly reasonable to me! Still and all, I'm wondering if this is one of those YA novels now coming out that will be more appealing to an adult readership who likes certain conventions of YA than actual kid readers--of course only time will tell. I could (and often am) dead wrong.

Other than that, I've got a splendid history going: Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage by Stephen Budianski going. If you like the 1500s, spies, biographies, and interesting historical characters, this is an entertaining overview, and could whet your appetite for deeper reading. The style is engaging, the quotes give tiny glimpses of the fascinating people who lived at that time.