Reading these days

Lady S is so inspirational, keeping up with her reading and actually writing down the titles (to say nothing of stomping me again! in Scrabble), and I'll never remember to keep a list, it's clear. But here are a few good things I've found in the last weeks. Thanks to whoever led me to some of them, and if these make you think of something else I might like, I'd be delighted to know about it:

Madeleine Robins (madrobins), Point of Honour If you haven't discovered the impressive Sarah Tolerance--Ruined Woman, Regency private investigator, and literate swordswoman--your life is not complete.

Laura Amy Schlitz, A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama The heroine is one of those children whose truly original voices never ceases to delight, and she's up against true evil in the form of deceptively kind adults (there's just a hint of the supernatural lurking in the shadows of the plot, too).

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought Another very interesting introduction to the way that our use of language reveals the ways our minds work. You have to like language to like this, but it's way more fun than the original scholarship it summarizes (and maybe occasionally distorts just slightly, but I don't mind).

Tsering Shakya, Dragon in the Land of Snows The history of the relationship between China and Tibet since 1950--I'm only about a third of the way into this, but so far it seems balanced (but of course, I'm biased).

Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth and World Without End Big fat, juicy, pageturning, history-candy with architecture thrown in. Follett has always been able to keep me up late at night, and when he starts in the 11th century with cathedral building, I'm gone. We don't even concern ourselves with the distortions here. I was a little bothered by the rapist's POV sections in the first one, but like all the bad guys in these books, he eventually gets all that he deserves--also described in loving technicolor.