Books so far this year

I took a stab at keeping track of my reading this year, but here we are over a third of the way through the year and the list is getting too long to be able to get into every specific book in any detail. Fortunately, I haven't so much been reading new books as reading several new authors, which makes this much more efficient.

Rhys Bown, Her Royal Spyness series : This is a mystery series, starring Lady Georgianna, a young noblewoman living in London in the 1930s. Great-granddaughter to Queen Victoria and 34th in line to the throne. Unfortunately, her branch of the royal family is quite broke and her dreadful sister-in-law makes the family home in Scotland unbearable, so she is attempting to live independently while being too well-born to be able to earn a living. She scrapes by while periodically getting called upon by Queen Mary to do various favors, like attempt to distract the Prince of Wales from that dreadful Wallis Simpson. But really none of this gets across how hysterically funny these books are. Imagine the love child of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers (conveniently ignoring the fact that Dorothy was FAR too proper to do something so scandalous) with a generous dollop of Cold Comfort Farm (there's something very Flora Poste-ish about Georgie), and you begin to get the tone of these books.

Jennifer Crusie : I admit, I've been on a kick of light reading. She's a romance author, but her books are intelligent and well-written, and usually very funny. Her female protagonists tend to be intelligent women in their late 30s with real bodies who enjoy eating, as opposed to Barbie dolls in their early 20s. Her male protagonists aren't asssholes who make you wonder why anyone would ever want to get within 15 feet of them. There are very few moments of even slightly dubious consent. They're really about as good as a romance novel can get, particularly when you're in a mood for light and entertaining but don't want to have to turn your feminism off.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games trilogy : And now for something completely different, a dystopian future where teenagers are chosen by lottery once a year to fight each other to the death for everybody's entertainment on tv. Hijinks ensue! Need I say that it isn't a good idea to get too attached to any of the characters? Truly, not so much the series I would recommend for someone who wants something light and easy. But much like Battlestar Galactica, despite the fact that I'm generally feeling too unsettled about the state of the world to be able to enjoy dystopia, this is just too damn good for me to put down.