I seem to be finding Rudyard Kipling all around me lately. As everyone who reads this blog knows, I am hopelessly in love with Geert Spillebeen's WWI novel, Kipling's Choice. (And please - READ THIS BOOK!) I was reading The Guardian the other day though and came across this article about a character from Kim. Do people learn the most amazing things in cemeteries or what? Very cool.

The new issue of Bookslut is up. Read it all, read it twice! I am quite happy to have a review there on Donna Seaman's Writers on the Air. I love that collection, it's one of my major discoveries of 2005. (Which was a pretty great reading year for me, to balance all the other bad crap that happened which I would like to forget.)

I am reading a pretty neat YA novel right now, Black Duck by Janet Taylor Lisle. (It's due out in May.) It is about rum running along the Rhode Island shore in 1929 and there is already one dead (and then missing) body, one major arrest and lots of threats from gangsters. The two young boys caught up in all this are not perfect and don't know what to do or who they should tell about the things they know or even what they should tell each other. In other words, they are very realistic. Lisle also includes a contemporary character who is conducting an interview with one of the now elderly boys from the story. I like that aspect of the story as one of the things I keep wondering about is what happened to the boys, and their friendship, when all of this was done.

So, big shocker - I seem to be reading a YA novel that is not about sports but that boys will still like! Yea!

Today I will be writing a review of the very intense photographic comic series Dorothy, and if you are an Oz fan and aren't reading this comic then you are missing out big time. I don't care if you like comics or not - you.will.love.this.book. Promise! And, well, sadly - I must clean my office today.

UGH.

Still time to preorder Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans. I'm so excited about this book I can't stand it. Really. I am freaking out with excitement!!