I finished several books this weekend in anticipation of the trip to Florida on Tuesday. (Don't want to take anything I'm halfway done with and don't want to leave it here and forget what I've read!) All sorts of different subjects and all major winners. Here's some thoughts.

I really enjoyed Kristine Kathryn Rusch's first Retrieval Artist novel Disappeared and picked up the next one in the series earlier this year. Extremes is just as well done and continues the adventures of Miles Flint who lives in the Armstrong dome on the Moon. On one level this is just a very well done murder mystery although it also includes some major ethical questions about science and survival and medicine. But the cool thing Rusch has done with her futuristic world is create a situation where the human world has signed treaties with alien worlds wherein humans who break alien laws must pay the consequences - regardless of how severe. It's a riff on the the diplomatic immunity question in the international community now - and the situations that arise when say an American breaks a law in a country that has a much more severe penality than in the US. In Rusch's world penalties might include death for something that would not even be against the law in the human world. So sometimes people elect to "disappear" and when they need to be found, people like Flint have to go looking.

It's great futuristic, techno sci fi with wonderful old fashioned mysteries and all the human drama you could want. I have the next entries in the series on deck and the fifth will be out from Roc this fall. I'm really looking forward to it and planning to include the Retrieval Artist series in an adventure column I have planned for Bookslut.

Barbara Hodgson is one of my alltime favorite authors. She writes illustrated novels and does some really beautiful work. I raved about her last book over at Bookslut last year - not only is it up to her usual standard of beauty but it's about Syria's war for independence against France following WWI. I had no clue about this and with Syria so frequently in the news today, it's a wonderful way to get your feet wet on that country's history. Hodgson has also done some nonfiction books and I just finished Dreaming of East: Western Women and the Exotic Allure of the Orient. It's a collection of mini essays on western European women who traveled to what was then considered the Orient (Turkey and the Middle East today mostly) during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell are probably the most recognized names but there are a host of other "intrepid women" who went east in search of all sorts of adventure. What's really fascinating is how many of them felt liberated from society's standards when they were in eastern countries. There's just a ton of cool history here, bolstered by entries from journals, books and letters written by the travelers themselves. (And a tone of amazing photos and illustrations.) Based on Hodgson's book I'm now determined to read more about Bell and Stark as well as Margaret Fountaine, who collected butterfles as she traveled all over Syria and Turkey and fell in love with her dragoman in the early 1900s. Love Among the Butterflies and Butterflies and Late Loves, her two books on her adventures were published based on her journals in 1986.

I also finished Catherine Fisher's Corbenic, her latest young adult adventure story this time about the Fisher King. (Corbenic is the name of Grail Kings castle). This is one fantastic story - all about teenage Cal and his attempts to distance himself from a mentally ill mother and embrace the 9-5 upper class life of his uncle. Unfortunately on the way from one place to the other, he falls into the Grail King world (this is what happens when you get off at the wrong station while traveling by train). Cal is not sure if he losing his mind like his mother or if what he has seen (and continues to see) is fantastically real. His search for the truth, and the direction his own life must take, is literally not over until the very last page. Along the way he meets some great friends and faces all of his inner demons. Oh yeah - and Merlin shows up also (I think anyway). After reading Darkhenge earlier this year I was certain that Fisher was one of my new favorite authors, Corbenic has sealed that in a major way. This book is wonderful!

Other than that I'm blowing through A Girl Like Che Guevera at breakneck speed and should be done tomorrow night. It's another story of Cuba that is totally outside of anything I know (or ever heard of) and a wonderfully well written coming of age story to boot. This one goes in my August column and should certainly be read by any young girl with an interest in Cuba (although you don't need to be Cuban to identify Lourdes and her friends.)