As I mentioned earlier this month, I read quite a few books over the break. Here are a few:

The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman

The initial book, ‘The Golden Compass’ is set it a world that is similar to, but yet unlike our own, where a person’s soul resides in their animal familiar–a dæmon.

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Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen by Garth Nix

The stories are set in two connected worlds. There is the world that feels to me a bit like England before WWII, and the magical world, whose entrance is guarded by a military conversant in weaponry both modern and medieval.

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Paper Mage by Leah R. Cutter

Xiao Yen, hero of Paper Mage is a dutiful daughter, dutiful niece, and practicing paper mage. The book is set in the Tang Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom (China about the time of the European Middle Ages), and the magic is quite unlike any I have previously read.

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The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint

Onion Girl is Jilly Coppercorn’s story, and delves into her past, and that is the reason that I hesitated for so long to read this book, for Jilly Coppercorn does not have a pleasant past, and so I knew that at least parts of this book were going to be hard to read, but probably no more so than some of his short stories. Regardless, sometimes you need to build yourself up to reading a book that you know is going to be painful in places.

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Lord of Castle Black, Book Two of The Viscount of Adrilankha, by Steven Brust

I knew that it was going to be a good book when I was laughing out loud reading the first page of the introduction.

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Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint

Spirits in the Wires is the story of the Wordwood, the literary internet site set up by Holly and others that has taken on a life of its own. Saskia Madding is an independent being, created by the Wordwood, and sent out into the World As We Know It, where she has fallen in love with Christy Riddle, and he with her. All of this is past history at the start of Spirits in the Wires.

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This is not all of what I read over the holidays, so more to come later. Meanwhile, all these books are excellent, and come highly recommended.