Od Magic, by Patricia McKillip It’s magical fantasy, it’s an adventure story, and it has no Quidditch. What more could I ask for?

Dead Beat, by Jim Butcher Necromancers? Here? Oh, no, nothing bad would ever happen in Chicago. That’s Harry Dresden’s city! Oh, wait, no. Bad things always happen in Harry Dresden’s city. Usually to Harry Dresden. Blackmail and black magic make this one a winner.

Proven Guilty, by Jim Butcher Yes, I am addicted to these books. Luckily, Jim Butcher likes making money, so he keeps writing them. This is it until April, though, so I’ll have to make it through somehow. The blurb talks about movie monsters, which there are—but this book also features more of the Carpenter family, and is the first one in a while to not have any vampires on centre stage. This is somewhat reassuring—there are a lot of people writing bad vampire novels, and if all the vampires stay offscreen long enough to really really reassure me that Harry’s not going to go all Anita Blake on us, I will be quite happy. (Laurel Hamilton, why couldn’t you have stuck with vampire slaying? Why did you have to switch to porn?) Anyway, I think Butcher’s getting better as he writes, and it may even be enough to get me to go read his “sword and sorcery” series (as he calls it).

Books in 2006: 39

(Will I make 52? Not likely—13 books in the next 26.5 hours. Maybe I missed some, but, then again, maybe I didn’t.)