I recently read all of Sholem Aleichem's "Tevye the Milkman" stories, and I gotta admit that I didn't think they were so fantastic. I liked them well enough, I suppose, but that was as far as it went. One always hears that Yiddish is hard to translate, so maybe that's the problem...
I just finished listening to Jim Butcher's Cursor's Fury, third in his Codex Alera. Just like in his Harry Dresden books, he managed to pull me in, despite a repetitive style (characters are constantly arching eyebrows, something I don't see a real-life person do once in a year. Characters call each other by names like "Aleran" or "Calderan" after knowing them for more than 5 years -- this would be like my calling my friends "Kansas-guy" or "Chicagoan"). He knows how to keep the pot boiling enough that it distracts from his stylistic infelicities.
Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters, on the other hand, is all about style. She's incredibly adroit, writing in a high fantasy mode in one story, horror in another, and so on. I've written before about how she writes about characters who are on the periphery of the story. Here, most of the stories are like that as well -- one that I particularly liked was an alien contact story that stops just before the aliens actually make contact. She also has a more traditional story about wizards that didn't really impress me the same way. Overall, it's a top-notch collection, even though two of the stories were also in Magic for Beginners.
I've begun book II of the Aeneid, which talks about the Trojan horse being brought into Troy.
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