Al and Yetta watched an operetta/ Leonard Bernstein told them what they saw

Read Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, after reading rushthatspeaks' review. It's lovely and lapidary, but I wouldn't have had a clue what it was about without the review (and/or the forward.) I am not a subtle reader.

Is probably why I spent the last week reading Stephen Brust. I started on Vlad Taltos in 2006, thanks to incandescens. What I hadn't realized is that I read all of the series in 2006, ending in July. I somehow thought Issola was the latest one then-- which it was chronologically, but it was published five years earlier. Dzur came out in '06, but I somehow failed to register it. In any case, after a gap of five years and for whatever reason, I bought Iorich last April and then found I had no memory of what had gone before. So I got Dzur and Jhegaala from the library, took a fast refresh read of the end of Issola, and plunged in. And was shortly very confused, because Jhegaala predates the previous four books and I didn't know. (For my own reference, the chronological sequence is here.)

One should probably read Vlad with long intervals. He's not a terribly likable person, which makes it doubly suspicious that all the top Dragaeran nobles like him. Marty Stu, is that you? Back to either DWJ, three of whose books I also got from the library, or Thich Nhat Hanh, that refuge in times of trouble.