It’s Monday! What Are Your Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila of Book Journey. Be sure to check out her post today to see her selections and the list of links to all the other participating bloggers.

I hope everyone has been making merry and being of good cheer!

My blog looks abandoned, but it’s not! I kept writing in December, which has never happened after NaNoWriMo. Now, I need to figure out how to write and continue posting on my blog. I’ll get there — it’s just going to take a little experimentation.

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Read

Last week, I read the latest in Marjorie Liu’s Dirk & Steele series, about a paranormal detective agency. Within the Flames finally told Eddie’s story about a man with a barely controlled power of creating fire. His assignment is to find and protect a shape-shifting dragon who has some fire of her own. I really enjoyed the interactions between these two.

I also re-read Slave to Sensation, the first in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling series. I never re-read, but I needed a model for my writing of paranormal creatures conducting ordinary business. In this book, the unemotional Psy and the sensual leopard changelings get together over a real estate deal, but there’s a murderer lurking in the depths so things are in more turmoil than they seem.

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Reading

I’m about to finish How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. I learned  a lot of history that I hadn’t been exposed to. Cahill points out that most history has been written by Protestants. As a good little Presbyterian, I learned lots of Western history twice — once at school and once at church. It matched and it was mostly Protestant history with a huge gap between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, which in the version of history that I learned led inexorably to the Reformation. So, the activities of bishops and monks in the years from about 600 to 900 were new to me.

Last night, I started Unearthly by Cynthia Hand. This is the next selection for the YA for Adults book club at Pudd’nhead Books. The idea was that it would be fun to read about angels this month. So far, it is!

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Will Read

What’s next? Rick recently finished American Nations by Colin Woodard, so I may read that next. In some ways, it will be an interesting follow up to How the Irish Saved Civilization since it deals with cultural identities.

The next book on my fiction pile is Pale Demon by Kim Harrison, but I have a big backlog so I may choose something a bit more cheery.

What are you reading?