I recently fin­ished Black­wood which will be reviewed in full  shortly, and now I am work­ing on Restora­tion, Book II in the World House series.  Both are from a newly dis­cov­ered pub­lisher, Angry Robot, and after read­ing two of their nov­els, they are one to keep an eye on for excel­lent books.  I couldn’t wait to read The World House as soon as I heard of it, and Restora­tion is sur­pass­ing my expectations.

Restora­tion is my 25th book to read this year.  I am about half way behind where I wanted to be by mid-year, but I am push­ing to fin­ish­ing this one before BEA on Mon­day.  Then I’ll be inun­dated with more books than I know what to do with, not to men­tion the Blog­ger Con­fer­ence and the UnCon in addi­tion to the evening pub­lish­ing events.  A busy three days await me.

In non-book news, the Origami Enve­lope Project is almost com­plete.  Enve­lope #7 has received more fame than the oth­ers thus far due to a teacher find­ing it while per­form­ing in Ghi­rardelli Square, San Fran­cisco, ear­lier this week and shar­ing it with his stu­dents.  Enve­lope #8 will go into the wilds of New Eng­land this week­end, #9 in New York next week, and the final enve­lope for now #10 is des­tined for Austin upon my return from vacation.

And top­ping off an already adven­ture­some trip, I encoun­tered a good-sized black bear in my brother’s back­yard last night.  He/She came around the side of the house and I mis­took it for one of the dogs.  It turned around and went back behind the house, I fol­lowed to bring the dog back into the yard only to dis­cover it was not a dog.  He/She ambled off back up the hill and hope­fully to its home on the moun­tain.  I know this isn’t uncom­mon for this area, but I wasn’t expect­ing a bear at all.