Cough, cough. Eck!

Well, my first (hopefully "only") illness of the winter has hit. Remembering last winter and all my relapses, I hid indoors for the past four days and I'm doing much better today. Although, I ventured out today (obviously I'm posting this!) and I seem to be declining a bit. It couldn't be avoided really though. I had to meet with my choir director to go over my solo. Luckily I've gotten my voice back already although it's a bit scratchy.

So, yes, I have a solo. Granted, it's only two words ("O Oriens," in case you wondered). But still, fun stuff. Plain chant, so nifty medieval stuff. Yay!

All this time home in bed gave me lots of time for reading. So I have now finished, at long long last, Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series. Wow! Ooh, ahh! Worth it. Go read it. This is a beautiful fantasy epic in a very alternate Europe. Great character studies. She does have billions of characters, though, so I'd recommend reading them all back to back (unlike me; the five year gap between the first four and the last three didn't help things, especially since there is no character guide!). Be prepared for a prolonged "wrap up" since the character sub plots can't possibly all finish up with the climax. The last page, for no reason I can quite explain, made me cry. Oh my, even thinking about it now, I'm getting teary.

I also read Stardust (Neil Gaiman) which is a fun romp in Faerie. There are things I liked better in the book and things I liked better in the movie, but to tell you which are which would give spoilers so I suppose I shall (mostly) refrain. I suppose it boils down to the book having more of the flavor of Faerie in all its wild dangerous and inexplicable glory whereas the movie had more humor. I liked the book's end with the witches better (though I can see why they changed it for Hollywood of course; but the book had the ending I guessed, the one that poetically felt right) but I liked the movie's epilogue better than the book's.