Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. A pretty decent read by a master story teller. Card's style is similar to Stephen King's: he has the same well-developed characters, simple writing style and riveting plot, without the need to scare the bejesus out of you that King has. I whipped through Magic Street in about two days. Set in a middle class black neighborhood in LA, it is the story of Mack Street, who was found as baby in a paper bag in a local park. Mack, although he is a kind hearted individual, has the involuntary ability to make people's dreams come true in the worst possible way. So, for example, a man suffers a terrible accident living him permanently disabled in response to his daughter's dreams that he would spend more time at home with her. As Mack grows up on the street, we slowly learn more and more about who he really is and why he was left in that bag. Nothing meaningful or insightful here, just a good tale that grabbed my attention and held it.

The Family Trade (Merchant Princes) by Charles Stross. Another good read and another mysterious adopted-child-with-mysterious-powers book: this time we meet our protagonist Miriam Beckstein as an adult who suddenly discovers that she can transport herself to another world by staring at locket left by her Jane Doe murder victim mother. A clear homage to Roger Zelzany's Amber series with the business savvy and cynicism that author Charles Stross brings to everything he writes. Our protagonist in this case turns out to be a member of a quasi-mafia, quasi-medievil family that gained wealth by transporting drugs and other stolen goods between worlds. Miriam, the protagonist finds herself in the middle of a chess game of competing families that this Book 1 only begins to sort out. Miriam is very street smart though, and it very clear that she will not be a pawn for long.

Those were the two books I enjoyed reading this year. Dissappointments were The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach, The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson, and The Wizard Knight books I and II, by Gene Wolfe.

The Carpet Makers is a translation from German and comes with this glowing recommendation by Orson Scott Card. I got about a quarter of the way through and could not finish. It has such a misanthropic way of looking at people. Everyone is a greedy bastard or an innocent fool. Just an unpleasant way of viewing things that I had no desire to continue with. Stephen R. Donaldson's latest sequel in

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant was just too much of a repeat of the formula used in series one and two. Horrible things happen, a lot of which the protagonist blames on herself, and then when everything seems lost, she does something seemingly stupid which saves everyone. Been there, done that. Donaldson may have captivated me with his self-loathing anti-hero twenty years ago when I was a teen, but now I'm not so impressed.

As for the Wizard Knight series, I liked Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer series when it came out in the 80s, but he has failed to hold my attention with anything since then. Serious writers seem to think he is some sort of wordsmithing god, but his main characters are always the same person, who in this case I never bought as a young boy suddenly transformed into a hulking midevil knight. In fact, the main character strikes me as more like the reverse: a character with wisdom far beyond his years, perhaps an elderly person given the body of a man in the prime of his life.(aka maybe Gene himself?). The story itself has strange plot with parts that are just down right disorienting and confusing until our protagonist reveals what actually happened ten chapters later. If there were some underlying meaning behind all the confusion I might buy into it, but there isn't: just a strange tale set in seven overlapping worlds related to Norse mythology.