Dragonriders of Pern

This is set on another planet called Pern. For 50 years every 200 years Thread falls from the sky at regular intervals. Thread burns and destroys everything living that it touches, very not good. To protect themselves from the thread, the original settlers bred Dragons to fly and destroy the threads. These three books take place after a 400 year interval of no Thread. Everyone believes that Thread is gone permanently and because of this dragons and their riders are viewed as parasites on humanity and there are hardly any dragons left. Go figure, thread starts falling again and they aren't prepared, but F'lar and Lessa come up with ways of dealing with the situation.

In the first book, F'lar finds Lessa and eventually they become Weyrwoman and Weyrleader, and it's up to them to convince people that thread is coming and that people need to be prepared for it. After thread starts falling, the two of them realize that they are horribly unprepared for it, so Lessa jumps back in time 400 years to get more dragons to help fight thread. Yay!

In the second book, Thread starts falling randomly instead of regularly and it causes major stress. The oldtimers that came forward in time in the last book aren't adjusting well to the times and manage to get themselves banished to the southern continent.

The third book is focused on the White Dragon who was impressed by Jaxom who is the Lord Holder of Ruatha Hold. His dragon is much smaller than the other dragons, the wrong color, and he can't be a real dragonrider because he has to be a Lord Holder. It's a very difficult situation for the poor boy.

I love these books and I think I'm going to track down the rest of them.

Dreams Made Flesh

This is a book of short stories based on the Black Jewels Trilogy. It contains the story of how Lucivar met and married his wife, the beginning of Jaenelle, how Saetan completely obliterated an entire country because of the death of one of his children, and what happened with Daemon and Jaenelle after the third book of the trilogy. I really enjoyed these stories. The one about Jaenelle's beginning was confusing, but other than that they were very well written and enjoyable. I think that Anne Bishop did a good job with these 4 stories

Howl's Moving Castle

Holy crap I love this book! As much as I love Hayao Miyazaki's films, this book is so much better. It just cracks me up. Sophie gets turned into a 90 year old woman by the Witch of the Waste (bad guy) so instead of freaking out she packs a bag and wanders out into the wild and runs into Howl's moving castle. She bullies her way in, declares herself the cleaning lady and chaos ensues. It's a very entertaining book and a relatively quick read.

Garden Spells

I completely forgot that I had read this. I guess that doesn't say much for the book. It's by Sarah Addison Allen. It's about a weird family that has magic in modern times. Not an immense amount, but some. These two estranged sisters haven't seen each other for over 10 years and then one day the younger sister shows up with a daughter of her own, running away from her extremely abusive husband. The best part of the whole thing is the apple tree in the back yard. It has a mind of it's own and likes to throw apples at people. It's not a bad book, but it isn't that earth shattering. It's a very simple read, with some rather gruesome bits (the abuse had a major ick factor).