The reading marches on.

Finished At War, At Sea. Overall very good, wish he had spent more time talking about the Falklands.

For fiction I'm now on to Northern Captives, a history of a Barbary Corsair slave raid on Iceland in the 1620s. This is quite interesting, not just because the specific incident is so bizarre, but as a look at a large and long lasting slave trade that, at least in the US, is completely ignored. Also makes me realize o know basically nothing about the 1600s.

Fiction wise I read something called A Touch of Darkness, a Hades and Persephone romance novel. This was pretty bad; dull prose, mostly lacking in plot, structure, conflict, or anything but a lot of sex. I got it for trashy fun, and only finished because I could read it stupidly fadt without thinking.

Am now reading Prospero's Children by Jan Siegal, which I grabbed at a used book store because it has an awesome cover. This is good, actually quite good. The prose is solid enough, and the author is quite adept at manipulating tone (particularly dread and unreality), and sketching in characters well enough to be clear, but vaguely enough to allow room for your imagination. It also moves at a good pace, tends to just tell you stuff you could probably guess rather than dragging it out for pages of tedious "mystery". I particularly like the dreamlike sense of the world opening up and fraying at the edges, with things hinted at and evoked.