Scribbling in the Margins

Today, in things Em has finished reading this week, we have Libriomancer by Jim Hines. This is the first installment of his series in which magic arises from books and the power of belief imbued in them by the readers who love them, and it reads very much like a love letter to all things science fictional and geeky. Our protagonist, Isaac, is a semi-disgraced member of the secret society of Porters who know how to use the magic of books and whose job it is to protect this secret world of magic and magical creatures from discovery by the ordinary folks who can't use magic themselves. Unfortunately, Isaac finds himself in the middle of a brewing war between the Porters and the vampires and on the hunt for Johann Gutenberg, who founded the Porters several centuries ago and has gone missing at precisely the wrong moment. If that weren't problem enough, he's also trying to balance a tricky love triangle on top of everything else.

This was a pretty quick, light read, and as I said above, very much a love letter to pop culture and science fiction, and it earns props for dealing with the love triangle in a way that did not make me want to grind my teeth--which is pretty rare for the standard urban fantasy love triangle trope, I must say.