Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

On the train yesterday, I couldn't do most of the work I brought with me because it required precise and steady handwriting, which one cannot have on a train, really. So I read Anne Bishop's The Pillars of the World instead. This is a shrug book: I finished it and shrugged. Bishop's first books, the Black Jewels trilogy, were pure guilty pleasures; deeply unsubtle and rather icky in places, but enjoyable all the way through. Pillars has the same flaws, but lacks the distinctive characters that overcame these problems in the Black Jewels books. (It also starts a series, which is not indicated anywhere on the book that I can see; it's possible that it won't be a tightly-linked series, however.)