Reading Update

I finished Sharra's Exile, and found it to be better than I remembered. Among other things, I remembered the depiction of Dyan Ardais as being rather inconsistent (and to the worse) with his depiction in The Heritage of Hastur, but I seem to have been wrong about this. I think that I must have read The Sword of Aldones (or perhaps The World Wreckers? What's that one about?), which was an early version of the same events, and conflated the two (or outright substituted TSoA for SE). Anyway, it's a pretty good book - not as good as THoH, but good. (I think I'd like Lew a bit better if he weren't such a drama queen. Hmm... it occurs to me that it's unclear how far after the fact his first-person narration occurs. It can't be too far, because I don't think the Lew of the end of SE would have spoken quite as bleakly as the narrator earlier in the book, to say nothing of THoH.)

Most of the rest of my Amazon order arrived yesterday: the two CDs I mentioned earlier, plus Spencer-Fleming's Out of the Deep I Cry (which I have begun reading), Robert Aronowitz' Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease, and Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. There's one more book coming, Heyer's April Lady.

Country Music

You really couldn't call me a fan of country music. Most of my music collection lies somewhere in the spectrum from rock to pop; there's a sprinkling of jazz, blues, latin music, even a little calypso. But I do own (and listen to) a fair amount of country.

It's an eclectic collection, and there are a lot of big names - Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Reba, many others - who go unrepresented. Also, I know even less about the subgenres of country than I do about those of rock. I've heard, for instance, that some people class the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as bluegrass, but what features place them there rather than elsewhere are a mystery to me. (A mystery which, for the moment, I'm not concerned with solving. That can wait.) What I'd like to ask any country fans out there is this: if I were to expand my collection further, who should I look for? Names are fine; specific albums are better.

The singers and groups I have that I'd class as straight-up country are: the Charlie Daniels Band; Crystal Gayle; Dolly Parton; Kenny Rogers; Leeann Womack; Mary Chapin Carpenter; the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band; Patsy Cline; Roxanne Cash; Shania Twain; Skeeter Davis; Suzy Bogguss; and Tammy Wynette. Then there are singers and groups at least some of whose work is country-tinged, including: Blood, Sweat and Tears; Bruce Hornsby; Creedence; Dan Fogelberg, maybe; the Doobie Brothers; Dusty Springfield; the Eagles; mid-period Elvis; Gordon Lightfoot; Jim Croce; Linda Ronstadt; and The Band.

So. What am I missing? Anybody?