Book 76: "Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link

The woman stood and flicked through magazines, and at some point she realized that the man standing there with his eyes closed was wearing pajamas. She stopped reading through People magazine and started reading Batu's pajamas instead. Then she gasped, and poked Batu with a skinny finger.
"Where did you get those?" she said. "How on earth did you get those?"
Batu opened his eyes. "Excuse me," he said. "May I help you find something?"
"You're wearing my diary," the woman said. Her voice went up and up in a wail. "That's my handwriting! That's the diary I kept when I was fourteen! But it had a lock on it, and I hid it underneath my mattress, and I never let anyone read it. Nobody ever read it!"

What is your Zombie Contingency Plan? According to Soap in the story of that name, everyone should have one . . . just in case.

The book starts with a tale about a village hidden inside a dog-skin handbag, and it is followed by some equally inventive and varied stories. "Hortlak", doesn’t seem to be fantasy at first, until you realise that the convenience store worker who refers to some of his customers as zombies isn’t just being insulting. Other stories that I loved were "The Stone Rabbits" about an unusual haunted house, and the title story, in which a group of teenage friends are brought together my their love of a mysterious and irregularly scheduled cult TV series. I didn’t like the non-story "The Cannon", and the book ended with one of the weaker stories, the backwards time-travel story "The Lull", but I loved the other seven stories.

I'd never heard of Kelly Link until someone on fantasywithbite recommended her, but I put this book on my wish list and came across it in the 'bad' bookshop in Birmingham (the source of many temptations at £1 per book). I'm a short story fan anyway, and this is one of the better collections of fantasy stories out there, so I will definitely be on the lookout for her other books.

Book 77: "Odd Thomas" by Dean Koontz

Odd Thomas, a 20-year-old grill-chef in the small town of Pico Mundo, can see the dead and although they don’t speak, they are able to let Odd know how to help them with the unfinished tasks that are preventing them from moving on. Only a few of the town's residents know about this talent of his, among them the police chief, who often acts on Odd's tips. But Odd can also see another type of spirit that he calls bodachs, which seem to be vampire-like shadows feeding on death and destruction. Accidents and illness don’t attract them, nor does a simple strangling; they like death on the grand scale, appearing in the days beforehand, following the perpetrators and victims and hanging around the site of the coming disaster. So when Odd sees more bodachs than ever before crowding around a customer at the diner where he is working, he starts thinking that a serial killer is in town.

The story is told by Odd after the event, at the urging of a friend who is a well-known author, and he decides to use the device of the unreliable narrator so that he doesn’t give away what actually happens until the end of the book. I enjoyed it and wouldn’t mind reading the sequels.

Book 78: "Leaven of Malice" by Robertson Davies

Part 2 of The Salterton Trilogy.

When a notice announcing the engagement of Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace appears in the Evening Bellman, most of the newspaper's readers don’t realise that anything is amiss. But it says that the wedding will take place on November 31st, and in actual fact Solly and Pearl aren’t engaged, and haven’t had much to do with each other since acting in an amateur performance of the Tempest together four years ago. The fall-out from this practical joke affects many of Salterton's residents is immense, with the flames being stoked by Pearl's father Professor Vambrace, who it sure that that it was expressly aimed at humiliating him, and is determined to sue the newspaper since the editor is unable to tell who it was that paid for the engagement notice.

A very funny tale, with a host of wonderful characters ranging from the deranged Professor Vambrace, the scheming Mrs Bridgetower, both of whom are opposed to a potential marriage between their children, the harried editor of the Evening Bellman Gloster Ridley and the eccentric musician and cathedral organist Humphrey Cobbler, who is known to be fond of playing jokes.