Today, while visiting a local used book store, I was thrilled to find a copy of the first edition of DragonQuest. I played DragonQuest extensively, but I'd never seen a copy of the 1st edition, and to find a copy in Buckhannon, WV was just neat.

• Magic Study, by Maria V. Snyder, copyright 2006; ISBN-13 978-0-373-80249-4.
• Fire Study, by Maria V. Snyder, copyright 2008; ISBN-13 978-0-7783-2534-5.

I enjoyed both of these, as well as the earlier book in the series, Poison Study.

• Midnight Never Come, by Marie Brennan, copyright 2008 by Bryn Neuenscwander; ISBN-13 978-0-316-02029-9.

  I really enjoyed this mix of faerie an Elizabethan England. Interestingly, this novel was inspired by part of a campaign of the Changeling RPG, which was one of the things talked about in the informative “Extras” section of the book, where she recommends three books by the folklorist Katherine Briggs: two on general British faerie lore (British Folk-Tales and Legends and The Faeries in Tradition and Literature) and one specifically about Shakespeare's time (The Anatomy of Puck). I'll have to look for those, and for Maire Brennan's other books. She has a website <http://www.mariebrennan.net>.

• Chindi, by Jack McDevitt, copyright 2002 by Cryptic, Inc; ISBN 0-441-00938-7.

  I enjoyed this. I'll have to look for his other books.

I got to run another short Labyrinth Lord session for the kids.

• The January Dancer (sp?), by Michael Flynn.

  I liked this, although I'd early put down another Flynn novel that I didn't like well enough to finish.

• Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross.

  I liked this one too. I'm going back and reading some of Stross's work that I missed when it first came out.

• SPQR XII — Oracle of the Dead, by John Maddox Roberts.

  I've enjoyed this series, and this entry was good.

• The Water Thief, by Ben Pastor.

  I enjoyed this, though it was sometimes annoying.

It's nice to see SQLite supports table constraints:

$ sqlite3 test.db
SQLite version 3.6.19
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> create table t1
   ...> (k int,
   ...>  s int,
   ...>  e int,
   ...>  d int,
   ...>  constraint se_or_duration check
   ...>    ((s is not null and e is not null) or d is not null));
sqlite> insert into t1 values (1, 8, 4, null);
sqlite> insert into t1 values (2, null, null, 8);
sqlite> insert into t1 values (3, null, null, null);
SQL error: constraint failed
sqlite>

• In the Stormy Red Sky, by David Drake, copyright 2009; Baen Books/Baen Publishing Enterprise; May 2009; ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9159-7.

  This is the seventh in The RCN Series featuring Daniel Leary and Adele Mundy.