Before and during Pennsic I read two books that were very much throw-away reading: light, didn't require a lot of heavy thinking, utterly of their genre and time-period.
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
One of the great mystery cliche-creators of our time. Or, if you will, Trope Codifier (
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TenLittleMurderVictims) Ten people who have never met each other before are lured onto an isolated island and killed off in various ways one by one, culminating in the suicide of the very last one. Being more genre-savvy than the average murder mystery book character, I clued in immediately to the notion that one of the ten had faked his or her death and was continuing to hunt down the others. Despite having read this book before, I had forgotten exactly which person it was, so the ending was still more or less a surprise. I had also forgotten that all of the victims are asshats of varying degrees. It's a light, satisfying read.
The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett
It's 1950s pulp sci-fi, not fantasy as one would think from the title. On the other hand, Brackett may call the goings-on "super science" but change three words here and there and it's a fantasy novel. The plot is at best one step above a SyFy original movie: A futuristic Indiana Jones finds the Sword of Rhiannon (a sort of Martian Prometheus/Satan figure) and gets transported back into the Martian past, where he gets captured and made into a galley slave, falls in love with a Martian warrior-princess, fights snake-people, and starts a world war. It's shallow, silly and completely awesome all at the same time.
Not expecting her 1950s audience to be conversant with such things, Brackett used an unholy mix of Welsh, Irish and Anglo-Saxon names for Martians without regard for gender -- Ywain is female, Rhiannon is male (which is weird). Although, reading this book after long hours at Herald's Point, it seemed fitting. ;-)
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