The Dark Is Rising (series) by Susan Cooper. In an all-too-typical turn of events, I came down with a nasty cold just before New Year's, that persisted until just before classes started up again on the 5th of January. As a result, I wasn't really in the mood to read anything challenging and new, so I turned to reliable comfort books.

I've previously book-logged both The Dark Is Rising and The Grey King individually, which was a great trial, as the books are sort of addictive. This time around, I read all five (the two previously logged, plus Over Sea, Under Stone, Greenwitch, and Silver on the Tree. The two volumes I booklogged before are far and away the best individual books of the series, but they're all worth reading.

Reading the whole thing in one big rush makes a couple of things really stand out. Over Sea, Under Stone is widely cited as the weakest in the series, and Greenwitch is rarely mentioned at all, and both suffer from the same weakness: the focus is not so much on Will Stanton, the youngest of the Old Ones, and heir to great magical powers, but on the drew children, whose "great-uncle Merry" is Merriman Lyon, oldest of the Old Ones. The problem is that the Drews are perfectly normal children caught up in supernatural events, and as a result, seeing things through their eyes robs the story of some of its magic. The books that center on Will are much more effective.

There's also the problem that the puzzles needing to be solved in the Drew books are necessarily puzzles that can be solved by teens with no special abilities. Which makes them kind of lame, as mystical obstacles go, and you wonder just how thick the forces of the Dark must be for these to have gone unsolved for hundreds of years. The Will Stanton books evade this, as Will has magic powers and mystic knowledge that can be brought to bear without upsetting the suspension of disbelief.