The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories Book

As you'd guess from the title, this is the third volume of the Grantville Gazette compilations; it's a decent read if you've already invested the time in reading the novels and the Ring of Fire anthologies, but frankly this volume is largely unnecessary, even if you're a fan of the series. The stories in this volume are much more... domestic than the previous volume, with very little action and rarely touching on the major events of the Ring of Fire universe. That isn't to say that they're bad, it's just not terribly exciting compared to your average RoF book. That said, "The Sound of Music" (a crippled German violinist stumbles into Grantville and has his love of music reawakened through an encounter with an up-time female singer) by David Carrico and "Other People's Money" (detailing the near-accidental creation of the Other People's Money mutual fund by the Sewing Circle) by Gorg Huff are useful reads if you're interested in their respective main series books (1636: The Devil's Opera (which is by far the best non-Eric Flint written book in the Ring of Fire to date) and 1636: The Viennese Waltz) since both introduce characters and institutions that are central to those stories. I will also say that while the stories in this volume weren't as entertaining in general as those in the previous volume, the quality of the stories is more reliable, and I found almost all of the stories interesting (Pastor Kastenmayer's Revenge is a bit slow and rather dry, telling the stories of how down-time Lutheran immigrants conspire to marry off seven of their daughters to up-timers after the pastor's daughter marries a catholic boy, but that's pretty standard for Virginia DeMarce's stories) but I found "If the Demons will Sleep" (a Presbyterian pastor's wife and an Dutch nurse (both up-timers) help out an ex-mercenary immigrant and his pregnant woman who has some bizarre PTSD issues) by Eva Musch and "Hell Fighters" (a Benedictine monk comes to Grantville looking for a way for his order to find a useful role in the new world and escape its historical slide into oblivion) by Wood Hughes to be particularly evocative and "Hobson's Choice" (about a young Cambridge student tutoring a bar maid, inspired by the example of Grantville that women can learn as well as men) by Francis Turner and the second volume of Enrico N. Toro's Euterpe story (about an Italian instrument maker traveling to Grantville to learn to make Pianos, see Grantville Gazette II for part 1) to be nearly as good (though the latter felt very similar to David Carrico's story, which I liked better). Eric Flint's contribution "Postage Due" is another Anne Jefferson/Amsterdam/Dutch Artists story, which seems to be a trend in these books (and as in Grantville Gazette II, it's related to the cover artwork) and while it's amusing, it's also really short. I must note that (as with the previous volume) I didn't read the non-fiction essays, but would you read "The Impact of Mechanization on German Farms" for entertainment? I didn't think so.