Gobbling up the Immortals

Went on another Tamora Pierce binge, there.  I sped through the Immortals quartet, which I last read too long ago.  I remembered there was this girl who could talk to animals and this tall mage guy, and I remembered their names, and there were obviously Immortals involved.  I had apparently forgotten absolutely everything else, which is fine because then it's like reading something for the first time.

Things I had forgotten:

• How awful the 2005 covers were.
• The badger.
• Daine was every bit as involved in actual fighting as Alanna and Kel (two heroines from other series I had thought were more fighting-oriented). 
• Daine was the heroine who hated all Immortals at first but was able to later see them as individuals and treat them as such.
• The entire third book.  (It even took me a long while to pin down why that archeopteryx skeleton seemed familiar . . .)
• That so many other random characters from the other series made appearances here, too.
• That there had been a dead dinosaur rampage in another fantasy book, which may have primed me to like the more recent one I encountered . . .

This binge means I can now legitimately move on to the Protector of the Small Series, which I have loved dearly since it first came out and may have been the first Pierce series I read in order completely.

I'm trying to move through the various interrelated series in the order they were written except where that conflicts with the inner story continuity too much.  This is partly to travel the path of increasing length and complexity of books as Pierce grew as an author and storyteller and partly to help myself not completely forget everyone since they keep guesting all over.

FYI: These are really excellent books to only read while exercising because they make you have a sudden passion for exercising that may not be too smart when you are trying to rehab a hip with a tear in it.  You have been warned. : )