panThis Orcadian verse SFF novel with accompanying standard southern English version tells the story of a student returning to a space station from her art studies who forms a relationship with a visitor to the station.
While it was fun matching up the two versions and listening to the audiobook on Everand, there seemed to be a lot missing from the actual story which suddenly just stopped in the middle of the action. A disappointment.
pickThe author's account of how as an adult his Catholicism re-asserted itself and what that meant as the Church hierarchy threw itself into the fight against even secular civil gay marriage in the mid 2000s. ⬇
pickHari Seldon uses the statistical techniques of psychohistory to foresee the coming collapse of the Galactic Empire and starts a Foundation which will help shorten the coming period of barbarism since the collapse of the Empire is now inevitable. We observe the course of history through a series of snapshots in the first couple of centuries of the Foundation's existence. ⬇
pickA book of SF short stories with religious themes written between 1940 and 1970. It has one of my favourite of such stories, Arthur C. Clarke's “The Nine Billion Names of God“, which I still think has one of the best last sentences ever.
Of course it is noticeable from a 2020s standpoint what or rather who is left out of this collection of 13 stories, but I don't know which of these stories I would omit to make room for other voices.
pickI knew nothing about Schopenhauer going in, and if asked I would probably have guessed that he was a composer. I didn't really understand the explanation about Schopenhauer's theory of the Will as the meaning seemed to slip and slide about and just as I thought I was beginning to understand it the concept changed. I don't know who was at fault, me, the author, or Schopenhauer.
pickWe follow the ups and downs of the relationship of two haenyeo (sea women) played out against a backdrop of Korean history from 1938 to the present (2008).
As someone with only vague knowledge of the barest outline of Korean history (Japanese occupation, Korean War, brutal dictatorship, democracy), I found that aspect of the book very interesting. I don't think I'd ever heard of the April 3rd Incident, which plays a pivotal role in the book. ⬇
pickOne of the astronomers helping Julius Caesar with his reform of the Roman calendar is found murdered. Caesar takes this personally and orders Decius Caecilius Metellus to investigate.
Liberal use of famous names as red herrings made this, the last book in the series, even more fun. I accidentally skipped the penultimate volume so I still have that to look forward to as well as some short stories.
A memoir. It's the highest on my TBR list but I might end up reading something lower down first
#SundayFunday
@BookmarkTavern
pickWhen a priest's daughter is murdered in the luxury resort of Baiae, local opinion fixes on the son of a Numidian slave trader as the culprit. Decius Caecilius Metellus thinks the young man is innocent but he only has a couple of days before the trial, which is certain to find him guilty.
As usual great twisty fun much enhanced by Metellus's comments on the action as asides in the narration.
It was a good year for me, even if it was a bad one for Rome.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
pickThe author uses diaries, library records, and other papers as well as elocution guides to reconstruct who was reading what in the 18th century and how. Reading was much more of a shared activity with people reading aloud to each other from newspapers, periodicals, non fiction, joke books, and religious works, and a good reading voice was essential.
pickImmediately after the end of WWII, the patriarch of a rich Japanese family dies leaving a will designed to set his three grandsons and their mothers at odds with each other. The bodies of members of the family start piling up. Can Kosuke Kindaichi solve the case while there are still some heirs left?
⬇
#teaandabook
I read the first chapter and realised I'm going to have to read it again and construct a family tree while reading it.
pickTatsuyada, whose mother died when he was 7 and who was brought up by his stepfather, discovers that he is a member of a rich family. Now he's been called to claim his rightful position as the heir.
Secret passages, a hidden treasure, and a family curse all have a part to play in this intriguing mystery. I don't know if the change in tone is because of the change to 1st person POV, differences in the Japanese style, or the different translator.
so-soKosuke comes to Gokumon Island immediately after WWII with the news of the death of Chimato on board a vessel repatriating Japanese soldiers. The village is then rocked by the murders of Chimato's sisters.
The background of immediate post War Japan was interesting but although the how and the who was ingeniously worked out by Kosuke I found out the motivation too implausible. I wonder if it struck the original Japanese readers that way.
Seventeen miles south of Kasaoka, falling right on the border between Okayama, Hiroshima and Kagawa Prefectures, in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea, there‘s a tiny island.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
@puddlejumper
#queerbc
This anthology had Neon Yang's novelette “A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential“. I find stories with a 2nd person POV hard going so I DNF-ed it about 1/4 of the way through.
pickWhile visiting her sister in hospital in 1987 Sadie meets Sam, who is recovering from a car accident. They bond over computer games and we follow the ebbs and flows of their friendship over the next quarter of a century.
Enjoyable even for someone like me who knows almost nothing about computer gaming. I recognised some of the names of the earlier games but that was about as far as I could go.
pick16 year-old Reggie drops out of school after her mother's death but is still studying for her A levels with tutoring from a retired teacher while she's working as a part-time mother's help (aka nanny) for a doctor. But then her employer disappears. Meanwhile, a train crashes on the line just behind her tutor's house, leaving an injured Jackson Brodie with amnesia. ⬇
She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.
'Pliny the Younger,‘ Ms MacDonald always emphasized as if it was of crucial importance that you got your Plinys right, when in fact there was probably hardly anyone left on earth who gave a monkey‘s about which was the elder and which was the younger. Who gave a monkey‘s about them, period.
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O tempora! O mores!
pickJackson Brodie steps in to help defuse a road-rage incident in Edinburgh. He, the rager and the ragee, and another witness bounce off each other over the next few days as various storylines come together.
Funny in places and a few too many flashbacks to characters' early lives, but still good to see how it all fitted together. Martin was the character I identified with most strongly and I wish his story hadn't concluded quite the way it did.
pickAfter a pre-Christmas trip to London, staying with her sister, and Christmas itself, Sophronia and friends return to the school for the New Year Tea only to find that it has been infiltrated by Picklemen.
A satisfactory wrap-up to the series with quite a few surprises on the way.
pickSiddheag receives distressing news about her pack and Sophronia and the other girls put their training into practice to help her and incidentally foil the latest plot of the Picklemen.
It's been 3 years or more since I read the previous installments so I was a bit hazy on the details of what had happened. Fortunately there is fan wiki to remind me who was who. Great fun.
"Funambulist,” said Sophronia Temminnick, quite suddenly.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
panStaying with an old friend in Oxford, Mrs Malory finds that her godson is more upset than his family realises about having found a body, crushed under falling bookshelves, because he believes it was no accident. She decides to investigate.
I would have loved the setting and characters in this cozy when it first came out around 1990 but now I found it rather meh, especially in its characterisation of gay men.
