It is a trite but true Observation, that Examples work more forcibly on the Mind than Precepts: And if this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praise-worthy.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(1959) Second in Norton's “Time Traders“ series. In this one, time agents discover an alien spaceship crash-landed on Earth in the Pleistocene. When the agents send it through a time gate for studying in the present, they accidentally trigger a return-to-home function, sending the mysterious craft and all on board to distant worlds. It's a big-dumb-object adventure, one of my favorite sf tropes, and I hope Norton builds on it through the series

(2005) Third in Stroud's series about the crafty and cynical djinni Bartimaeus, and the wizard who summoned him. This series has grown on me, and this entry caps it off very nicely. I read this on audiobook during a long drive, which is a good way to consume this series: Simon Jones's narration is just delicious.

(1741) This is Richardson's own sequel to Pamela and lacks every quality that made Pamela surprisingly engaging. Pamela is a proto-Mary Sue: Everyone she meets admires her, or when they don't she talks at them until they do. There are interesting moments, as when she suspects Mr. B. of an affair (which turns out to be a huge misunderstanding, because sure it is) but mostly it's a plotless, moralizing, long-winded dud.

(2024) When the Tyrant's children go missing in an enchanted forest, the job of retrieving them falls on Veris Thorn: the only person ever to enter the forest and return alive. Tense, surreal, atmospheric, recommended.

My dear father and mother,
We arrived here last night, highly pleased with our journey, and the occasion of it.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

And here's my #BookSpinBingo card for November.

October was another slow month with no bingos. I'm optimistic for November, though.

Yay for #ReadYourEbooks day! Four very different titles for me this month: muckraking journalism about a Rhode Island boss, a collection of Jack London's writings about Hawaii, a collection of horror stories, and the launch of an indie fantasy epic. I hope to get to the London and at least one more.

Thanks for hosting. @CBee !

(1995) This was a #ReadYourEbooks pick left over from October. It's about a writer who returns to his hometown, where years ago he and a childhood friend defeated an unspeakable evil and now have to defeat it all over again. The premise is a little too familiar, but the execution is entertaining enough.

My November #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin books are very different again: a space opera set 50,000 years in the past on the one hand, and on the other a picaresque Georgian-era comedy. Both of these were pretty high priority for me even before @theAromaOfBooks spun them, so I feel like the BookSpin Fates once again read my mind.

And here is my #ReadYourEbooks list for November

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

Just under the wire, here is my #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list for November.

Thanks for hosting, @theAromaOfBooks !

(2024) Second in a series that I'm thinking of as "Ruritanian weird" until someone offers a better subgenre term, featuring a wandering soldier dealing with PTSD and stranger things. In this one, Easton returns to their ancestral estate which is rumored to be haunted by a breath-stealing ghost. Creepy fun, and introduces characters I hope will return in future volumes. For which, I am here.

(1741) I imagine Eliza Haywood reading Pamela and eye-rolling herself seasick. For twenty years Haywood had been writing stories about self-interested sexually aggressive women, the polar opposite of Pamela's male-gazey virginal innocence, and "Anti-Pamela” is a fine example of the type: Syrena, a beautiful young woman of limited means and fewer scruples seeking a fortune through marriage. Easily more fun than Pamela, and far less moralizing.

Syrena was a Girl, who even in her Cradle had the promise of being one of the compleatest Beauties of the Age ...

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

My #10beforeTheEnd list combines installments of long-term projects with next-in-series-before I-lose-the-thread reads. Pretty confident I can get to all of these.

1Joseph Andrews
2 Jonathan Wild the Great
3 Lady Audley's Secret
4 A Journey to the World Underground
5 Diadem from the Stars
6 Fevered Star
7 A Dragon of Black Glass
8 The Butcher of the Forest
9 What Feasts at Night
10 Galactic Derelict

Thanks for hosting, @ChaoticMissAdventures !

(1741) In 1740 Samuel Richardson wrote Pamela, an epistolary novel about a servant girl who resists her employer's increasingly forceful sexual advances until he proposes marriage, at which point they happily wed. In this 1741 novella, Henry Fielding lampooned Pamela by pretending to publish Pamela's original letters, which expose her as a fraud. Fielding's wit is sharper than Richardson's, but his classism and misogyny are, if anything, worse.

(1974) “The Riddle of the Glass Coffins“

Scotland Yard's ghost-hunter John Sinclair investigates an evil undertaker who secretly leads a band of corpse-eating ghouls. It's a John Sinclair, Geisterjäger adventure: you dig it or you don't but you get what you expect, and I enjoy a JSG fix around this time every year.

Bookriot has a story on Georgia's “Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl,“ a statewide program to promote reading in Georgia schools. According to the story, this year the program caved to pressure from book banners and removed 8 (40%!) of the already-announced 20 titles from the high school list.

You'll be shocked, I'm sure, to hear that they left only one work by a Black author on the approved list. And they spelled her name wrong. Shocked.

(1966) "Wrong Way Through Time"

The crew of the DINO III are charged with delivering equipment upgrades to the CREST III, which is stranded 50,000 years in the past. The DINO sneaks through the enemy's time gate, only to discover that the CREST is already gone, having jumped 500 years into the relative future. Can they still complete their mission? Both the problem and its solution are a bit tortured, but don't ask questions and the ride is fun

(1989) After the rapture, the dead rise from their graves. Left-behind sinners ponder the state of their souls while battling a zombie horde. I love the idea of mining Christian mythology for horror material -- especially as here when the author has no evangelistic agenda -- but like many another zombie novel this gets bogged down in a repetitive series of violent gross-out set pieces. Still it's fun enough to finish, and just right for the season

(1984) Third (or 4th or 5th depending on what & how you count) in Butler's Patternist series. This seems connected to the series less by plot than by common themes: power, transformation, eugenics, toxic family relationships, and the struggle to be human in the midst of it all. (Oh and rape: big red flashing trigger warning for that, y'all.) As with others in the series, I'm torn between admiration for the craft and aversion to the material.

(2020) Epic fantasy inspired by precolumbian Americans, with political intrigue, prophecy, betrayal, revenge served cold, and dangling plot threads. Must read the next.

(2004) Second in the author's “Bartimaeus“ trilogy, about a young magician and the demon he summons to do his bidding. I liked the first for its pace and sense of humor but found all characters dislikable. This one offers a similar recipe, snarky humor and morally vacant characters, but with an additional main character, a member of the nonmagical resistance elevated from a minor role in the first volume, to provide the story a moral center

(2010) Sixth in the Three Pines/Inspector Gamache series of mysteries. I'd been putting this one off because vol. 5 (The Brutal Telling) pissed me off (IYKYK) so I was mollified that BYD follows up on threads that TBT left dangling. It seems a little busy with what felt to me like one subplot too many, but the mystery(ies) is(are) fine, the character development is appealing, and I will read another. This was an ear-read for a long drive.

And here's my #BookSoinBingo card for October. Good luck everybody!

And thanks for hosting @TheAromaofBooks !

Yay for #ReadYourEbooks day. It's all seasonal choices for me this month (by design)

Thanks for hosting @cbee !

My #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin reads address social justice issues from different genres: one through science fiction, the other through journalism. Looking forward to both.

Thanks for hosting @theAromaofBooks !

No bingo for me in September's #BookSpinBingo , but there were bright spots: I finished the #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin reads, one of which was my priority read for September. No #ReadYourEbooks completed, but I am about halfway through Black Sun, which gives me a head start on October

Thanks for hosting @theAromaOfBooks !

For October's #ReadYourEbooks I pulled the horror and dark suspense reads that have been sitting unread on my Kindle the longest. Yay imaginary monsters!

Thanks for hosting @cbee !

Here's is my #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list for October.

September was a slumpy month, thanks partly to life stuff, and partly to the firehose of insanity that has been the daily news. We'll see what October brings: I hope the terror will be mostly imaginary. But, alas, I expect otherwise, so I'm stuffing the list with shorter reads, including a few seasonal John Sinclair Heftromane.

Thanks for hosting, @thearomaofbooks !

(1969) Joe Fernwright is a repairer of pottery in a future world where most pots worth repairing have been repaired already. Joe is recruited by a near-godlike being to join a project that goes to raise a sunken cathedral (with lots of broken pots) on a distant planet. It's a strange, surreal story with themes of transformation and imperfect information. It's fascinating and disorienting, in the way of an alchemical allegory.

#ClassicLSFBC

(1966)

Perry's wife Mory hears about Perry being stuck 50,000 years in the past and wonders whether the time-travers' meddling has anything to do with the wandering planet Barkon (last mentioned ep. 95). She convinces Reginald Bull to visit Barkon, but on arrival they see that the Tefroders got there first and are preparing a deadly trap for the Terrans. Mixed feelings about the Barkon story line, but it's nice to know Mory is still alive

(1958) Juvenile delinquent Ross Murdock is given a choice: Rehabilitation, or volunteer for a secret government project that has specifically requested his recruitment. Soon Ross is transported to a prehistoric arctic wilderness, where the free world conducts a cold war against Soviet Russia over alien technology using human tribes as pawns. Plot-driven and undemanding, it's a fun palate cleanser after a couple of weeks spent on 18th-C conduct lit

(1740)

Hooray for the magic of low expectations! I'd braced myself for a tedious slog, so was pleased to find an unexpectedly engaging story of power and resistance. Pamela's obsession with Virtue doesn't resonate, but as a drama of compulsion and consent, it's surprising how much still works. Of course a lot doesn't work: Pamela is as exasperatingly twee as she is sympathetic, and the hero belongs in prison. But I was prepared for so much worse.

Those days when you work in a library and step out for lunch and think, you know, maybe there's no hurry to get back.

When I woke up, my roommate, Johanna, was dead.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

And here's my #BookSpinBingo card for September. Good luck everybody!

And thanks for hosting @TheAromaofBooks !

Here are my #readYourEbooks picks for September. These are all appealing.

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

My #BookSpin read for September is Samuel Richardson's “Pamela“, a book I've eyed with both interest and dread. Pamela is a milestone in the development of the English novel, but it's a work of “conduct literature,“ a genre I associate with stuffy moralizing, running over 700 pages.

And so for the #DoubleSpin the BookSpin Fates have assigned a much shorter stuffless read as my reward for finishing Pamela.

Thanks for hosting, @TheAromaofBooks !

(2022) I expect I'll probably lose some sort of genre-fan credit by confessing that I've never understood the appeal of “The Fall of the House of Usher.“ I've read it a dozen times (it's short at least), each time hoping it will knock me over, but then don't get it all over again. So I'm pleased that T. Kingfisher has taken that cipher of a story and crafted something engaging, accessible and even creepy. Of this version, I'd read a sequel.

I failed to score in #BookSpinBingo in August, which makes no sense because ... well, take a look. Nobody's fault but mine. I kept thinking, oh I have plenty of time to make that bingo just let me read this other book first.

On the other hand, I completed my #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin reads, and two of my #ReadYourEbooks picks, which was my goal.

My #readYourEbooks list for September, pulled almost randomly from the large and growing archive of unread books I've acquired for Kindle and Kobo.

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

Here's my #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list for September.

Thanks for hosting again, @theAromaOfBooks !

(2012) Second in Tallerman's humorous high-fantasy series featuring thief Easie Damasco. My response to the first was lukewarm, but the second was already on my Kindle so ...

And I liked this one. I'm not sure whether Tallerman's storytelling improved or my mood matched the product, or maybe it's just the magic of accurate expectations. Easie still wasn't sympathetic exactly, but I found him less annoying and he made me laugh.

(1969) It's a story about culture clash and friendship on a world whose natives are sexually neuter for most of their lives, except once a month when they may become either male or female. I remember bouncing off this when I first encountered it in grade school, so was delighted to find it completely absorbing as a thought piece, as a story about cross-cultural friendship, and as an adventure yarn.

This was the August pick for #ClassicLSFBC

(1966) “Between Fire and Ice“

Continuing their adventureson an ice-covered Pleistocene Earth, Don Redhorse and his exploratory team follow radio signals coming from the ruins of a Lemurian city. They discover a settlement of Lemurian refugees in prolonged conflict with hostile “mutants.“ But all is not as it seems.

Yes that's a woman on the cover. No it doesn't end well for her. It's hard to be a woman in the PR universe. More on that next ish

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(2012) First in a fantasy series about a farmer boy who longs for something other than farming, and by accident stumbles upon a maguffin that gives him entry into matters of universal importance. Yeah, you've heard this before, but the world is unique and the story hits all the right notes. I dug it and will read the next.

This was a #readYourEbooks pick for August

(1739, English translation 1740)

One man falls in love with a friend's wife after he and the wife accidentally have sex (Hey, it happens.) (I guess.) Another loves a woman who lacks a fortune, which is the one quality his family demands. And an English soldier loves a French nun. The subtitle says it's “an historical novel,“ but really it's more an amatory novel in historical setting, with buckets of tears and an occasional swoon.