My #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin picks are a contrasting pair of light and ponderous reads. Looking forward to both, for very different reasons.

Thanks for hosting @TheAromaOfBooks !

(2022) Second in the trilogy beginning with “Black Sun,“ this is a fantasy set in a would inspired by pre-Columbian America. This entry develops the worldbuilding and the political maneuvering. It's a fun world, and this is a fun visit, but it also feels a little directionless to me, like moving people around for the sake of filling Book Two. Looking forward to a grand showdown in Book Three.

November was a successful month for the spinny tasks: I finished both the #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin reads, and even scored a bingo, which has eluded me the last couple of months.

Thanks for your work on these challenges every month, @theAromaOfBooks !

And here is my #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list for December. Thanks for hosting @theAromaOfBooks !

And here are my results for November's #ReadYourEbooks : 3 titles of 4, which is a new record for me.

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

Here is my #ReadYourEbooks list for December, chosen sorta-randomly from the oldest titles in my large and growing ebook backlog.

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

(2011) First in an indie fantasy trilogy featuring a teenage magic user who acquires a powerful book written by the followers of an outlawed god. It's fine, but I'm over the "magic teenager" trope and the characters' banter just feels like bickering to me. Fortunately there's no cliffhanger ending so I don't feel compelled to continue.

This has been in my Kindle backlog for a long time so thanks to @Cbee and #ReadYourEbooks for the nudge

The White Tree / Edward W Robertson
Fevered Star / Rebecca Roan horse
Separation of Church and Hate / John Fielding

Hope to finish the first two, and get a start on the third. Another Perry Rhodan adventure may also be on the block ...

#weekendreads
@rachelsbrittain

The sun had not yet risen on the first day after the new year's winter solstice, and it felt not at all as if an age had ended, but Balam knew better.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(1966) “Orders from the Fifth Dimension“

The CREST III retrieves equipment delivered last episode by the DINO-III then sets course for the Andromeda Galaxy. It's a tidy episode that moves our heroes on to the next stage, fills some blanks in the worldbuilding, and introduces a new mystery to be solved later.

(2015, selections 1995-2014)

It's a collection of 25 horror short stories. They range from a sweet sad story about a man who befriends a ghost in his back yard (“She Found Spring“), to bizarre *WTF did I just read?!* stories (like “Grandma Wanda's Belly Jelly“), with a generous helping of erotic and body horror in between. Some stories lean too hard into sexual violence for my taste, but by and large they're well crafted, efficient and effective

(2015) it's a collection of stories and homilies by a pastor with tattoos, anger issues, salty language, and a deep appreciation for human messiness. It's heavy on grace and forgiveness, light on exhortations and moralizing. I'm an ex-evangelical quasi-atheist, but this kind of humane reading of Christian tradition resonates with me still, and I am grateful for Bolz-Weber's expression of it.

(1742) Fielding's follow-up to Shamela continues his critique of Pamela. It's a gender-swapped comedy in which Pamela's brother Joseph resists his female employer's advances. Compared to Shamela, JA has more nuance, more satirical targets, and more than one joke. Of course jokes that worked for his audience often don't work for me: much of it is slapstick, some based on SA. But the humor of character, manners, and wordplay still get laughs from me

(1862) It's a Victorian sensation novel about a young gentleman who returns from the Australian gold fields having struck it rich, only to find on his return that his wife has died. Except the stories about her death don't add up, and there's something suspicious about his friend's new stepmother... There are several interesting things going on here but its heart is a sensation novel, and as such it delivers.

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.