pick(1877) I understand this was one of the first books to use first-person perspective from an animal's viewpoint, and that choice was brilliant for Sewell's project of exposing cruelties toward animals. It won't be among my favorites -- too plotless and polemic and I'm probably just too old -- but I admire Sewell's aim and her effortless prose. I get why it's a classic.
The mighty north winds had been tossing us around in a terrible storm for three days and had thrown us on death‘s doorstep in the raging chaos of our blasted sails, when they suddenly stopped.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
pick(2019 Ed.) It's a fast and humorous love letter to horror films in the form of a handbook for readers who think they might be in a horror movie and wish to survive. I expect that it would appeal most to horror fans: others may not get the joke, mistake it for ridicule, or find that it wears out fast. But I dug it, and if you enjoyed the Scream series for its meta commentary, or Cabin in the Woods for any reason at all then you may too.
pick(1980) Two immortal humans -- one a killer and the other a healer -- are lovers and rivals and the parents (figuratively and often literally) to communities of super-powered humans, set against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade. It's a disturbing read because of its gaze at abusive relationships and abusive social structures, but also a very powerful one. For my taste, it's the most effective of the series so far.
pick(2024) This is a very scary account of how autocratic governments around the world work together to stifle dissent and promote antidemocratic movements worldwide. It was published only last year, and already things have gotten worse. This stuff keeps me up at night.
pick(2023). Cosmic horror at Gallipoli, mostly told through dispatches from an embedded journalist, all tangled up with ponderings about truth-telling, secrets, and information control. The horror works, and the themes speak to some of my own preoccupations. Plus: it's short.
pick(1966) "The Temples of Darak"
Still trapped 50,000 years in the past, the crew of the CREST III find themselves involved in a battle among ancestors of the Maahks and Haluters, a crew of cosmic engineers likewise stuck in the past, and newly-introduced aliens who met Gucky and conclude he is some sort of god. Plenty of action, and some dot-connecting among the plots of previous adventures.
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
pick(2011, English translation 2017)
This was a delight. It's an understated story about the relationships and preoccupations of a publishing team as they prepare a new dictionary. The story takes up questions about the relationship between words and the concepts they signify, the value of experience in forming definitions, and the ever-changing nature of language. Thoughtful and charming, and recommended.
Kohei Araki had devoted his entire life—his entire working life—to dictionaries.
#FirstLineFridays
#ShyBookOwl
Hip-hooray for #BookSpin Day! My May picks are very different books: #BookSpin is a chunky volume one of an epic fantasy series; and #DoubleSpin is a Victorian-era classic of animal fiction. Looking forward to both.
Thanks for spinning, @thearomaofbooks !
pick(2025) Here's one of the better horror stories I've read in a while, about a sister and two brothers in a difficult family situation. When one brother gets into trouble with the law, they escape to a cabin in the woods where family history, present reality, and the sister's nightmares blur together. It's a suspenseful, surreal, and very smart story about family trust and family trauma, and resonates with experiences of my own extended family
Any French speakers able to help me with this quote:
... souvent il vaut mieux faire des riens que de ne rien faire du tout ...
Google Translate renders it as: “... it is often better to do nothing than to do nothing at all ...“, which matches the sense from my very elementary French but which is no sense at all. I expect I'm missing a nuance, maybe between the plural “riens“ and the singular “rien“?
Merci d'avance!
Two bingos in April. I've had two months this year with no bingos at all, so I'm doing a happy yay-me dance.
#BookSpinBingo
@thearomaofbooks
pick(1996) “The Time-Eye“
Trapped 52,000 years in the past, Perry and the crew of the CREST III try to find a way back to the present. This one is extremely busy, packed with events that could easily have played out over two or even three episodes. The breathless pace keeps things fun, while the plot continues to establish connections to backstory and set up future complications.
Here's my #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list for May.
Thanks for hosting again, @thearomaofbooks !
so-soThis collects stories from the author's “Fairy Tale Almanacs“ of 1826-1828. They are of their time: orientalist and antisemitic stereotypes sometimes make the stories not so much enjoyable as, let's say, historically interesting. But they can also be charming. My favorite is “The Cold Heart,“ in which a young man makes foolish bargains with spirits of the Black Forest in hope of riches.
so-so(1951, from stories 1941-1949)
I read and enjoyed this back around 1980, but avoided revisiting it because I remembered a libertarian/gun-rights theme that I'd now find irksome. Which is true a little, but it's hard to stay irked by something so bonkers. For me this is peak Van Vogt: so packed with ideas it can't be bothered with things like consistency, craft or common sense: a hot mess that tips “hot“ enough to be enjoyable still
#ClassicLSFBc
And here's my 2025 #IndependentBookstoreDay haul.
The tote is a holiday incentive. I wish there'd been one that said “Oh yes definitely smut what's it to y'all“ because that would make me seem *so* much more interesting, but it's still my favorite free tote in a long time.
(Also: Mrs Swynn assures me that's exactly what the tote says but with fewer words)
Happy #IndependentBookstoreDay !
It's a rainy day in Tulsa, but Magic City Books had a pretty good crowd when we stopped by after lunch.
pick(2023) It's a middle-grades supernatural thriller about a basketball player who is recovering from a serious accident while dealing with a monster from his nightmares. I'm not the target audience, but it's fun for what it is. I picked it up for its terrific cover.
(1984) It's a collection of three interconnected novellas, about a failed revolution on Mars and what happens after, set in the 23rd-27th centuries. The “icehenge“ of the title is a megalithic structure on Pluto, which may have been constructed by Martian rebels, or by aliens ancient or recent, or something else. I quite liked the premise and the epistemological themes, but found it difficult to engage with the story.
Es zog einmal eine große Karawane durch die Wüste.
“Once upon a time, a large caravan moved through the desert.“
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
pick(1966) “The Invasion of the Dead“
Perry and the crew of the CREST III fall into a trap that transports them to the Milky Way Galaxy and 50,000 years into the past, to a time when Earth was called Lemuria and the Lemurians fought a doomed war against invading Haluters. Much to like here: there's plenty going on, it's rich with references to backstory, and the debut of Lemurians puts one more piece of the Perryverse in place. I'm a happy reader.
so-so(2019) A telepath and her partner are trapped in the caves of a prison planet. She doesn't remember what she did to get there; her partner says it was mass murder, but she has no recollection -- and then she sensed the presence of another person who may have a different story. It's fine, though it dwells more on relationship drama than I prefer. Others have loved it and I'm sure they're right.
pick(1966) “Seven Hours of Fear“
Last episode ended with Perry and the crew of the CREST III in pursuit of a Tefroder ship which was making duplicates of Gucky, Icho Tolot, and Andre Noir. As this ep opens, the Terrans have just seven hours to destroy the ship before the duplicates are complete -- but the Tefroders won't wait that long to teleport a troop of still-developing Guckys onto the CREST. And if that sounds nuts, you probably read it right.
pick(2020) It's a collection of five stories set in and around the Rwandan genocide. It's a gut-wrenching theme, Mukasonga's prose is graceful and restrained, and the stories will break your heart. The last story, “Grief,“ centered on a woman who attends funerals of strangers in search of comfort for the unobserved deaths of her own family, broke mine. This is what stories are for, so much that I found it hard to take more than one or two at a time
pick(2025) It's a supernatural thriller set in a maternity home for pregnant teenagers in the 1970s. Forced by circumstances into a place where they have no agency, some of the girls are drawn to a darker path that leads to a tight spot between the patriarchy and a a power that demands more than they may be willing to give. It moves right along, delivers the promised suspense, and wraps nicely. Recommended.
pick(2006) It's a collection of essays addressing issues of ownership and trade in cultural objects, mostly in the context of the looting and illegal trade in Iraqi antiquities that flourished following the 2003 invasion. Authors are museum professionals, dealers, a collector and an archaeologist, so multiple perspectives are represented and all are well stated. The context is a little dated, but the arguments are evergreen.
pick(2017) This was an audiobook for a long drive, and served nicely. It's an historical novel with dual timelines, one featuring a woman spy in WWI, and the other a young socialite searching for a friend lost in WWII. I'd read another by the author.
pick(1966) “The Master Plan“
The Tefroders set a trap for the Terrans: an apparently damaged and abandoned spaceship with multiduplicators to capture Terran boarding teams and duplicate them for interrogation. The trap captures Gucky, Icho Tolot, and “hypno“ Andre Noir, who escape but not before the Tefroders capture the information they need to make duplicates. Now the Terrans must destroy the ship before the Tefroders can complete the process.
You were a displaced little girl like me, sent off to Nyamata for being a Tutsi, so you knew just as I did the implacable enemy who lived deep inside us, the merciless overlord forever demanding a tribute we couldn't hope to scrape up, the implacable tormentor relentlessly gnawing at our bellies and dimming our eyes, you know who I'm talking about: Igifu, Hunger, given to us at birth like a cruel guardian angel ...
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@ShyBookOwl
pick(2003) A young magician works a spell far above his level of training to summon a demon for a plan of petty revenge. Things go downhill from there. For a book in which all the characters are dislikable except for the demon a little bit, it's surprisingly fun.
My #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin reads for April are a couple of short weird novels. Looking forward to both
Thanks @thearomaofbooks !
The temperature of the room dropped fast.
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@ShyBookOwl
so-so(2000) There's disappointingly little math here for a book titled “The Geometry of Love.“ But it's interesting for what it is: a discussion of a church, Sant'Agnese Fuori la mura near Rome, from as many perspectives as possible, ranging from architecture and art history to theology, hagiography, folklore, and personal response. It's interesting and occasionally fascinating. A bit unfocused for me, but arguably that's the point. Also: no pictures?
pan(1977) John Grimes, exiled from space service after events of The Big Black Mark, starts an interplanetary mail business. But on his very first job he and the postmistress are hijacked by bee-people. It's very 1970s, with sexual situations probably intended to be modern that now seem icky and misogynistic instead. We get past that to a serviceable but forgettable escape-and-revenge plot, but still not one of the series' highlights, for sure
so-so(1966) “The Devil's Factory“
We learn more about the Tefroders' capabilities, as the CREST III is attacked in “linear space“ -- roughly, PR's version of hyperspace where attacks had been thought impossible -- then land on a planet where a Tefroder factory produces android clones. It's a functional story that seems mostly concerned with hitting world-building points, but one assumes the payoff is coming ...
(1736) Set in a time before the world was remade for Adam's arrival, this is the story of the princess Eovaai who is deceived by an evil counselor and loses her kingdom and very nearly her Virtue. It's a strange book that lurches from utopian treatise to Arabian Nights pastiche to amatory-fiction shenanigans, with occasional flashes of brilliance and humor (both intentional and un-) and a generous serving of WTF?!?
This is my March #DoubleSpin
pick(1953) Yay for the #ClassicLSFBC because here's one I should have read long ago and never got around to till now. Maybe it's just as well, because I think younger-me may have struggled to engage with the very loose plot, flat characters, and wooden dialog. OTOH maybe I would have loved the big-picture speculation about humanity's nature, future, and our place in the universe(s?). I'll never know, but now-me found it a rewarding read.
The volcano that had reared Tratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years.
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pick(1966) “Ghosts of the Past“
Inside Andromeda's forbidden zone and hiding from Tefroder pursuers, the CREST III picks up a transmission from a planet near its hideout. Perry sends the “parasprinter“ Woolver twins to investigate. They discover armies from several eras of Earth's history, from Neanderthal hordes to medieval knights to WWII soldiers and veterans of the war with the Blues. It's an interesting mystery, but no answers in this episode.
pick(1966) “The Uncanny Robot“
Last episode, the Terrans captured a Tefroder ship that had been damaged in battle, and also met a new ally, a psychic robot named -- I kid not -- “Lucky Log.“ As Perry and crew move the ship to safe place for further investigation, they get caught up by an automatic wreck-collection system that transports them into Andromeda's forbidden zone. This one is packed with action and incident and does not disappoint.
