so-so(2008, English translation 2015)
A body wrapped in a fishing net washes up on a beach on Sandhamn in the Stockholm Archipelago. Shortly afterward, the victim's cousin turns up dead under suspicious circumstances. Inspector Thomas Andreasson investigates. This is the first volume in the Sandhamn Murders mystery series. It's fine but I'm not feeling the enthusiasm the series inspires. Either I'm missing something or they get better
#ReadYourEbooks
pick(1920) Recently widowed Lionel Varrick throws a Christmas get-together for a few friends at his late wife's childhood mansion. Unintended by Varrick, one of his guests is a spiritual medium, and upon her arrival strange things start happening. When the medium holds an impromptu seance the first evening, secrets start leaking ... This old-fashioned gothic thriller is a hoot, and my 1920 read for #192030
pick(1967) Gucky reads a report about a Springer ship captured near Jago's Star, and suspects mischief. Upon investigation he discovers a Tefroder secret base, which he infiltrates. A solid entry, with an appearance by Mory Abro-Rhodan in which she shows some agency independent of her husband, which is nice.
pick(2025) This is an academic look at psychiatric treatment of African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and specifically at the role that religion played in psychiatric care. Author Weisenfeld meticulously describes popular European-American myths and stereotypes about Black psychology and Black religion, which psychiatrists accepted uncritically, and how those prejudices affected care. Eye-opening, outrageous, and indisputable.
Oops, missed yesterday, so I guess it'll be two today. First, November:
I went back& forth on this one, because I had problems with Joseph Andrews that made it difficult to appreciate in spots. But when I look at my November list, there is exactly one book I'd already like to read again so congratulations Fielding you b*****d you got me.
Honorable mention to Jack London's “House of Pride and Other Stories“
#12BooksOf2025
@TheElieMo
October: Black Sun / Rebecca Roanhorse
Honorable mention to Clay's Ark / Octavia Butler
#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo
In the summer of 1889, hundreds of Black residents of Liberty County, Georgia, congregated in daily worship on rough-hewn benches arranged beneath the branches of two moss-covered live oak trees near Walthourville.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
January #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin :
Eliza Haywood's account of the case of James Ainsley, whose uncle had him kidnapped and sold into slavery in America; and an academic discussion of how institutional psychiatry pathologized black religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A couple of heavy reads to start the year, but I'm looking forward to both.
Thanks for hosting @thearomaofbooks !
Samuel Richardson's “Pamela“ (“or, Virtue Rewarded in a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents“) dominated my fall reading: Pamela itself, responses to Pamela, commentary about Pamela and the Pamela controversy ...
It's not a favorite, not even close, not even for September, but without it then my 2025 reading would have been very different, and I'd have missed some rewarding reading.
#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo
pick(1967) "Battle in the Deep Sea"
Perry suspects that Terran finance minister Homer G. Adams has been replaced by a duplicate. He sends Adams to an undersea spa resort on Earth near Guam, but also sends agents to observe his every move. This episode advances the intrigue among Terrans, Tefroders, and Island Masters and also gives a soft resolution to last episode's counterfeit currency plot.
August was another slow reading month, so Ursula K. LeGuin's “The Left Hand of Darkness“ has little competition. But it would have been a strong contender even in the busiest of months.
#12BooksOd2025
@TheEllieMo
July was another light reading month, though I did log several excellent novella-length reads. My favorite for the month, though, was easily “Lord of Light,“ Roger Zelazny's classic novel about technology, immortality, and deity.
Honorable mentions to Liz Ziemska's “Mandelbrot the Magnificent“, Neon Yang's “Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame“, and Lauren Beukes's “Zoo City“
#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo
pick(1996) A battle-hardened crew is assigned security for settlers of a new colony world. What looks like a milk run turns into an endurance trial when the world turns out to be full of flora, fauna, and enemy combatants that want them dead, colonists and soldiers and all. The ending felt abrupt, but overall it's a very good example of the kind of thing that David Drake does very well. Not usually my sort of thing but I enjoyed this one.
First #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list of 2026. I'm not ready, but at least I'm ready, y'know?
Thanks for hosting @TheAromaOfBooks !
June was a slow reading month, but Lauren Markham's thought-provoking essay on a disconnect between our language and our historical moment, has lingered in my thoughts.
Honorable mention to Asimov's “Foundation,“ which held up better than I expected.
#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo
May's pick is Octavia Butler's challenging, disturbing, uncomfortably memorable “Wild Seed.“
Honorable mentions to Shion Miura's “The Great Passage“ (a sort of romance for people turned on by dictionaries); Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tales; Nghi Vo's “Brides of High Hill“; and Charles de Fieux's bonkers fever-dream of a fantasy “Lamekis“. It was a good reading month.
#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo
April: Igifu / Scholastique Mukasonga
Honorable mention to Octavia Butler's “Kindred“
#25BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo
pick(2023) Set in a desert where a water-poor town makes unimaginable sacrifices to survive, it's the story of a young man who sets out on a quest to find another way. It's a novella-length parable about truth and power and the need to question everything. It's also very good.
I completed all but one of my #10BeforeTheEnd reads, and enough of the tenth to know I need to be in a different frame of mind with different priorities to make finishing worth my time.
So I'm calling the challenge a success for this year. Thanks for hosting @ChaoticMissAdventures !
bailedDisappointed, because this is the last of my "Ten Before the End" reads but it's almost six hundred pages, I'm sketchy on several points from the last book, there's a "breath I hadn't known I was holding" on *page**one*, and a candidate for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award on page 16. I just can't for another 560 pages so am bailing at page 16. It probably gets better. (I'm perversely curious to see whether it can get worse, but not curious enough rn)
March: Death of the Author / Nnedi Okorafor
Honorable mentions to Arthur C. Clarke's classic “Childhood's End“; and Abigail Williams's fascinating and perspective-changing “The Social Life of Books“
#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo
so-so(1977) First in Clayton's “Diadem“ series featuring a young woman bonded to an alien artifact that gives her superpowers, as she searches the stars for the mother who abandoned her as a child. This one sets up the premise, and it's fine. To me it's a little too much puttering about, resisting the quest that we all know she's going to begin; and seventies sexual edginess (TW for nonconsensual sex). I'll continue the series, but not right away
The thief walked through rolls of milky fog, advancing warily to the base of a wall that rose until the fog swallowed it; his chameleon-web bodysuit mocked the opaline mist until he was a pale shade in the shadows.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
pick(1741, English translation 1742)
A Norwegian college graduate descends into a cave near Bergen. When a rope breaks he falls through the earth and into its hollow center, where a second sun shines and a smaller Earth orbits it. Swiftian adventures follow in lands of walking talking trees, fashionista monkeys, sentient string basses and others, satirizing and commenting on 18th century European society. Dry in parts, but fun and sometimes funny
In the year 1664, after I had pass‘d my several examinations in the University of Copenhagen, and had deservedly obtained the Character, which is there call‘d Laudable, by the Votes of my Judges, as well Philosophers as Divines, I prepared for my Return into my native Country; ...
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
(2016) It's an anthology of mostly horror stories published by the (defunct?) literary journal “A Murder of Storytellers.“ Quality is pretty good, with a few really memorable pieces and a few that provoked a “Well that was odd.“ My favorites were Timothy O'Leary's “Fake Girlfriend,“ about a man who invents an Internet persona for his imaginary girlfriend; and Donald Jacob Uitvlug's pensive “Café Shambleau“, about a space cafe that is hard to leave
pick(1967) The Space-Detectives Intervene
Perry returns from his adventures in prehistory, only to face an economic crisis in the present: someone is flooding the Terran Empire with counterfeit currency! And two private detectives stumble on a source of the fake bills. It's amusing that the authors think paper currency will still be the basis of commerce in 2404, but it's cool to see a villainous plot that isn't premised on physical force.
pick(2024) This is a YA novel-in-verse about a Sudanese-American teenager who dreams of becoming a poet, and attracts the attention of an older male poet who steals her work and has even worse intentions. I picked it up after reading that it had been dropped from a reading bowl list in Georgia for ... idk, for suggesting 25-yo men hit on teenagers? (I think teen girls already know this.) Happily, it was reinstated and happily, it's also pretty good.
so-so(2014) It's a dead-teenager slasher flick about a group of high school grads who throw themselves a graduation party on an island rumored to be haunted by a witch. Things proceed as you'd expect for a dead-teenager slasher flick. I first got this for Kindle almost ten years ago, and should have read it back then, because my appetite for this sort of thing has soured. As an example of the genre, though, it's fine.
pick(2025) This is one of the more important books I've read this year, and it consolidates a lot of my own thoughts and misgivings about my country's place in the world. It's about Gaza, but not just about Gaza, more broadly about the many theaters where the current world order is based on dehumanization and violence against people whom it has found advantageous to think of as not-people. No comfortable read, but eye-opening and compelling.
(1967) “The Conquerors of Time“
Perry's team find an Island Master on planet Vario, which is good/bad news: bad because that means the Island Masters can track their movement and anticipate a confrontation; good because if the Terrans can get the upper hand, they might be able to compel him to help them return to 2404. There's a moral dilemma that deserved a little more reflection but this series is all about the action, which it delivers.
so-so(1743) Two years after “Anti-Pamela”, Eliza Haywood published this conduct manual for servant girls. Here she sounds more like Richardson, a fussy moralizing bore, than herself, noted author of lusty amatory fiction. In a section dealing with amorous employers, Haywood‘s advice could have been modeled after Pamela, never mind that she had satirized it only recently. Interesting for its glimpse into the period and another side of Haywood's career
Beware the notorious tea-to-dipsomania pipeline!
“I have known several who have loath'd the very Smell of any spiritous Liquor, become at last to love them to their Ruin, meerly by drinking of Tea, which, by too much cooling and weakening of the Stomach, seems to render it necessary to have something warm.“
so-so(1911) It's a satire of Oxford life, an over-the-top mock epic about a young woman so beautiful and bewitching that she brings calamity upon the school. For me the prose style is even more bewitching than I can imagine any Zuleika being: I am undone by such an easy command of a precise vocabulary, range of literary allusion, and nimble tongue in cheek. But the plot centers on suicide which I can't quite bring myself to laugh about, even in context
pick(1966) “On a secret mission to Lemuria“
Still stuck in the past, but having now arrived at the Andromeda Galaxy, Perry's next objective is to find a way to access and operate the time-traveling equipment of the Island Masters. He leads a team disguised as unkempt, incompetent “space tramps“ to the Lemurian planet Vario to investigate. The premise leads to some light humor. This was the last episode of 1966.
(2012) First in an indie YA dystopian series, set on a future Earth where humans have been enslaved by aliens. Our heroine is a member of a rebel group that liberates humans and plots to fight for freedom. It's very YA, with the self-absorbed first-person narration, the very special narrator, and the love triangle. Not really my thing, and I won't continue.
But at least it's no longer sitting unread in my Kindle archive. Yay #ReadYourEbooks !
so-so(1962) Book 3 of the “Time Traders“ series has not aged well. The idea is that in order to colonize a distant planet, the West sends a team of Apaches who have been regressed “into prototypes of their ancestors“ (because blablah survival blah) -- only to discover on arrival that the Commies have done the same thing only with Mongols. The story is well-intentioned and has strengths but it's the kind of thing that makes you say “It is of its time.“
In unserem Universum wimmelt es von Narren.
“Our universe is swarming with fools.“
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
pick(1743) Fielding's fictional biography of the thief and con artist Jonathan Wild is a satire of English political life in general, and of “prime minister” Robert Walpole in particular. The running joke is that Wild (like Walpole) is a “great man”, i.e., driven to (in)famous deeds by ambition and avarice and untroubled by “vulgar” traits like honesty or loyalty. Deeply cynical -- misanthropic, even -- but also funny and uncomfortably relevant.
1mo
My #ReadYourEbooks picks for December: three indie horror books and a satire of university life from 1911. (Which of these things is not like the others?)
I'll definitely get to Zuleika Dobson, and hopefully one of the other three.
Thanks for hosting @Cbee !
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 !
so-so(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 !
