Die Menschheit steht kurz vor einem entscheidenden Ereignis – vielleicht dem gewichtigsten ihrer bisherigen Geschichte.

Humanity stands on the brink of a decisive event -- perhaps the most important of its history so far.

#FirstLineFrudays
@ShyBookOwl

A business retreat at an alpine mountain chalet is complicated by an avalanche trapping the chalet's residents snowbound with a murderer. It's okay, but also contains several narrative pet peeves that had me rolling my eyes.

It's a middle-grades book about a middle-grades monster hunter, based on Navajo folklore. It's fun, and knows its audience.

It's a surreal novella set in a segregated city where White and Black districts are separated by railroad tracks for a train carrying ghosts. Black homes and citizens are targeted for erasure. The narrator finds she is losing her skin color and language and eventually her home. Others disappear altogether. Powerful stuff, but it's rarely clear just what is happening, nor what is a dream. I admire parts of it, but it is not an easy read.

(1964) A group of scientists investigate a vast multilevel labyrinth beneath an abandoned temple on the planet Eysal and discover that, while the temple may be abandoned, the maze is not. Thus humans' first face to face encounter with the mysterious "Merciful" is led by academics unprepared for hostilities. Plenty of action in this one, in a setting used to good effect.

This was my #DoubleSpin for November.
@TheAromaofBooks

This was the bestselling novel in the US in 1970. I've been aware of it forever ("Love means never having to say you're sorry," FFS ?) but it's not really my kind of thing, never seen the movie, wasn't interested. Pleasantly surprised to find it very short-- barely 100 pages-- and pretty readable: bland, but direct. It won't take much more than an hour of your time, if you're interested. I'm still not a fan, but have read many worse bestsellers.

Fourteenth in Tub's space opera adventure series featuring galactic traveler Earl Dumarest. In this one, Dumarest gets roped into a search for a legendary treasure planet. It's fun as usual. The resolution involves one too many unlikely coincidences for my taste, but it delivers on action, suspense, and exotic settings.

Fourth in McGuire's "Wayward Children" series featuring refugee children from portal fantasy worlds, this time set in a "Goblin Market" world, where principles of fair trade are magically enforced. WC is my favorite of McGuire's series, with just the right mix of fantasy, adventure, and melancholy, and this entry fits right in.

Ihre kurzen, raschen Schritte hallten tappend durch die schmale Gasse, die die Explosion gerissen hatte.

Their short, quick steps echoed softly through the narrow alley that the explosion had torn.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

It's a look at early-19th-century American utopianism through the stories of five movements: the Shakers, the Owenists, the Fourierists, Icaria, and Oneida. My knowledge of these groups and of utopianism in general was minimal and mostly belittling. So I was fascinated by Jennings's account of how many movements there were, their ideological diversity, and the surprising relations between them. It's good stuff, engagingly written, and recommended.

Here's a collection of nine stories by "two-spirit and indigiqueer" authors, with themes of apocalypse, kinship, and identity. No duds here, but my favorite was Adam Garnet Jones's "History of the World," an affecting story about conflicting loyalties in a situation of imperfect information.

01. Love After the End (Joshua Whitehead, ed.)
The Shoelace Book (Burkard Polster)
Paradise Now (Chris Jennings)

02. The Big Burn (Timothy Egan)

03. Oh yes, always. Right now it's:
The Silence of the Wilting Skin (Tlotlo Tsamaase)
One By One (Ruth Ware)
Checkmate in Berlin (Giles Milton)

#WeekendReads
@rachelsbrittain

I think I need to take a break from this series. The jokes are all sounding the same, and this one asks me to believe that restoring a hereditary monarchy is a solution, which ... yeah, no it's not. I'll probably pick it up again sometime because the character, cast, and world do still appeal to me.

"Contact Ship Terrania" (1964)

With help from a new ally, Terrans locate the Schreckworms' homeworld, where they go to offer their one-time nemeses a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Author Junger walks the rails (illegally, which is part of the point) in the northeast US, while contemplating freedom, drawing object lessons from history and prehistory. It's short and consistently interesting, but also lacks resolution. I'd have preferred a longer book with clearer conclusions.

📖 Tagged.

🍁 See inset. That good boy makes me smile every dang day

📚 Phonetically-rendered dialect.

#thoughtfulthursday
@MoonWitch94

This one gets a lot of love, and I'm glad it's found its audience. Unfortunately, it was mostly a miss for me. (Surprise! Old dude finds YA book too angsty for his taste! Details at 11!) Hope those who loved it enjoy the sequels too.

(1957) It's a crime novel set in mid-20th-century Harlem, with a cast of not especially sympathetic characters trying to get their hands on a trunk of gold ore. It's twisty, violent, bitterly funny, and I loved it.

(1974) Sequel to Farmer's "Hadon of Ancient Opar", though it's not so much a sequel as book two of a two-volume novel, which is not so much a novel as a long piece of Tarzan/Quatermain fanfic. It's okay for what it is. I expect it would appeal most to those who know the Burroughs and Haggard novels well enough to catch the references better than I do.

(Under the Spell of the Giant Planet) (1964)
On Impos, an Earth-sized moon of the giant planet Herkules, scientific teams are investigating the artifacts of a long-vanished alien civilization. Then an instrument reading shows that Herkules's center of mass does not match its geographical center. In fact, its center of mass seems to be *moving*. Intrigue and peril ensue -- and also a clue to the mystery of Schreckworms.

Hadon leaned on his sword and waited for death.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(1974) In the Tarzan series, Opar is a lost city of fabulous riches deep in the jungle. This book and its sequel imagine the adventures of a native of Opar back when it was a thriving city on the shore of an inland African sea. It's okay, though it shares some problems of the Tarzan series, along with a few of its own. This is a reread, since the sequel is next in my DAW challenge and I realized I didn't remember book 1 well enough to read book 2.

... and my #BookSpinBingo card for November.

Thanks @TheAromaofBooks !

The #BookSpin fates smile on me this month: a couple of short reads that should be no problem -- although in case #DoubleSpin there are a couple other volumes that must be read first.

Thanks @TheAromaofBooks !

"Chess With the Demon" (1978)

Ghost-Hunter John Sinclair plays chess with a demon for the lives of his friends. It's kind of a mess because the villain's motives are never clear, and for a chess-playing demon he sure makes a lot of clumsy mistakes. Between parts that haven't aged well and parts that don't make sense, there's little to like in this episode.

After a couple of months off, here's my #bookspin #doublespin #bookspinbingo list for November.

@TheAromaofBooks

"The Second Empire" (1964) A fleet of the Terran/Arkonide Empire meets a fleet from the mysterious civilization known only as "The Merciful." Battle is joined, but neither side has weapons to defeat the other's defenses, so casualties are few. Much of the plot centers on a futile attempt by Terran teleporters to board a Merciful ship, and the unlikely (one might say ridiculous) events that follow.

I may be in a reading slump, but that's no reason to deny myself a haul at the Lions Club annual booksale, right?

It's an engaging, sometimes horrifying, account of the founding of the National Forest Service and its losing fight against the Great Fire of 1910, which burned over 3 million acres of timber. There is nothing not to like here, from fascinating history that throws light on current policies, powerful personalities in conflict, and extreme peril. Recommended.

1. No

2. LibraryThing, where I maintain a thread in the group, "75 Books Challenge" https://www.librarything.com/topic/334429

I mostly avoid other social media.

3. Air in my lungs. Blood in my heart.

Thanks for the tag @Eggs !
#WondrousWednesday

It's a pretty good collection of essays on mathematical subjects, mostly at the level of a general audience. My favorites included essays on the mathematics of gerrymandering, integer sequences, and 3d optical illusions (like these: https://youtu.be/oWfFco7K9v8)

Mrs swynn: Are you going to read any scary books for October?

Me: Yeah, I was thinking maybe ...

She: Oh, never mind. I see you've already started.

Smartass.

"The Deal With Death"
For Terran agents are trapped on a spaceship of unknown origin, speeding on autopilot to an unknown destination. With them in the ship is a deadly and near-indestructible Scheckworm, who is also trapped and does not wish to ride the ship to its programmed target, but cannot operate the ship's controls. For mutual temporary benefit, humans and worm strike an uneasy truce. Plot holes in this one are even wider than usual.

Lotte and Luise meet at summer camp, surprised to find they share the same face and the same birthdate and the same birthplace and wait a minute ...

It's creaky sometimes, but given that it's a children's novel from 1949 about twins who reunite their divorced parents (it's the source of "The Parent Trap"), I'm surprised that it hasn't aged worse. The author's respect for children is strong, and that helps a lot.

This was Leonard's first crime novel, after several westerns. It's not bad: it's the kind of bad-people-behaving-badly story he later perfected. The prose and dialog are already sharp. The plot feels thin, though, and the ending contrived. And while it feels a little weird to complain about it in a book about crooks and thugs, I could have done without the casual racism and misogyny. (Violence and larceny are fine -- they're what I came for.)

Mixed feelings about this collection of four stories set on Ty-Kry, where the idle rich can pay psychic Dreamers to bring them into shared dreams for adventure and diversion. Norton's stiff prose is a barrier for me, complicated here by stories that lack resolution and a world whose rules are opaque. OTOH, there are some terrific set pieces, like the hold full of bodies shown on the cover. (Tho in the text, it's the heroine who saves the hero.)

It's an art book with a small amount of text, depicting an alternative later-20th-century with robots, dinosaurs, hovercraft, and weirdness. It's brilliant and gorgeous and enthusiastically recommended.

Now I can watch the Amazon series, though I'm already pissed that they moved the setting from Sweden to &@#€ Ohio.

An academic discussion of utopian, futurist, and science fiction writing, and the literary role of sf texts, in context of German-language science fiction. It's pretty dry, and I'm certain I missed subtleties of the author's argument. But I was all eyes on a series of chapters discussing sf subgenres, with summaries of representative German novels.

Reader, my TBR grew like a radioactive sewer rat.

This was my August #BookSpin

Fifth in McGuire's October Daye series. In this one, Toby tries to avert a war between water-based and land based fae, by locating and rescuing the kidnapped children of undersea nobles. I love the mythology and cast in this series, though I think a sterner editor would help. And speaking of stern opinions, it seems that finishing the book has caused me to neglect local canine/squirrel relations, an oversight I must remedy immediately.

It was the bestselling book in the U.S. the year I was born. Having seen the film, I was surprised at how little space was given to the disaster plot -- instead the narrative is looser, a soap opera with monologs on sundry topics in aviation industry (and, awkwardly, abortion). Then in the final quarter the disaster subplot delivers a rousing conclusion. Engaging, interesting and ends in thrills -- which you can't say about *some* bestsellers.

Third in McGuire's “Wayward Children“ series of novellas about a boarding school for children returned from portal-fantasy worlds. In this one, the daughter of a character killed in book 1 arrives at the school, demanding help to bring her mother back so that she (the daughter) can be born. I love that it doesn't make sense and that's fine because mother & daughter come from a nonsense world. Of McGuire's series, this is easily my favorite.

I don't have much to add to the comments of everyone else who has loved this gem: it has a great cast, it's funny and sometimes poignant and it's wrapped around a clever mystery. Recommended.

Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

The plot is a pretty standard fantasy walkabout, where a couple of friends wander around having adventures and dodging peril. The world's geography resembles our own, but the characters might have come from furry fandom: pig-person Aldair and wolf-person Rhemia are unlikely allies among a cast that also includes sheep- bear- and lizard-people. It's an odd book, but there is action and satiric humor and a charming friendship between the principals.

"Four From the USO" (1965) Four USO agents go to planet Euhja to test a theory that Schreckworms are intelligent. Euhja is home to just one worm, who fortunately is looking for options. It knows that eventually it will be picked up by beings called The Graceful, whom it does not trust. Now humans and worm must come to an understanding before The Graceful arrive.

Despite implausibilities of the plot, I'm interested to see where this is going.

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

@TheAromaofBooks

My #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin reads for August: a history of German science fiction, and the bestselling book in the US for 1969.

Thanks @TheAromaofBooks !

1. Tagged. Also Perry Rhodan no. 161 and Neal Barrett's Aldair in Albion.

2. Running. Limping. Sprawling in the grass. It's sort of my personal triathlon.

3. Not much into stars, but I thought Cynan Jones's "Dig" was terrific.

#WeekendReads
@rachelsbrittain

Second in Kowal's alt-history series “Lady Astronaut,“ in which a meteor strike forces earlier and more diverse development of the space program. This one covers the first crewed mission to Mars. I love the space-nerdery in this series, and the author's detailed attention to her premise.

Score: two bingos for the July #BookSpinBingo . I'm happy with that. Looking forward to August's game.

Thanks @TheAromaofBooks !