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Book Chain, weeks 14 & 15
#19: Read a book where the title is a different color than the previous book's.
First attempt: Takeoff Too!, a collection of works by Randall Garrett. I was introduced to Garrett through his Lord Darcy stories, which I really enjoyed (the elevator pitch is "Sherlock Holmes in a world of magic, with the occasional delightfully awful pun"), and then pretty much everything else of his that I've read has left me cold. The contents of Takeoff Too! proved no exception, at least in the two-fifths I made it through before giving up on it: the best thing in it was the foreword, written not by Garrett himself but by somebody else, who had a great appreciation for his work and for him as a person, and filled me with a sense of goodwill that didn't survive contact with the first story. (Maybe I should be reading her books instead.)
The story that came closest to a hit, "A Spaceship Named McGuire", presents a problem that wouldn't be out of place in one of Asimov's Powell & Donovan stories, complete with a robot whimsically named from its model number, but spoils it with a scene at the end so weirdly sexist that the editor of the collection was moved to add an afterword assuring the reader that Garrett wasn't really like that or that if he was he got better with age. (For what it's worth, the sequel story, "His Master's Voice" - which isn't in this collection but I was curious enough to look it up online - is only a regular amount of sexist; it's also built around a reasonably interesting puzzle, and I found it more enjoyable than any of the stories I read that were in the collection.)
It occurs to me that most of these stories are science fiction, which might be part of why I'm not reacting to them the same way; if the Lord Darcy stories have the same shortcomings (at this point I'm afraid to go back and look), some of them would be less conspicuous in a cod-Victorian fantasy world than in a realistic present or a supposedly enlightened future.
Second attempt: How to Draw Stupid, and other essentials of cartooning by Kyle Baker, which also counts for the May prompt in the Buzzword challenge (title contains "to" or "too"). Since I was reading out of idle curiosity I don't have a strong opinion about whether it would actually be useful to someone seeking to become a cartoonist, but I was entertained.
#20: Read a book whose cover clashes with the cover of the previous book.
First attempt: K-PAX by Gene Brewer; the edition I had on hand has a vibrant purple cover that clashes with just about everything. My quickest DNF of the year to date: I lasted 20 pages. It was shaping up as one of those books where two sock-puppets talk at each other in a way that's supposed to end up imparting important life lessons; neither of the two participants in the dialogue felt like real people, and to the extent that they approached real personhood neither of them was a person I liked or wanted to spend more time with or expected to have any insights into life that were worth sticking around for.
(And then I took the rest of the week off fiction reading and binge-watched Natural Six instead.)
First attempt: Takeoff Too!, a collection of works by Randall Garrett. I was introduced to Garrett through his Lord Darcy stories, which I really enjoyed (the elevator pitch is "Sherlock Holmes in a world of magic, with the occasional delightfully awful pun"), and then pretty much everything else of his that I've read has left me cold. The contents of Takeoff Too! proved no exception, at least in the two-fifths I made it through before giving up on it: the best thing in it was the foreword, written not by Garrett himself but by somebody else, who had a great appreciation for his work and for him as a person, and filled me with a sense of goodwill that didn't survive contact with the first story. (Maybe I should be reading her books instead.)
The story that came closest to a hit, "A Spaceship Named McGuire", presents a problem that wouldn't be out of place in one of Asimov's Powell & Donovan stories, complete with a robot whimsically named from its model number, but spoils it with a scene at the end so weirdly sexist that the editor of the collection was moved to add an afterword assuring the reader that Garrett wasn't really like that or that if he was he got better with age. (For what it's worth, the sequel story, "His Master's Voice" - which isn't in this collection but I was curious enough to look it up online - is only a regular amount of sexist; it's also built around a reasonably interesting puzzle, and I found it more enjoyable than any of the stories I read that were in the collection.)
It occurs to me that most of these stories are science fiction, which might be part of why I'm not reacting to them the same way; if the Lord Darcy stories have the same shortcomings (at this point I'm afraid to go back and look), some of them would be less conspicuous in a cod-Victorian fantasy world than in a realistic present or a supposedly enlightened future.
Second attempt: How to Draw Stupid, and other essentials of cartooning by Kyle Baker, which also counts for the May prompt in the Buzzword challenge (title contains "to" or "too"). Since I was reading out of idle curiosity I don't have a strong opinion about whether it would actually be useful to someone seeking to become a cartoonist, but I was entertained.
#20: Read a book whose cover clashes with the cover of the previous book.
First attempt: K-PAX by Gene Brewer; the edition I had on hand has a vibrant purple cover that clashes with just about everything. My quickest DNF of the year to date: I lasted 20 pages. It was shaping up as one of those books where two sock-puppets talk at each other in a way that's supposed to end up imparting important life lessons; neither of the two participants in the dialogue felt like real people, and to the extent that they approached real personhood neither of them was a person I liked or wanted to spend more time with or expected to have any insights into life that were worth sticking around for.
(And then I took the rest of the week off fiction reading and binge-watched Natural Six instead.)