Book Chain, weeks 25, 26 & 27
Sep. 14th, 2025 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther#26: If the previous book had an odd number of pages, read a book with an even number of pages, or vice versa.
Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler, which also fit the criterion for the March random book challenge, a book over 500 pages. (It wasn’t strictly selected at random, but it was selected arbitrarily, and I tend to allow myself some latitude with the random book challenge on the basis that it’s more about getting a book read than about getting a specific book read.)
A non-fiction account of the rise and fall of Constantinople (and the echoes of it that remain in the modern world). Interesting, but it took a few weeks to get through.
#27: If the text on the previous book’s cover was blue, read a book with orange text on the cover.
Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre by Tom Scioli: in which a certain giant fire-breathing reptile stomps out of the bay and sets fire to Jay Gatsby’s mansion as the opener to a series of battles with famous public-domain characters and historical figures. Very strong “kid invents a story on the fly by pulling action figures out of the toybox until it’s empty” energy. Races through set-pieces and shout-outs at a breathless pace that doesn’t leave time for rounded characters or thoughtful re-contextualisation: there are a lot of bits where quotations are reused in new contexts, but it’s on the level of Nick Carraway narrating “So we beat on, boats against the current” as Gatsby’s motor launch struggles against the waves of Godzilla’s wake, or Sherlock Holmes declaring “The game is afoot” as he examines Godzilla’s gigantic footprint with a magnifying glass.
#28: Read a book with a higher rating on StoryGraph than the previous book.
It’s been a while since I progressed my read-through of the Bony novels, so I read The New Shoe, the next in the series. I found it somewhat unsatisfactory in both the detection (which relies a bit too much on key information falling into Bony’s lap, as Bony himself comments at one point) and the conclusion (in which the characters whose fate I was most interested weren’t the ones the author was interested in).
Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler, which also fit the criterion for the March random book challenge, a book over 500 pages. (It wasn’t strictly selected at random, but it was selected arbitrarily, and I tend to allow myself some latitude with the random book challenge on the basis that it’s more about getting a book read than about getting a specific book read.)
A non-fiction account of the rise and fall of Constantinople (and the echoes of it that remain in the modern world). Interesting, but it took a few weeks to get through.
#27: If the text on the previous book’s cover was blue, read a book with orange text on the cover.
Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre by Tom Scioli: in which a certain giant fire-breathing reptile stomps out of the bay and sets fire to Jay Gatsby’s mansion as the opener to a series of battles with famous public-domain characters and historical figures. Very strong “kid invents a story on the fly by pulling action figures out of the toybox until it’s empty” energy. Races through set-pieces and shout-outs at a breathless pace that doesn’t leave time for rounded characters or thoughtful re-contextualisation: there are a lot of bits where quotations are reused in new contexts, but it’s on the level of Nick Carraway narrating “So we beat on, boats against the current” as Gatsby’s motor launch struggles against the waves of Godzilla’s wake, or Sherlock Holmes declaring “The game is afoot” as he examines Godzilla’s gigantic footprint with a magnifying glass.
#28: Read a book with a higher rating on StoryGraph than the previous book.
It’s been a while since I progressed my read-through of the Bony novels, so I read The New Shoe, the next in the series. I found it somewhat unsatisfactory in both the detection (which relies a bit too much on key information falling into Bony’s lap, as Bony himself comments at one point) and the conclusion (in which the characters whose fate I was most interested weren’t the ones the author was interested in).
