Fiction log - September 2020

Fiction books
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 2 (re-read)
Martha Wells. Artificial Condition (e)

In progress
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 3 (re-read)
Roger Zelazny. A Night in the Lonesome October (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Karen Armstrong. A Short History of Myth (e)

( short, screen, and stage )

( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
P Djeli Clark. A Dead Djinn in Cairo

Four Things About Reading Make a Post

. The wait time for the library system's copy of the second Murderbot Diaries book turned out to be three weeks instead of the estimated two-three months, which I suppose makes sense since the estimate is probably based on assuming people will have the book for the full loan period but it's quite a short book and I, for instance, had it back to the library within a few days.

Reading these is an interesting experience: normally I really don't enjoy stories where a likeable character is stuck in socially awkward situations, and Murderbot is getting stuck in socially awkward situations all the time, but -- it's like, you know how in a series where the protagonist is being put in physical peril all the time, no matter how bad it gets in a given moment you can take comfort from knowing that the author's not going to go too far? In this series, arguably Murderbot's emotional stress has at least as much dramatic weight as the physical peril, and to me it feels like it comes with the same kind of implicit promise that no matter how bad it is in the moment, it's never going to be too much.


. I don't usually start reading long fanfics until they're complete, because I don't like worrying about the possibility of being left hanging if the story is never finished (note scribbled in margin: also why never watch TV now? hmmm), but after I devoured Like Fire in Our Bones, I wanted to see what happened next so much that I started reading the sequel immediately even though it's still in progress. So far, that's paid off; new chapters are being published often, and the story is still great. It does, however, mean that the story and its characters are continuing to take up space in the part of my brain that holds information about my ongoing reading, which may be why I haven't attempted anything else this month that couldn't be read in a single sitting.


. Another thing taking up space in the mental filing cabinet of ongoing reading is Batman: The Adventures Continue, the latest comic book series spun off from Batman: The Animated Series. It's okay.


. On the plus side, possibly because the mental filing cabinet is currently optimised for serial fiction, this is the first year in ages when I've felt up to doing Lonesome October again. I always think about it, but most years lately I've felt like I was too busy or didn't have the spare mental or emotional capacity or whatever.

It works like this: Roger Zelazny's novel A Night in the Lonesome October has been described as an advent calendar for Halloween: apart from the prologue, it has 31 chapters, each set on the corresponding day in October, and readers are encouraged to space it out and read each chapter on the appropriate day. The story itself is a cheerfully macabre tale involving vampires, werewolves, indescribable Things, and other such seasonal delights. (As well as a guest appearance by an unnamed famous detective who might well be Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, because if you're already including every other famous character from the black-and-white Universal Studios movies of the 1930s and 1940s, why not?)