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Book Chain
Mar. 9th, 2025 06:54 pmThe Book Chain reading challenge is turning out to be quite motivating; I've already read two more books in the chain and started a third. I suppose it's because the set-up requires to one to start thinking about the next book one is going to read as soon as one has finished the previous book.
The third prompt in the challenge is to read a book where the title contains a noun or adjective that appears on page 50 of the previous book. The first adjective I found on that page was "light", so I read Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen.
Sister Light, Sister Dark is the first half of a duology about a young woman with a long-prophesied world-shaking Destiny, although at the beginning of the book it's unclear what that destiny actually entails, because the ancient prophecy follows the traditional strategy of being impossible to understand until it's too late to dodge. At the end of the book, it's still pretty unclear, partly because things are only just beginning to really kick off but also partly because, in my view, the book does a less-than-stellar job of explaining what's going on in the world that might be shaken by a world-shaking Destiny. We get a very clear portrait of the isolated community the protagonist grows up in, and a few slightly-less-isolated neighbouring communities she visits over the course of the story, but the wider world remains foggy: somewhere away in the distance there's a king, and some guy trying to usurp the throne, but it's never really explained what the political situation is or what difference it makes to most of the people the story is actually about.
There's some interesting worldbuilding, including the titular light and dark sisters, who give an effectively otherworldly tone to the parts of the story where they feature. I was disappointed, though, by how much they felt like set dressing and didn't affect the (fundamentally rather familiar-feeling) plot. My reservations are probably addressed in the second half of the duology, but I find that I'm not in any hurry to find out.
One of the features of the book is that it's interspersed with legends and scholarly articles from later centuries, showing how the key events of the protagonist's life left their mark on posterity. The first few piqued my interest, but in the aggregate I felt that they rather weighed the story down, and although I got some wry humour from the scholars' biased misrepresentations of the past (including the repeated insistence on interpreting what the reader knows to be genuine supernatural events as metaphors or later inventions), I found that the accumulation of them had the effect of making me less invested in how things turn out: how important can the details of the protagonist's life really be, when posterity will forget most of it, misunderstand the rest, and believe none of it?
The fourth prompt is to read a book at least five years older than the third book. I read a Biggles novel I happened to have lying around, Biggles Forms a Syndicate. It's pretty slight, even compared to other Biggles books I've read; in particular, the nominal villain barely achieves anything in a plot where the environmental hazards are the real driver of the drama. But it passed a couple of hours and was an effective palate cleanser.
The fifth prompt is to read a book where the author's name on the cover is the same colour as on the fourth book. I've made a start on The Rout of the Ollafubs by K.G. Lethbridge, a collection of interlinked fantasy stories which share a setting and a recurring cast but each story has a different central character and a different style. I know I read through it once when I was much younger, but I seem to recall that I skimmed over the bits I was bored or confused by, and I'm interested to see how different it hits me at my current age.
The third prompt in the challenge is to read a book where the title contains a noun or adjective that appears on page 50 of the previous book. The first adjective I found on that page was "light", so I read Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen.
Sister Light, Sister Dark is the first half of a duology about a young woman with a long-prophesied world-shaking Destiny, although at the beginning of the book it's unclear what that destiny actually entails, because the ancient prophecy follows the traditional strategy of being impossible to understand until it's too late to dodge. At the end of the book, it's still pretty unclear, partly because things are only just beginning to really kick off but also partly because, in my view, the book does a less-than-stellar job of explaining what's going on in the world that might be shaken by a world-shaking Destiny. We get a very clear portrait of the isolated community the protagonist grows up in, and a few slightly-less-isolated neighbouring communities she visits over the course of the story, but the wider world remains foggy: somewhere away in the distance there's a king, and some guy trying to usurp the throne, but it's never really explained what the political situation is or what difference it makes to most of the people the story is actually about.
There's some interesting worldbuilding, including the titular light and dark sisters, who give an effectively otherworldly tone to the parts of the story where they feature. I was disappointed, though, by how much they felt like set dressing and didn't affect the (fundamentally rather familiar-feeling) plot. My reservations are probably addressed in the second half of the duology, but I find that I'm not in any hurry to find out.
One of the features of the book is that it's interspersed with legends and scholarly articles from later centuries, showing how the key events of the protagonist's life left their mark on posterity. The first few piqued my interest, but in the aggregate I felt that they rather weighed the story down, and although I got some wry humour from the scholars' biased misrepresentations of the past (including the repeated insistence on interpreting what the reader knows to be genuine supernatural events as metaphors or later inventions), I found that the accumulation of them had the effect of making me less invested in how things turn out: how important can the details of the protagonist's life really be, when posterity will forget most of it, misunderstand the rest, and believe none of it?
The fourth prompt is to read a book at least five years older than the third book. I read a Biggles novel I happened to have lying around, Biggles Forms a Syndicate. It's pretty slight, even compared to other Biggles books I've read; in particular, the nominal villain barely achieves anything in a plot where the environmental hazards are the real driver of the drama. But it passed a couple of hours and was an effective palate cleanser.
The fifth prompt is to read a book where the author's name on the cover is the same colour as on the fourth book. I've made a start on The Rout of the Ollafubs by K.G. Lethbridge, a collection of interlinked fantasy stories which share a setting and a recurring cast but each story has a different central character and a different style. I know I read through it once when I was much younger, but I seem to recall that I skimmed over the bits I was bored or confused by, and I'm interested to see how different it hits me at my current age.
