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Book Chain, etc, Week 10
Mar. 8th, 2026 11:28 am#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
Still making slow progress on Devil in the Mountain. Geology has not been a particular interest of mine, so there are a lot of new concepts to take on board.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book one of your friends gave 4 stars out of 5
After a long pause, I decided to finish off The Amateur Cracksman, in order to check off the challenge prompt and perhaps with some slight hope that the finale would improve my opinion of it.
It is finished. The finale did not improve my opinion. I decidedly do not like Raffles, who is a bad man and a bad friend and not even that good a criminal; I don't really like Bunny, either, but I feel sorry for him, which doesn't help matters.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Attempt two: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. A large and interwoven cast and a complicated mystery involving several mysterious deaths, an orphan with an unknowingly significant parentage, etc.
It's going much better than Mythos was; after three days I'm already over 500 pages in.
One of the reasons I picked it is that it's also the earliest novel on the Haycraft List of Detective Story Cornerstones, which (from my current viewpoint) is a bit puzzling. It certainly involves the unravelling of a mystery, but it's short on detectives: one shows up about a third of the way in, does barely anything in a few scenes, and then disappears and (so far) has not been heard from again. Mind you, during his brief time in the spotlight he does manage to find the time to fit in a dramatic revelation that an innocent bystander was him in disguise, so I suppose one can see a family resemblance to certain later examples of the breed.
Still making slow progress on Devil in the Mountain. Geology has not been a particular interest of mine, so there are a lot of new concepts to take on board.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book one of your friends gave 4 stars out of 5
After a long pause, I decided to finish off The Amateur Cracksman, in order to check off the challenge prompt and perhaps with some slight hope that the finale would improve my opinion of it.
It is finished. The finale did not improve my opinion. I decidedly do not like Raffles, who is a bad man and a bad friend and not even that good a criminal; I don't really like Bunny, either, but I feel sorry for him, which doesn't help matters.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Attempt two: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. A large and interwoven cast and a complicated mystery involving several mysterious deaths, an orphan with an unknowingly significant parentage, etc.
It's going much better than Mythos was; after three days I'm already over 500 pages in.
One of the reasons I picked it is that it's also the earliest novel on the Haycraft List of Detective Story Cornerstones, which (from my current viewpoint) is a bit puzzling. It certainly involves the unravelling of a mystery, but it's short on detectives: one shows up about a third of the way in, does barely anything in a few scenes, and then disappears and (so far) has not been heard from again. Mind you, during his brief time in the spotlight he does manage to find the time to fit in a dramatic revelation that an innocent bystander was him in disguise, so I suppose one can see a family resemblance to certain later examples of the breed.
