Book Chain 2026: Weeks 1 & 2
Jan. 11th, 2026 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherOn reflection, I decided that, since the point of doing this challenge is to get reading done, I would treat the first prompt as a free space and proceed from there. If it should happen that I encounter a book I'm properly excited about the prospect of reading, I'll start a new chain from there.
#1:A book that you're excited to read!
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.
Ella Minnow Pea is an ordinary young woman living on the island nation of Nollop, where life takes a turn when the ruling council starts progressively banning letters of the alphabet (first Z, then Q, and so on) and imposing draconian punishments on anybody caught using, or possessing in written form, any word containing the forbidden letters. The story is told in letters and documents, which become increasingly constrained as the proscriptions continue.
The book combines whimsical wordplay with explorations of the human effects of censorship and tyranny, which is a challenging balance and one that I'm not entirely persuaded it pulls off. The way Ella eventually wins over a majority of the council and persuades them to abandon the proscriptions is appropriate to a story of whimsical wordplay, but the depiction of the increasingly-repressive government was realistic enough that I wasn't convinced by how easily they accepted defeat.
(I might also have found it somewhat anticlimactic because I've dabbled in the relevant kind of wordplay enough that I immediately recognised the key to the resistance's ultimate victory as soon as it appeared, long before any of the characters realised its significance.)
#2: A book where the first letter of the title matches the last letter of the previous title
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll with annotations by Martin Gardner.
The complete text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with extensive annotations providing historical context, Oxfordian in-jokes, the original texts of poems being parodied, and other useful details. I read one of the earlier editions when I was at university and liked it enough to pick up a copy for myself later on, which I then didn't bother to read because I assumed I already knew more or less what was in it. This turns out to have been short-sighted: the Definitive Edition, published nearly thirty years after the original, has many more annotations and a new appendix covering the rediscovery of an additional scene that was excised from Through the Looking-Glass before publication and believed lost for nearly a century.
(The Definitive Edition is itself no longer definitive, having been succeeded in 2015 by the "Deluxe Edition", although that was completed by other hands following Gardner's death.)
It's also been a fair while since I last read Alice's adventures in any form; they're still just as entertaining, and there were some fun bits I'd forgotten about.
#3: A book in a different genre than the previous book
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.
I decided to mark the occasion of The Maltese Falcon hitting the US public domain by finally getting around to reading some Hammett, but to start with the Hammett I already had on my shelf. A private investigator is hired to travel to a town in the grip of gangsters, and arrives to find that his client has been murdered, after which he takes matters into his own hands.
Full of sound and fury, but I'm not sure how much it adds up to in the end. The narrative voice is engaging, but I don't much like the character it's attached to. (When Raymond Chandler wrote his famous description of the detective hero as a man who walks mean streets without himself becoming mean, he wasn't talking about this guy.) I think we're supposed to be impressed by how he outwits his opponents, but most of them are so poorly armed for a battle of wits that it's not a fair fight; and there's so much of the regular kind of fighting that the mystery and deduction parts sometimes feel like they've strayed in from a different story.
#1:
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.
Ella Minnow Pea is an ordinary young woman living on the island nation of Nollop, where life takes a turn when the ruling council starts progressively banning letters of the alphabet (first Z, then Q, and so on) and imposing draconian punishments on anybody caught using, or possessing in written form, any word containing the forbidden letters. The story is told in letters and documents, which become increasingly constrained as the proscriptions continue.
The book combines whimsical wordplay with explorations of the human effects of censorship and tyranny, which is a challenging balance and one that I'm not entirely persuaded it pulls off. The way Ella eventually wins over a majority of the council and persuades them to abandon the proscriptions is appropriate to a story of whimsical wordplay, but the depiction of the increasingly-repressive government was realistic enough that I wasn't convinced by how easily they accepted defeat.
(I might also have found it somewhat anticlimactic because I've dabbled in the relevant kind of wordplay enough that I immediately recognised the key to the resistance's ultimate victory as soon as it appeared, long before any of the characters realised its significance.)
#2: A book where the first letter of the title matches the last letter of the previous title
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll with annotations by Martin Gardner.
The complete text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with extensive annotations providing historical context, Oxfordian in-jokes, the original texts of poems being parodied, and other useful details. I read one of the earlier editions when I was at university and liked it enough to pick up a copy for myself later on, which I then didn't bother to read because I assumed I already knew more or less what was in it. This turns out to have been short-sighted: the Definitive Edition, published nearly thirty years after the original, has many more annotations and a new appendix covering the rediscovery of an additional scene that was excised from Through the Looking-Glass before publication and believed lost for nearly a century.
(The Definitive Edition is itself no longer definitive, having been succeeded in 2015 by the "Deluxe Edition", although that was completed by other hands following Gardner's death.)
It's also been a fair while since I last read Alice's adventures in any form; they're still just as entertaining, and there were some fun bits I'd forgotten about.
#3: A book in a different genre than the previous book
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.
I decided to mark the occasion of The Maltese Falcon hitting the US public domain by finally getting around to reading some Hammett, but to start with the Hammett I already had on my shelf. A private investigator is hired to travel to a town in the grip of gangsters, and arrives to find that his client has been murdered, after which he takes matters into his own hands.
Full of sound and fury, but I'm not sure how much it adds up to in the end. The narrative voice is engaging, but I don't much like the character it's attached to. (When Raymond Chandler wrote his famous description of the detective hero as a man who walks mean streets without himself becoming mean, he wasn't talking about this guy.) I think we're supposed to be impressed by how he outwits his opponents, but most of them are so poorly armed for a battle of wits that it's not a fair fight; and there's so much of the regular kind of fighting that the mystery and deduction parts sometimes feel like they've strayed in from a different story.
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Date: 2026-01-11 02:17 am (UTC)