Book Chain, etc, Week 11
Mar. 15th, 2026 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
Devil in the Mountain: done. The pace picked up toward the end, which is perhaps less a statement about the book itself than about how I had enough grasp of the concepts by then that I wasn't having to keep pausing to process.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Having completed Bleak House, I have to admit that a section in the last quarter fully justifies its inclusion as a detective story, complete with murder, the suspect the police consider obvious but the audience knows didn't do it, the suspect the audience is given every reason to think did it short of actually showing the murder being done, and so on, all the way to the summation in the drawing-room. There's some impressive setting-up of things that will turn out to be important later. There's even a bit where the detective finishes a conversation and pauses on the way out the door to ask one last thing.
I enjoyed the rest of the novel, too, although some of the directions the "heroine is epically clueless about being in love" plot went were, to put it politely, a bit odd.
Miscellaneous
For no other reason than because I reached the front of the hold queue,
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.
A collection of essays with the conceit that Green is writing reviews of, and giving ratings out of five to, random things that it would be foolish to give ratings out of five to, such as "Viral Meningitis" and "The Lifespan of the Human Race". Most of the essays end up being about more than just the thing being reviewed and rated: The first essay, for instance, is nominally about the song "You'll Never Walk Alone", but also covers the history of the musical it originated in and also looks at the phenomenon of sports fans adopting club songs and Green's history with football club whose fans adopted this song in particular. Many of them, as the title suggests, end up having something to say about humanity's place in, and effect on, the world.
I'm enjoying the essays, and finding it a useful book on days when I want to keep my reading streak going but don't want to get involved in anything long and complicated.
Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor.
A university history department staffed by Loveable Eccentrics has access to time machines which they use for conducting first-hand historical research. In due course, there is Plot involving people who wish to use the time machines for more selfish purposes.
The Kobo store's recommended reading page has been trying to convince me for years to give this series a try, and up to now I've been resisting out of an ingrained suspicion of the kind of book that would describe itself as "madcap", a suspicion that wasn't assuaged by opening the book and being confronted with a page headed "Dramatis Thingummy".
The whole thing felt rather contrived, both the set-up -- the first-hand research department feels like it was constructed backward from the kind of story the author wanted to tell, and there's never a convincing explanation of how they're able to make use of their discoveries when they can't disclose how the discoveries were made -- and the characters, who all have Idiosyncratic Quirks but only sometimes felt to me like people. (I occasionally had to resort to the Dramatis Thingummy to keep track of who was who, which I usually manage to avoid.)
The fact that the humorous eccentrics' first-hand research includes things like "a week in the life of a field hospital in World War I", and in the course of the story some of the researchers wind up doing first-hand research into things like Being Stabbed Through The Head With A Cavalry Sabre and Being Eaten Alive By Dinosaurs (not to mention the non-research-related sexual assault), causes some difficulty as to the proper tone to strike, which I don't think the author successfully navigated. I may have been more favourably inclined if my sense of humour had turned out to have more overlap with hers, but I'm not sure that would have been enough to bridge the gap.
I admit that I did get into it in the run-up to the dramatic climax, which I was suitably engaged by, and the same for the second dramatic climax that, due to an oddity of the plot structure, followed several chapters later. However, the blatant sequel hook in the epilogue failed to find purchase, and I don't anticipate continuing with the series.
Devil in the Mountain: done. The pace picked up toward the end, which is perhaps less a statement about the book itself than about how I had enough grasp of the concepts by then that I wasn't having to keep pausing to process.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Having completed Bleak House, I have to admit that a section in the last quarter fully justifies its inclusion as a detective story, complete with murder, the suspect the police consider obvious but the audience knows didn't do it, the suspect the audience is given every reason to think did it short of actually showing the murder being done, and so on, all the way to the summation in the drawing-room. There's some impressive setting-up of things that will turn out to be important later. There's even a bit where the detective finishes a conversation and pauses on the way out the door to ask one last thing.
I enjoyed the rest of the novel, too, although some of the directions the "heroine is epically clueless about being in love" plot went were, to put it politely, a bit odd.
Miscellaneous
For no other reason than because I reached the front of the hold queue,
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.
A collection of essays with the conceit that Green is writing reviews of, and giving ratings out of five to, random things that it would be foolish to give ratings out of five to, such as "Viral Meningitis" and "The Lifespan of the Human Race". Most of the essays end up being about more than just the thing being reviewed and rated: The first essay, for instance, is nominally about the song "You'll Never Walk Alone", but also covers the history of the musical it originated in and also looks at the phenomenon of sports fans adopting club songs and Green's history with football club whose fans adopted this song in particular. Many of them, as the title suggests, end up having something to say about humanity's place in, and effect on, the world.
I'm enjoying the essays, and finding it a useful book on days when I want to keep my reading streak going but don't want to get involved in anything long and complicated.
Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor.
A university history department staffed by Loveable Eccentrics has access to time machines which they use for conducting first-hand historical research. In due course, there is Plot involving people who wish to use the time machines for more selfish purposes.
The Kobo store's recommended reading page has been trying to convince me for years to give this series a try, and up to now I've been resisting out of an ingrained suspicion of the kind of book that would describe itself as "madcap", a suspicion that wasn't assuaged by opening the book and being confronted with a page headed "Dramatis Thingummy".
The whole thing felt rather contrived, both the set-up -- the first-hand research department feels like it was constructed backward from the kind of story the author wanted to tell, and there's never a convincing explanation of how they're able to make use of their discoveries when they can't disclose how the discoveries were made -- and the characters, who all have Idiosyncratic Quirks but only sometimes felt to me like people. (I occasionally had to resort to the Dramatis Thingummy to keep track of who was who, which I usually manage to avoid.)
The fact that the humorous eccentrics' first-hand research includes things like "a week in the life of a field hospital in World War I", and in the course of the story some of the researchers wind up doing first-hand research into things like Being Stabbed Through The Head With A Cavalry Sabre and Being Eaten Alive By Dinosaurs (not to mention the non-research-related sexual assault), causes some difficulty as to the proper tone to strike, which I don't think the author successfully navigated. I may have been more favourably inclined if my sense of humour had turned out to have more overlap with hers, but I'm not sure that would have been enough to bridge the gap.
I admit that I did get into it in the run-up to the dramatic climax, which I was suitably engaged by, and the same for the second dramatic climax that, due to an oddity of the plot structure, followed several chapters later. However, the blatant sequel hook in the epilogue failed to find purchase, and I don't anticipate continuing with the series.
