Book Chain, etc, Week 23
Jun. 7th, 2026 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther#24: A book whose author comes after the previous book's author alphabetically
How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev. A look at the use of propaganda by and against the Nazis in the 1930s and '40s, with a focus on the career of British propagandist Sefton Delmer, and on what lessons can be learned about the use of propaganda in the present day.
The ebook does something I haven't seen before in an ebook: instead of having all the footnotes grouped at the end, the footnotes for each chapter are grouped at the end of the chapter. An advantage of doing it this way is that the progress indicator is closer to being a reliable guide to how far through the book you actually are: I've read non-fiction ebooks with lots of notes where the main text ended and the endnotes began before the progress indicator reached 75% complete, and even one where the end of the main text ambushed me at 50%.
June: One word title
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
I wrote a while back about having trouble getting into Project Hail Mary because the protagonist spends the first part of the novel alone and amnesic, with no other characters to interact with in either the present or the past; Piranesi posed a similar challenge, and similarly I only really warmed up to it once there were multiple characters in play. It also didn't help that I found the central mystery a lot more obvious than the blurb makes out; the general outlines, if not the details, are clear to the reader very early on (although the protagonist, lacking vital information, takes a lot longer to put the pieces together).
And I had issues with the narrative structure: it's told as extracts from the protagonist's journal, and there are good reasons why that's probably the best way it could have been done, but it did mean that there are a few places where the protagonist is having huge emotional revelations and either continuing to write through them or coming back later to carefully write down all the details.
#25: A book whose cover clashes with the previous book's cover
I don't really know what this would mean, so I've been just randomly picking up whatever book catches my eye.
I read the opening section of Accelerando by Charles Stross, which vividly reminded me why I stopped reading Charles Stross.
Now I'm a couple of stories into Bookburners, a shared-world urban fantasy anthology. I'm coming to it with a certain amount of suspicion: I've tried two of this publisher's other anthologies, gave up on one partway through, and though I made it to the end of the other I didn't feel rewarded for my persistence. This one is about a secret Vatican taskforce with the job of tracking down and securing rogue magic books before they do too much damage, which I've seen done before, near enough, and wasn't especially keen to see again. I'm also in the mood to be mildly annoyed by the empty provocation of the book's title: the team get called "Bookburners" as a derogatory nickname by someone in the criminal magic book underground, but they don't destroy the books they confiscate (and in fact it's a plot point that the really dangerous magic books can't be destroyed).
But it'll do until something I actually want to read comes along.
How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev. A look at the use of propaganda by and against the Nazis in the 1930s and '40s, with a focus on the career of British propagandist Sefton Delmer, and on what lessons can be learned about the use of propaganda in the present day.
The ebook does something I haven't seen before in an ebook: instead of having all the footnotes grouped at the end, the footnotes for each chapter are grouped at the end of the chapter. An advantage of doing it this way is that the progress indicator is closer to being a reliable guide to how far through the book you actually are: I've read non-fiction ebooks with lots of notes where the main text ended and the endnotes began before the progress indicator reached 75% complete, and even one where the end of the main text ambushed me at 50%.
June: One word title
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
I wrote a while back about having trouble getting into Project Hail Mary because the protagonist spends the first part of the novel alone and amnesic, with no other characters to interact with in either the present or the past; Piranesi posed a similar challenge, and similarly I only really warmed up to it once there were multiple characters in play. It also didn't help that I found the central mystery a lot more obvious than the blurb makes out; the general outlines, if not the details, are clear to the reader very early on (although the protagonist, lacking vital information, takes a lot longer to put the pieces together).
And I had issues with the narrative structure: it's told as extracts from the protagonist's journal, and there are good reasons why that's probably the best way it could have been done, but it did mean that there are a few places where the protagonist is having huge emotional revelations and either continuing to write through them or coming back later to carefully write down all the details.
#25: A book whose cover clashes with the previous book's cover
I don't really know what this would mean, so I've been just randomly picking up whatever book catches my eye.
I read the opening section of Accelerando by Charles Stross, which vividly reminded me why I stopped reading Charles Stross.
Now I'm a couple of stories into Bookburners, a shared-world urban fantasy anthology. I'm coming to it with a certain amount of suspicion: I've tried two of this publisher's other anthologies, gave up on one partway through, and though I made it to the end of the other I didn't feel rewarded for my persistence. This one is about a secret Vatican taskforce with the job of tracking down and securing rogue magic books before they do too much damage, which I've seen done before, near enough, and wasn't especially keen to see again. I'm also in the mood to be mildly annoyed by the empty provocation of the book's title: the team get called "Bookburners" as a derogatory nickname by someone in the criminal magic book underground, but they don't destroy the books they confiscate (and in fact it's a plot point that the really dangerous magic books can't be destroyed).
But it'll do until something I actually want to read comes along.
