One thing I have achieved with all this free time is catching up on my reading
. For the July random book challenge (a book in the genres of Feminism and/or Science Fiction), I'd selected The Female Man, but then proceeded to spend a fortnight not reading it. Then I saw that the local library now has all three volumes of Claire North's Ithaca trilogy, which retells the end of the Odyssey (as well as the fates of Clytemnestra and Helen) from the viewpoint of the women involved, so I read that instead.
. The themed book challenge for August was "a book that has something to do with schools or education"; I read Down with Skool!, a book from the 1950s that purports to be an account of school life written by a schoolboy named Nigel Molesworth, he of the famously individualistic approach to spelling and punctuation. It used to be highly regarded, but although I got a few laughs out of it I suspect it works best for people who have themselves survived the kind of school being described and aren't standing at a distance going, "Wow, people just used to do that, huh?"
. The random book selection for August came from books labelled Medium- or Fast-paced. My selection was The Tesladyne Industries Field Guide, a tie-in to the Atomic Robo comic book series, containing essays on such useful topics as What to Do If You Meet Your Evil Twin, The Best Ways of Fighting Genetically-Engineered Dinosaurs, a separate essay on one specific dinosaur who's a recurring character in the comic and an exception to all the usual rules, and Time Travel Is Impossible But Even If It Isn't Here's Why You Shouldn't Do It. "If you really want to change the present, the best time to act is now."
. The themed book challenge for September was "a book with a one-word title or a collection of short stories"; I read He Do the Time Police in Different Voices, a collection of parodies and pastiches by David Langford. It's a mixed bag; the works collected were written over a span of more than three decades, and many of the earlier ones haven't aged well at all. The later works are better, and it ends on a high note with a story in which a detective who definitely isn't Nero Wolfe solves a series of murders that may or may not have been done with the Evil Eye, but I wasn't sad to be seeing the last of it.
. The instructions for the September random book selection are to sort the to-be-read list Z-A by author, and then read one of the first five books on the list. This turned out to produce several dilemmas on the subject of how literally to take the instructions; for one thing, the first three books on the resulting list were by authors who the system had decided came after Z in the alphabet (one was by a Lebanese author and had been sorted on her name in Arabic, and the other two were by de Lint, Charles). Then three of the next five were sequels I'm not up to yet, and four of those five had been sorted by an illustrator, Michael Zulli, but strictly speaking the actual author of the four is Neil Gaiman. I haven't decided which book I'm going to read yet, but I currently suspect I'm going to keep discovering technicalities until I can justify reading Timothy Zahn's Cobra.
. The themed book challenge for August was "a book that has something to do with schools or education"; I read Down with Skool!, a book from the 1950s that purports to be an account of school life written by a schoolboy named Nigel Molesworth, he of the famously individualistic approach to spelling and punctuation. It used to be highly regarded, but although I got a few laughs out of it I suspect it works best for people who have themselves survived the kind of school being described and aren't standing at a distance going, "Wow, people just used to do that, huh?"
. The random book selection for August came from books labelled Medium- or Fast-paced. My selection was The Tesladyne Industries Field Guide, a tie-in to the Atomic Robo comic book series, containing essays on such useful topics as What to Do If You Meet Your Evil Twin, The Best Ways of Fighting Genetically-Engineered Dinosaurs, a separate essay on one specific dinosaur who's a recurring character in the comic and an exception to all the usual rules, and Time Travel Is Impossible But Even If It Isn't Here's Why You Shouldn't Do It. "If you really want to change the present, the best time to act is now."
. The themed book challenge for September was "a book with a one-word title or a collection of short stories"; I read He Do the Time Police in Different Voices, a collection of parodies and pastiches by David Langford. It's a mixed bag; the works collected were written over a span of more than three decades, and many of the earlier ones haven't aged well at all. The later works are better, and it ends on a high note with a story in which a detective who definitely isn't Nero Wolfe solves a series of murders that may or may not have been done with the Evil Eye, but I wasn't sad to be seeing the last of it.
. The instructions for the September random book selection are to sort the to-be-read list Z-A by author, and then read one of the first five books on the list. This turned out to produce several dilemmas on the subject of how literally to take the instructions; for one thing, the first three books on the resulting list were by authors who the system had decided came after Z in the alphabet (one was by a Lebanese author and had been sorted on her name in Arabic, and the other two were by de Lint, Charles). Then three of the next five were sequels I'm not up to yet, and four of those five had been sorted by an illustrator, Michael Zulli, but strictly speaking the actual author of the four is Neil Gaiman. I haven't decided which book I'm going to read yet, but I currently suspect I'm going to keep discovering technicalities until I can justify reading Timothy Zahn's Cobra.