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Book Chain, weeks 8 & 9
May. 11th, 2025 02:46 pm#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.
I had a couple of false starts, including The Third Policeman, a work of dark absurdist comedy that I found too dark and not detectably comedic, and lost patience with before it even got to the first policeman. (Afterward, I was moved to re-read An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest to confirm that my sense of humour wasn't broken.)
The book I ended up finishing was also my book for May in the Random Book Challenge; the instruction was to sort my TBR by 'Earliest Added' and pick one of the first five books listed. In my case, that didn't actually mean the books that have been waiting longest for me to read them, because when I started keeping a TBR on StoryGraph I first added the books that were on my ebook reader at the time before I went to the physical bookshelves.
Anyhow, the book I selected was A Hangman for Ghosts by Andrei Baltakmens, a murder mystery set in Australia during the convict period. It's an interesting one; the detective character is a convict with a hidden past, so the story's unfolding the mystery of him alongside the mystery of the murder, which he investigates for a variety of reasons - none of which are precisely to see law and order preserved, so neither he nor the audience is sure what he'll do when he does track the murderer down.
#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.
The flip side of the "didn't look at the next prompt" coin: the cover of A Hangman for Ghosts featured a noose and not really anything else. I don't think I have anything else in the TBR with a noose on the cover.
I went to the local library to see what they had, and after confirming that their copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None isn't one of the editions with a noose on it, and failing to locate their copy of Meg Caddy's Slipping the Noose (it turns out the library has shelved it in the Junior Fiction section, despite the subject matter and the publisher putting it solidly in Young Adult), I borrowed a non-fiction book of True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows.
I had a couple of false starts, including The Third Policeman, a work of dark absurdist comedy that I found too dark and not detectably comedic, and lost patience with before it even got to the first policeman. (Afterward, I was moved to re-read An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest to confirm that my sense of humour wasn't broken.)
The book I ended up finishing was also my book for May in the Random Book Challenge; the instruction was to sort my TBR by 'Earliest Added' and pick one of the first five books listed. In my case, that didn't actually mean the books that have been waiting longest for me to read them, because when I started keeping a TBR on StoryGraph I first added the books that were on my ebook reader at the time before I went to the physical bookshelves.
Anyhow, the book I selected was A Hangman for Ghosts by Andrei Baltakmens, a murder mystery set in Australia during the convict period. It's an interesting one; the detective character is a convict with a hidden past, so the story's unfolding the mystery of him alongside the mystery of the murder, which he investigates for a variety of reasons - none of which are precisely to see law and order preserved, so neither he nor the audience is sure what he'll do when he does track the murderer down.
#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.
The flip side of the "didn't look at the next prompt" coin: the cover of A Hangman for Ghosts featured a noose and not really anything else. I don't think I have anything else in the TBR with a noose on the cover.
I went to the local library to see what they had, and after confirming that their copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None isn't one of the editions with a noose on it, and failing to locate their copy of Meg Caddy's Slipping the Noose (it turns out the library has shelved it in the Junior Fiction section, despite the subject matter and the publisher putting it solidly in Young Adult), I borrowed a non-fiction book of True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows.
