pedanther

. After I graduated from university, I took a job in a field that vaguely interested me in order to put some money away while I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life. It's a bit worrying that I'm now going on long service leave from the same job and I still haven't figured out what I really want to do.

On the bright side, long service leave is long service leave.


. For June, the themed reading challenge offered a choice of "a book about the ocean, maritime life, coasts, or something sea-related; bonus if it’s also fishy in some way" or "a book about things/people/places/galaxies being fixed and/or broken". For my official selection, I ultimately settled on Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee (a book about people and galaxies being fixed and broken, not necessarily in that order), but before that I'd also considered trying to satisfy the first theme with several books that kinda-sorta fit, like Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (a significant chunk features the ocean, maritime life, coasts, etc., and the justifying science is definitely fishy).


. For July, the theme was much broader: a book obtained second-hand, bought from an independent bookshop, or borrowed from the library. I had plenty of choices, I just needed to decide whether I wanted to hold myself to the July book being one that I read after the June book. While I was thinking about it, I spotted Arthur Upfield's An Author Bites the Dust on the to-read shelf and spontaneously decided to read it, and since it's a book I obtained second-hand from a library sale it's eminently suitable for the theme.


. The random book selection for July came from "books in the genres of Feminism and Science Fiction". It turns out I have no books in my TBR that have both genre labels, which isn't a reflection of its contents (if nothing else, I know there's Humble Bundle of Nebula winners in there that includes several classics of feminist SF), but rather a reflection of the fact that StoryGraph treats "Feminism" as a non-fiction subject label and doesn't apply it to fiction works. I tried again with the subset of my TBR that was labelled "Feminism" or "Science Fiction", and came up with short story collection I didn't like the look of, but the book next to it was The Female Man, from the aforementioned Humble Bundle, so I'm going to go with that instead.


. Part of the reason I'm running a month behind on the monthly reading challenges is that I've been buddy-reading a chunky omnibus of "Classic Tales of Science Fiction", which meant I had to read that at a pace which matched my reading buddy and fit any other reading in around it. That's "have been" and "had to", past tense, because my reading buddy has hit their limit on old-timey sexism and racism and decided that if this is the best the past can do, the past can keep it, and has gone off to read something else more recent and more enjoyable instead. I'm going to keep plugging away at the omnibus, because I don't like leaving a book unfinished and in my unwise youth I acquired a tolerance for old-timey bullshit and there are a few things in there that I do genuinely want to read at least once, but since it's just me now I'm going to be doing it at my own pace and reading other things in between.