pedanther

. 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.

1. I'm doing the monthly theme reading challenge again this year, and to shake things up I'm also doing another reading challenge for people who have all their unread books catalogued on something like StoryGraph or Goodreads, where each month there's a different method to randomly select one book from the list. I took one look at my randomly selected book for January and said, "Actually, I don't want to read that", so I decided it would still be in the spirit of the challenge to read the book next to it instead, which I've had on my shelf for years and keep forgetting about when I'm trying to decide what to read next. So now I've finally read Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddle-Master of Hed, which as a bonus I could also use for the monthly theme challenge, as January's theme was "begin a new series and/or a new author".

The Riddle-Master of Hed is very much a First Third of a Trilogy book, ending on a dramatic revelation without anything really being resolved. The second book is much the same, and it's only in book three that things finally come together. I'm not sure how I feel about the trilogy as a whole, now that I'm done with it; there's a part of me that wanted to immediately start reading it over from the beginning, so I could see all the foreshadowing now I know where the story goes, and there's another part of me that suspects I'm never going to read it again, because bits of it are quite unpleasant and there are so many other books I could be enjoying reading instead.


2. For February, the theme prompt was "A book by an author you love or a genre you love. Bonus if it is shorter for the shortest month of the year." I read A Fall of Stardust, a small collection of short pieces by Neil Gaiman that was published for charity. I'd read some of them before, but not the main piece, which was a prologue to a sequel to Stardust that Gaiman never got around to writing the rest of. It was interesting, but also very definitely a prologue and not a self-sufficient story.

My randomly-selected book for February was Soulless by Gail Carriger. I was intrigued by the premise, but I wasn't that keen on the execution, although I don't know if I'd have liked it more if I were more familiar with the genre conventions it's playing with. (On the gripping hand, I do at least know enough about Regency Romance to know there are reasons beyond the obvious why it's not usually set during the reign of Queen Victoria.) Also there was a plot device that the author had clearly appropriated from Jewish mythology and then reskinned to remove all its explicitly Jewish elements, which I wasn't happy about.


3. For March, I was able to repeat January's trick of getting a book out of the random selection that also fit the monthly theme. (Entirely above-board, this time, as the random selection method for March produced a shortlist of ten books and left the final selection to the reader.) The theme for March is "A historical or epic book, bonus if it is related to ancient Rome", and I am reading Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. I didn't know much about it before I started except for the much-quoted "brave Horatius" quatrain, and so far I suspect that not much of it is going to stick with me except for that.


4. I said when Kidnapped Weekly started that I thought I'd read Kidnapped before, because I remembered the initial set-up and had a clear memory of one particular scene. Now that we're done, I can confidently say that I haven't read the whole book before, because I didn't recognise anything except the initial set-up and that one scene, and even that one scene was unfamiliar in a way that suggests to me that I read a description of it rather than the scene itself. I enjoyed the novel, but I'm not sure whether reading it at one chapter a week did it any favours. (I'm going off the whole literary substack idea generally, I think; I've done so many in the last couple of years, and most of them unsurprisingly didn't work as well as Dracula Daily, so I'm finishing out the ones I've already started but I'm trying to avoid starting any new ones.)


5. I mentioned the last time I did one of these that I'd started playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown and that it had rapidly climbed into my top 10 most played games by hours played. I've since moved on to the sequel, XCOM 2, which is already up into the top 5.

Fiction books
Patricia A. McKillip. Harpist in the Wind (e)
Patricia A. McKillip. Heir of Sea and Fire (e)
Patricia A. McKillip. The Riddle-Master of Hed
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)
Arthur Upfield. The Devil's Steps (e)

In progress
Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (e)
Arthur Conan Doyle. A Study in Scarlet (e) (re-read)
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Catriona (e)

Picture books
Michael Dahl, Ethen Beavers. Bedtime for Batman
Oliver Jeffers. Begin Again

Non-fiction books
Neil Gaiman. Adventures in the Dream Trade (e)
Steve Lindstrom. CSS Refactoring (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Gail Carriger. Soulless

Fiction books
Aeschylus, tr. Robert Fagles. The Oresteia
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)

In progress
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Marvelous Land of Oz (e) (re-read)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)

Abandoned
Richard Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish (eight deadly words)

Non-fiction books
Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Salvage Right (e)

1. Shortly after I moved into this house, I noticed that one of the washing lines (there's a set of five, strung in parallel) was looking significantly frayed at the end and was probably going to give way sooner or later. Then I had a look at the other end and realised that each line is on a reel, so that if it breaks you just have to release the tensioner widget and pull some more line out, so I decided to not worry about it until it happened. Well, last week it happened (while I was in the middle of hanging out laundry -- who would have guessed that the time it snapped would be when it was having weight put on it?), so after the laundry had dried and been put away I set about figuring out how to operate the tensioner widget. It took some figuring out (by my count, I unscrewed at least three things that didn't need to be unscrewed at all), but in the end I had restrung the broken line, as well as a couple of others that were beginning to look frayed, and as a bonus had adjusted the tension on all the lines, and it felt like enough of an achievement that I wanted to record it somewhere.


2. At the Rep Club, our big musical for this year is 9 to 5, the musical of the film of the Dolly Parton song. (If you know the song, I'm playing the man from the line "I swear sometimes that man is out to get me".) It's going to be a lot of fun if it comes together; we're currently at the "four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse; three weeks, and it couldn't be worse" stage.


3. Speaking of musicals, the local high school that does a musical every year or two is currently doing The Wizard of Oz (the version that's adapted from the 1939 film). I'm not sure if it's the first musical production they've done since the lockdown, or if I've ignored some in the intervening time because I felt it was too soon to be sitting in a crowded auditorium for several hours, but anyway it's the first one of theirs I've been to since last time I mentioned I'd been to one. There was the usual range of talents on show for a student production, with Dorothy and Scarecrow being the strongest performers, and the kid who played both the Munchkin Coroner ("not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead") and the Winkie Captain standing out among the smaller roles. The guy playing the Wizard did pretty good characterisation, but wasn't so good on the vocal projection (and for some reason, even though all the main players were miked, nothing was done to make his voice more impressive when he was doing the Great and Powerful routine). Their version of the disappearing-reappearing ruby slippers wasn't as slick as the version in the last production I saw of this show, about a decade ago, but it was pretty good. I had a good time.

3a. One thing I used to enjoy doing at these shows, that I didn't get to do this time, was spot the cast members I knew from performances at the annual performing arts festival. The performing arts festival hasn't been held since the lockdown, and I suspect there isn't going to be another one any time soon, because the two most load-bearing members of the organising committee have separately become too occupied with other commitments.


4. I was on the fringes of the solar eclipse last month. Around the time when Exmouth was experiencing totality, I went out into the garden with a pinhole viewer and got a good look at the moon covering about half the sun -- but if you didn't know there was an eclipse on, and were just going about your day, you probably wouldn't have noticed anything. It was a bit less bright than you might expect for a cloudless midday, but that was all.


5. I mentioned back when Dracula Daily was finishing up that I was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to re-read Anno Dracula, Kim Newman's Dracula-meets-Jack-the-Ripper novel, while the details were still fresh, or if that would just lead to me spending a lot of time complaining about things Newman changed or got wrong. In the end, I decided instead to read The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's non-fiction book about what the standard Jack the Ripper myth doesn't tell you about his victims. I have a feeling that this means there are even more parts of Anno Dracula that would make me complain about things Newman changed or got wrong, but I think it was the right choice.

5a. Rapid-fire reading challenge update: November (a book with "ING" in the title) - Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson; December (a book with a number in the title) - The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; January (a book you wanted to read last year and didn't get to) - Deathless Gods by PC Hodgell; February (a book by an author you love) - The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman; March (a historical or epic book) - The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; April (a book about rain or weather) - Winds of Evil by Arthur Upfield; May (a book about emergencies, panics, or escapes) - the first couple of volumes of Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo.

Fiction books
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, tr. Archibald Colquhoun. The Leopard (e)
Arthur Upfield. Mr Jelly's Business (e)

In progress
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (e) (re-read)
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)
RA MacAvoy. The Grey Horse (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Glenn Fleishman. Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It (e)

In progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Hallie Rubenhold. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Arthur Upfield. Winds of Evil

Fiction books
Agatha Christie. Spider's Web
PC Hodgell. Deathless Gods (e)
William Shakespeare, ed. GR Hibbard. The Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (e) (re-read)
Arthur W Upfield. The Sands of Windee (e)
CN & AM Williamson. The Lightning Conductor (e)

In progress
Rachael Allen. Harley Quinn: Reckoning (e)
L Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (e) (re-read)
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Hallie Rubenhold. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Neil Gaiman, JH Williams III. The Sandman: Overture

Fiction books
Sulari Gentill. A Decline in Prophets
Sulari Gentill. A Few Right-Thinking Men (e)

In progress
Jane Austen. Persuasion (e) (re-read)
Bram Stoker. Dracula (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Madeleine St John. The Women in Black (e)

Fiction books
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Fair Trade (e)
Raymond Chandler. The Lady in the Lake (re-read)
Raymond Chandler. The Little Sister (e)
Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye (re-read)
Raymond Chandler. Playback

In progress
James A Michener. Tales of the South Pacific
Bram Stoker. Dracula (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Grahame Bond. Jack of All Trades, Mistress of One (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Timberlake Wertenbaker. Our Country's Good

Stats

List of Completed Fic

Like falling off a log, only perpendicular (Good Omens, G, 136 words) for believerindaydreams in a five-sentence prompting meme

You'd Swear The Dice Were Doing It On Purpose (Marvel Cinematic Universe, G, 62 words) for WingedFlight in the Three Sentence Ficathon

The Limericks of the Ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, G, 271 words) for leecetheartist

Total number: 3

Total word count: 469

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