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Five Things Make a Post
Mar. 10th, 2024 10:09 pm1. 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.
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.
