March books

1. Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams (audio)


2. The Antelope Strategy, +Jean Harzfeld (Rwanda) (paper)
   The author is actually French, but he was in the list for Rwanda, so here we are. The book is a series of topically-organized interviews and recollections from both survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, and it's been very difficult to read. I've only been able to read a few pages at a time, and I've needed long breaks between. I have "Adventures of Tintin" waiting as a unicorn chaser.


3. +The Adventures of Tintin, Herge (Belgium) (paper)
   Or not. Abandoned after five pages or so. Ludicrous plots, and then a ton of casual racism. No thanks.


4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, +JK Rowling (United Kingdom) (audio, reread)
   I didn't read this for my Reading the World challenge: it didn't come up in my random number generator, but Rowling really is on the list, so I guess it counts. Sort of.


5. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, +JK Rowling (United Kingdom) (audio, reread)


6. +Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk (Poland) (paper)
   I struggled with this one too. It was a series of semi-connected vignettes with a first-person narrator, but there was no real connecting thread or plot. Just a lot of long-winded description and setting details, an occasional character who never really had any agency and only existed for her (...most of them were female) influence on the narrator's inner life. I would have abandoned it out of boredom but decided to struggle through since at least it wasn't actively offensive and I've abandoned several of the Reading the World books already this year.


7. +The Discovery of Heaven, Harry Mulisch (Netherlands) (paper)
   Yet another struggle. 800 pages long, the first 600 were lethally boring tales of the tawdry affairs and boring daily life of several people, then 150 pages of actual interesting, then 20 pages of seriously weird (but at least interesting). It took 400 pages for the person who drives the plot in the last section to even be born! The book has a framing structure of angels in heaven discussing their plans to get him born, therefore to engineer the meeting of his parents, etc, and ends with a conversation between those same angels basically saying the Earth is now doomed, after their plot has succeeded.

At least my audio books are interesting. Currently listening to _Indexing: Reflections_ by Seanan McGuire.