Menage à Trois Bingo

• Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee


• Once Broken Faith, Seanan McGuire


• Sandman: Overture, Neil Gaiman

This has not been a month where I've wanted to read. I've been carrying around a couple of books from the Read the World Booklist for [mumble] months now (as in, I took them to Michigan with me in June) and haven't read them, so I finally returned them to the library yesterday (except for the one that has gone walkies--which I hope turns up soon!)

I've been extremely busy and also in a funk.

• From folklore to fiction : a study of folk heroes and rituals in the Black American novel, +H. Nigel Thomas (St. Vincent) (paper)


• The Stone Diaries, +Carol Shields (Canada) (paper)


• The Savage Detectives, + Roberto Bolano (Chile) (paper) (abandoned 33% ish)
  The book seems to be three vaguely-connected novellas. I read one all the way through, but didn't enjoy it, so gave up after a few pages of the second one wasn't any better. First novella was the diary of a feckless 17-year-old who skipped classes at university to bum around Mexico City drinking with a bunch of avant-garde poets who never actually wrote anything. Lots of diary entries about his tawdry sex life sleeping with several different women who all seemed to instantly fall in love with him. Bleh.


• Trigger Warning, Neil Gaiman (paper)


• Death in Venice, +Thomas Mann (Germany)


• The Sacred Band, *David Anthony Durham


• Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days, Salman Rushdie


• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, +JK Rowling, UK (audio) (reread)


• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

Tammie has given me a good idea for alleviating the frustration I'm feeling from the Read the World project. Instead of just going and getting the randomly selected books, go to GoodReads or another review site first and check out some reviews to see whether the book is likely to fit me. Here's hoping that will help me find more pleasure in the project. I have also checked out several recent acclaimed SFF novels as a palate cleanser.

I've just gone through my list of previous reads, and GoodReads ratings do not seem to correlate at all with my opinions of the books. However, in a number of cases the negative reviews do manage to mention the things that I also hated, so perhaps I can get some value from those.

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.

I'm still working through my Tempest Challenge booklist, but this year I also hope to start on a different diversity-in-reading challenge: books from other countries. However, so far, I'm still in the middle of a pile of books that have come in from previous hold requests, and I'm still not making these reading lists my exclusive sources of reading materials, so there will be other things in the book posts. I'll continue to use * for the Tempest Challenge books/authors, and I'll use + for the Round the World in 80 Books list.

1. Cast in Honor, *Michelle Sagara


2. Conjured, *Sarah Beth Durst


3. *Earth Girl, Janet Edwards


4. Acacia: The Other Lands, *David Anthony Durham


5. *Vessel, Sarah Beth Durst


6. Parable of the Talents, *Octavia Butler


7. Written in Red, Anne Bishop (audio)


8. A, B, C; *Samuel Delany


9. Skinwalker, Faith Hunter (audio)


10. The House of Shattered Wings, *Aliette de Bodard