Welcome to Litsy!

Having snorted derisively earlier this month at a quiz giving 4+ books per month as its highest category, I find my tally for June is actually pretty slim when accounting for the Gorey's taking 5 minutes each to read (but, admittedly, 5 glorious minutes). I liked all these books in their own ways, but I'm probably most gratified at finally having read the Asimov I bought 44 years ago 👴
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2nd story: Green Patches
Life on Saybrook's Planet is an organised whole, living in a harmoniously balanced ecology, lacking individuality. The arrival of humans, "fragmented lifeforms", evokes pity in Organised Life, which seeks to rescue them from the chaos of their existence by assimilating them into the collective. Asimov, 1950.
[*Cough* Star Trek *cough* The Borg *cough-cough*]

The title story is set on the planet Lagash, in orbit around the primary of a six-sun system. Archeological evidence indicates that civilisations rise and fall in cycles of 2½ millennia, always ending in apocalyptic catastrophe. Towards the end of the present cycle, scientists are figuring out the gravitational complexities of the system, only to predict the imminent crisis when all suns will either be below the horizon or in eclipse, and night ⬇️

I bought this book in 1980, and it's been TBR ever since. Travelled up and down the country with us as we moved house, and has been carefully shelved, packed, unpacked, and reshelved several times. Time to find out if that effort has been worthwhile...