July was another light reading month, though I did log several excellent novella-length reads. My favorite for the month, though, was easily “Lord of Light,“ Roger Zelazny's classic novel about technology, immortality, and deity.

Honorable mentions to Liz Ziemska's “Mandelbrot the Magnificent“, Neon Yang's “Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame“, and Lauren Beukes's “Zoo City“

#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo

(1996) A battle-hardened crew is assigned security for settlers of a new colony world. What looks like a milk run turns into an endurance trial when the world turns out to be full of flora, fauna, and enemy combatants that want them dead, colonists and soldiers and all. The ending felt abrupt, but overall it's a very good example of the kind of thing that David Drake does very well. Not usually my sort of thing but I enjoyed this one.

My first #ReadYourKindle list for 2026, chosen randomishly from titles that have been longest unread in my Kindle archive.

Thanks for hosting again @cbee !

First #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list of 2026. I'm not ready, but at least I'm ready, y'know?

Thanks for hosting @TheAromaOfBooks !

June was a slow reading month, but Lauren Markham's thought-provoking essay on a disconnect between our language and our historical moment, has lingered in my thoughts.

Honorable mention to Asimov's “Foundation,“ which held up better than I expected.

#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo

May's pick is Octavia Butler's challenging, disturbing, uncomfortably memorable “Wild Seed.“

Honorable mentions to Shion Miura's “The Great Passage“ (a sort of romance for people turned on by dictionaries); Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tales; Nghi Vo's “Brides of High Hill“; and Charles de Fieux's bonkers fever-dream of a fantasy “Lamekis“. It was a good reading month.

#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo

April: Igifu / Scholastique Mukasonga

Honorable mention to Octavia Butler's “Kindred“

#25BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo

(2023) Set in a desert where a water-poor town makes unimaginable sacrifices to survive, it's the story of a young man who sets out on a quest to find another way. It's a novella-length parable about truth and power and the need to question everything. It's also very good.

I completed all but one of my #10BeforeTheEnd reads, and enough of the tenth to know I need to be in a different frame of mind with different priorities to make finishing worth my time.

So I'm calling the challenge a success for this year. Thanks for hosting @ChaoticMissAdventures !

Disappointed, because this is the last of my "Ten Before the End" reads but it's almost six hundred pages, I'm sketchy on several points from the last book, there's a "breath I hadn't known I was holding" on *page**one*, and a candidate for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award on page 16. I just can't for another 560 pages so am bailing at page 16. It probably gets better. (I'm perversely curious to see whether it can get worse, but not curious enough rn)

March: Death of the Author / Nnedi Okorafor

Honorable mentions to Arthur C. Clarke's classic “Childhood's End“; and Abigail Williams's fascinating and perspective-changing “The Social Life of Books“

#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo

(1977) First in Clayton's “Diadem“ series featuring a young woman bonded to an alien artifact that gives her superpowers, as she searches the stars for the mother who abandoned her as a child. This one sets up the premise, and it's fine. To me it's a little too much puttering about, resisting the quest that we all know she's going to begin; and seventies sexual edginess (TW for nonconsensual sex). I'll continue the series, but not right away

The thief walked through rolls of milky fog, advancing warily to the base of a wall that rose until the fog swallowed it; his chameleon-web bodysuit mocked the opaline mist until he was a pale shade in the shadows.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

February: Stamped from the Beginning / Ibram X Kendi

#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo

January: Mind of My Mind / Octavia Butler

#12BooksOf2025
@TheEllieMo

(1741, English translation 1742)

A Norwegian college graduate descends into a cave near Bergen. When a rope breaks he falls through the earth and into its hollow center, where a second sun shines and a smaller Earth orbits it. Swiftian adventures follow in lands of walking talking trees, fashionista monkeys, sentient string basses and others, satirizing and commenting on 18th century European society. Dry in parts, but fun and sometimes funny

In the year 1664, after I had pass‘d my several examinations in the University of Copenhagen, and had deservedly obtained the Character, which is there call‘d Laudable, by the Votes of my Judges, as well Philosophers as Divines, I prepared for my Return into my native Country; ...

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(2016) It's an anthology of mostly horror stories published by the (defunct?) literary journal “A Murder of Storytellers.“ Quality is pretty good, with a few really memorable pieces and a few that provoked a “Well that was odd.“ My favorites were Timothy O'Leary's “Fake Girlfriend,“ about a man who invents an Internet persona for his imaginary girlfriend; and Donald Jacob Uitvlug's pensive “Café Shambleau“, about a space cafe that is hard to leave

(1967) The Space-Detectives Intervene

Perry returns from his adventures in prehistory, only to face an economic crisis in the present: someone is flooding the Terran Empire with counterfeit currency! And two private detectives stumble on a source of the fake bills. It's amusing that the authors think paper currency will still be the basis of commerce in 2404, but it's cool to see a villainous plot that isn't premised on physical force.

(2024) This is a YA novel-in-verse about a Sudanese-American teenager who dreams of becoming a poet, and attracts the attention of an older male poet who steals her work and has even worse intentions. I picked it up after reading that it had been dropped from a reading bowl list in Georgia for ... idk, for suggesting 25-yo men hit on teenagers? (I think teen girls already know this.) Happily, it was reinstated and happily, it's also pretty good.

(2014) It's a dead-teenager slasher flick about a group of high school grads who throw themselves a graduation party on an island rumored to be haunted by a witch. Things proceed as you'd expect for a dead-teenager slasher flick. I first got this for Kindle almost ten years ago, and should have read it back then, because my appetite for this sort of thing has soured. As an example of the genre, though, it's fine.

(2025) This is one of the more important books I've read this year, and it consolidates a lot of my own thoughts and misgivings about my country's place in the world. It's about Gaza, but not just about Gaza, more broadly about the many theaters where the current world order is based on dehumanization and violence against people whom it has found advantageous to think of as not-people. No comfortable read, but eye-opening and compelling.

(1967) “The Conquerors of Time“

Perry's team find an Island Master on planet Vario, which is good/bad news: bad because that means the Island Masters can track their movement and anticipate a confrontation; good because if the Terrans can get the upper hand, they might be able to compel him to help them return to 2404. There's a moral dilemma that deserved a little more reflection but this series is all about the action, which it delivers.

(1743) Two years after “Anti-Pamela”, Eliza Haywood published this conduct manual for servant girls. Here she sounds more like Richardson, a fussy moralizing bore, than herself, noted author of lusty amatory fiction. In a section dealing with amorous employers, Haywood‘s advice could have been modeled after Pamela, never mind that she had satirized it only recently. Interesting for its glimpse into the period and another side of Haywood's career

Beware the notorious tea-to-dipsomania pipeline!

“I have known several who have loath'd the very Smell of any spiritous Liquor, become at last to love them to their Ruin, meerly by drinking of Tea, which, by too much cooling and weakening of the Stomach, seems to render it necessary to have something warm.“

(1911) It's a satire of Oxford life, an over-the-top mock epic about a young woman so beautiful and bewitching that she brings calamity upon the school. For me the prose style is even more bewitching than I can imagine any Zuleika being: I am undone by such an easy command of a precise vocabulary, range of literary allusion, and nimble tongue in cheek. But the plot centers on suicide which I can't quite bring myself to laugh about, even in context

(1966) “On a secret mission to Lemuria“

Still stuck in the past, but having now arrived at the Andromeda Galaxy, Perry's next objective is to find a way to access and operate the time-traveling equipment of the Island Masters. He leads a team disguised as unkempt, incompetent “space tramps“ to the Lemurian planet Vario to investigate. The premise leads to some light humor. This was the last episode of 1966.

(2012) First in an indie YA dystopian series, set on a future Earth where humans have been enslaved by aliens. Our heroine is a member of a rebel group that liberates humans and plots to fight for freedom. It's very YA, with the self-absorbed first-person narration, the very special narrator, and the love triangle. Not really my thing, and I won't continue.

But at least it's no longer sitting unread in my Kindle archive. Yay #ReadYourEbooks !

(1962) Book 3 of the “Time Traders“ series has not aged well. The idea is that in order to colonize a distant planet, the West sends a team of Apaches who have been regressed “into prototypes of their ancestors“ (because blablah survival blah) -- only to discover on arrival that the Commies have done the same thing only with Mongols. The story is well-intentioned and has strengths but it's the kind of thing that makes you say “It is of its time.“

In unserem Universum wimmelt es von Narren.

“Our universe is swarming with fools.“

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(1743) Fielding's fictional biography of the thief and con artist Jonathan Wild is a satire of English political life in general, and of “prime minister” Robert Walpole in particular. The running joke is that Wild (like Walpole) is a “great man”, i.e., driven to (in)famous deeds by ambition and avarice and untroubled by “vulgar” traits like honesty or loyalty. Deeply cynical -- misanthropic, even -- but also funny and uncomfortably relevant.

Amd here's my #BookSpinBingo card for December.

Thanks for hosting, @theAromaOfBooks !

My #ReadYourEbooks picks for December: three indie horror books and a satire of university life from 1911. (Which of these things is not like the others?)

I'll definitely get to Zuleika Dobson, and hopefully one of the other three.

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

My #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin picks are a contrasting pair of light and ponderous reads. Looking forward to both, for very different reasons.

Thanks for hosting @TheAromaOfBooks !

(2022) Second in the trilogy beginning with “Black Sun,“ this is a fantasy set in a would inspired by pre-Columbian America. This entry develops the worldbuilding and the political maneuvering. It's a fun world, and this is a fun visit, but it also feels a little directionless to me, like moving people around for the sake of filling Book Two. Looking forward to a grand showdown in Book Three.

November was a successful month for the spinny tasks: I finished both the #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin reads, and even scored a bingo, which has eluded me the last couple of months.

Thanks for your work on these challenges every month, @theAromaOfBooks !

And here is my #BookSpin #DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo list for December. Thanks for hosting @theAromaOfBooks !

And here are my results for November's #ReadYourEbooks : 3 titles of 4, which is a new record for me.

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

Here is my #ReadYourEbooks list for December, chosen sorta-randomly from the oldest titles in my large and growing ebook backlog.

Thanks for hosting @Cbee !

(2011) First in an indie fantasy trilogy featuring a teenage magic user who acquires a powerful book written by the followers of an outlawed god. It's fine, but I'm over the "magic teenager" trope and the characters' banter just feels like bickering to me. Fortunately there's no cliffhanger ending so I don't feel compelled to continue.

This has been in my Kindle backlog for a long time so thanks to @Cbee and #ReadYourEbooks for the nudge

The White Tree / Edward W Robertson
Fevered Star / Rebecca Roan horse
Separation of Church and Hate / John Fielding

Hope to finish the first two, and get a start on the third. Another Perry Rhodan adventure may also be on the block ...

#weekendreads
@rachelsbrittain

The sun had not yet risen on the first day after the new year's winter solstice, and it felt not at all as if an age had ended, but Balam knew better.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(1966) “Orders from the Fifth Dimension“

The CREST III retrieves equipment delivered last episode by the DINO-III then sets course for the Andromeda Galaxy. It's a tidy episode that moves our heroes on to the next stage, fills some blanks in the worldbuilding, and introduces a new mystery to be solved later.

(2015, selections 1995-2014)

It's a collection of 25 horror short stories. They range from a sweet sad story about a man who befriends a ghost in his back yard (“She Found Spring“), to bizarre *WTF did I just read?!* stories (like “Grandma Wanda's Belly Jelly“), with a generous helping of erotic and body horror in between. Some stories lean too hard into sexual violence for my taste, but by and large they're well crafted, efficient and effective

(2015) it's a collection of stories and homilies by a pastor with tattoos, anger issues, salty language, and a deep appreciation for human messiness. It's heavy on grace and forgiveness, light on exhortations and moralizing. I'm an ex-evangelical quasi-atheist, but this kind of humane reading of Christian tradition resonates with me still, and I am grateful for Bolz-Weber's expression of it.

(1742) Fielding's follow-up to Shamela continues his critique of Pamela. It's a gender-swapped comedy in which Pamela's brother Joseph resists his female employer's advances. Compared to Shamela, JA has more nuance, more satirical targets, and more than one joke. Of course jokes that worked for his audience often don't work for me: much of it is slapstick, some based on SA. But the humor of character, manners, and wordplay still get laughs from me

(1862) It's a Victorian sensation novel about a young gentleman who returns from the Australian gold fields having struck it rich, only to find on his return that his wife has died. Except the stories about her death don't add up, and there's something suspicious about his friend's new stepmother... There are several interesting things going on here but its heart is a sensation novel, and as such it delivers.

It is a trite but true Observation, that Examples work more forcibly on the Mind than Precepts: And if this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praise-worthy.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

(1959) Second in Norton's “Time Traders“ series. In this one, time agents discover an alien spaceship crash-landed on Earth in the Pleistocene. When the agents send it through a time gate for studying in the present, they accidentally trigger a return-to-home function, sending the mysterious craft and all on board to distant worlds. It's a big-dumb-object adventure, one of my favorite sf tropes, and I hope Norton builds on it through the series

(2005) Third in Stroud's series about the crafty and cynical djinni Bartimaeus, and the wizard who summoned him. This series has grown on me, and this entry caps it off very nicely. I read this on audiobook during a long drive, which is a good way to consume this series: Simon Jones's narration is just delicious.