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#22) "The Man in the Brown Suit" by Agatha Christie: Fun romp about a young woman who grew up with an archeologist father and wants adventure and romance. Because she's incredibly gorgeous and artlessly charming people (mostly men) fall all over themselves to help her, and for no particular reason she falls into an adventure. One of the men who is taken in by her fresh young beauty and artless charm is a guy who's very Bertie Wooster-ish, also fun. :) But SO much of the story was strung together with luck or ridiculous coincidence that there really needed to be some supernatural explanation, which was never supplied overtly.
#23) "The Life of the World to Come" - #5 in The Company series by Kage Baker: I really love The Company series, I love Mendoza the botanist - because apparently I have a thing for depressed characters? - though at this point I really don't get her ridiculous devotion to her "soul-mate", a guy she had a brief fling with hundreds of years ago, but I love that she's spent all that time also hyperfocused on growing the best corn ever. I love her soul-mate's last incarnation, Alec Checkerfield. The linked-short-stories format is fun, and I loved the story where you get the other point of view of the same story we began the book with. The part where Alec is sharing his body with "his two previous incarnations" is a combination of mild body squick horror and comedy gold; one of the personalities is a stone-cold killer and anything might happen, and to everyone else he really looks like a raving lunatic. BUT. The utter despair cliffhanger ending is so tough, especially when this was a reread because I THOUGHT that I had the next book in the series, now, and then I found out I DIDN'T.
#24) "The Children of the Company" - #6 in The Company series by Kage Baker: And not the conclusion to Mendoza and Alec's on-again-off-again romance! No, this is another collection of the short stories about the Company, focusing on the evil cyborgs. (As opposed to the good cyborgs of which there are many as well.) This gives us a better understanding of what Alec doesn't even know that he's up against, so it's not at a bad point in the series, if I hadn't already read all of these ALSO and was dying to get to the part where Alec maybe saves Mendoza? Maybe?
#25) "Babel-17" - by Samuel R. Delany: If you're familiar at all with Delany maybe you won't be surprised that in 1964-'65 he was writing a story with a woman of Asian descent as the main character, she's a ships captain and brilliant linguist, and that she has a background of having previously been in a polyamorous relationship with two men. I don't think it was science fiction that wasn't friendly to women and POC, because Delany was winning awards. For me, as a story, it seemed a little too... overview. Like, he really didn't like to get into people's heads too much, he sort of glossed over the details of life. We get a lot of really quick sidewise glances at the crew of her ship, character sketches as it were, not a lot of details and interactions. But, he really wanted to talk about how language can be really important to how we think, something people are still talking about today as if it's a new idea: that if we don't have the words for a concept it's hard to even sneak up on talking about it.
#26) "Double Sin and Other Stories" by Agatha Christie: Some of these go really far into the supernatural, so I wonder why she didn't posit some supernatural reason for her girlie in "Brown Suit" to have some supernatural explanation for her luck. There are a couple of Poirot stories (also very lucky, that guy) and then there's one where a mother ends up killing a medium to bring her child back to life, and a story in which a possibly evil doll haunts the senile woman who runs a dressmaking shop. And there's no bones about it, these are entirely supernatural stories. Do they exist in the same universe with Poirot? Who knows.
#27) "The Fortunes of Philippa" by Angela Brazil: This may have been a re-read for me, because the general outlines of the story telegraphed themselves so strongly. Or that could just be the effect of narritive causality - if a character is looking forward to an event being fun it's a good chance that something will go drastically wrong. But in this book it doesn't always. I was really surprised by the level of detail about interactions between Philippa, her friend Cathy and Cathy's brothers. They go for rambles and play pranks on each other that could really have turned out badly in a modern book (the oldest brother has a pistol and Cathy and Philippa decide to prank that there's a burglar coming into the house when their parents are away). Completely unlike all other Angela Brazil books that I recall reading, this one was first person, years go by before she even gets to go to the school to meet Cathy, and the school had a really unpleasant teacher who picks on Philippa and makes her life miserable until she gets really sick. (Spoiler - unlike the real world, that teacher gets canned.) So, is it autobiographical? In part? Not sure.
[Doing books listened to separately because they're on my phone and not my kobo.]
#28) "White Cat Black Dog" by Kelly Link, read by numerous people: I can recommend the audio version if you like spaced out weird fairy story stuff and the reading is very good. In the one story where a girl frees a fairy-enchanted 'prince' from his enchantment I was really bothered by her using this fake theatre snow and getting it all over the yard. I was like, who is going to clean up this mess?? Sorry, that's me. Otherwise I enjoyed it a lot. :)
#29) "Lost in the Moment and Found" by Seanan McGuire, read by Jesse Vilinsky: A girl threatened by an abusive stepfather runs away and finds herself in a place with doors that go into other dimensions. It's the inside of the magical shop that people get that item at and then it's never seen again. It's the place where lost things go.
Okay, I guess that gets me up to date.
#23) "The Life of the World to Come" - #5 in The Company series by Kage Baker: I really love The Company series, I love Mendoza the botanist - because apparently I have a thing for depressed characters? - though at this point I really don't get her ridiculous devotion to her "soul-mate", a guy she had a brief fling with hundreds of years ago, but I love that she's spent all that time also hyperfocused on growing the best corn ever. I love her soul-mate's last incarnation, Alec Checkerfield. The linked-short-stories format is fun, and I loved the story where you get the other point of view of the same story we began the book with. The part where Alec is sharing his body with "his two previous incarnations" is a combination of mild body squick horror and comedy gold; one of the personalities is a stone-cold killer and anything might happen, and to everyone else he really looks like a raving lunatic. BUT. The utter despair cliffhanger ending is so tough, especially when this was a reread because I THOUGHT that I had the next book in the series, now, and then I found out I DIDN'T.
#24) "The Children of the Company" - #6 in The Company series by Kage Baker: And not the conclusion to Mendoza and Alec's on-again-off-again romance! No, this is another collection of the short stories about the Company, focusing on the evil cyborgs. (As opposed to the good cyborgs of which there are many as well.) This gives us a better understanding of what Alec doesn't even know that he's up against, so it's not at a bad point in the series, if I hadn't already read all of these ALSO and was dying to get to the part where Alec maybe saves Mendoza? Maybe?
#25) "Babel-17" - by Samuel R. Delany: If you're familiar at all with Delany maybe you won't be surprised that in 1964-'65 he was writing a story with a woman of Asian descent as the main character, she's a ships captain and brilliant linguist, and that she has a background of having previously been in a polyamorous relationship with two men. I don't think it was science fiction that wasn't friendly to women and POC, because Delany was winning awards. For me, as a story, it seemed a little too... overview. Like, he really didn't like to get into people's heads too much, he sort of glossed over the details of life. We get a lot of really quick sidewise glances at the crew of her ship, character sketches as it were, not a lot of details and interactions. But, he really wanted to talk about how language can be really important to how we think, something people are still talking about today as if it's a new idea: that if we don't have the words for a concept it's hard to even sneak up on talking about it.
#26) "Double Sin and Other Stories" by Agatha Christie: Some of these go really far into the supernatural, so I wonder why she didn't posit some supernatural reason for her girlie in "Brown Suit" to have some supernatural explanation for her luck. There are a couple of Poirot stories (also very lucky, that guy) and then there's one where a mother ends up killing a medium to bring her child back to life, and a story in which a possibly evil doll haunts the senile woman who runs a dressmaking shop. And there's no bones about it, these are entirely supernatural stories. Do they exist in the same universe with Poirot? Who knows.
#27) "The Fortunes of Philippa" by Angela Brazil: This may have been a re-read for me, because the general outlines of the story telegraphed themselves so strongly. Or that could just be the effect of narritive causality - if a character is looking forward to an event being fun it's a good chance that something will go drastically wrong. But in this book it doesn't always. I was really surprised by the level of detail about interactions between Philippa, her friend Cathy and Cathy's brothers. They go for rambles and play pranks on each other that could really have turned out badly in a modern book (the oldest brother has a pistol and Cathy and Philippa decide to prank that there's a burglar coming into the house when their parents are away). Completely unlike all other Angela Brazil books that I recall reading, this one was first person, years go by before she even gets to go to the school to meet Cathy, and the school had a really unpleasant teacher who picks on Philippa and makes her life miserable until she gets really sick. (Spoiler - unlike the real world, that teacher gets canned.) So, is it autobiographical? In part? Not sure.
[Doing books listened to separately because they're on my phone and not my kobo.]
#28) "White Cat Black Dog" by Kelly Link, read by numerous people: I can recommend the audio version if you like spaced out weird fairy story stuff and the reading is very good. In the one story where a girl frees a fairy-enchanted 'prince' from his enchantment I was really bothered by her using this fake theatre snow and getting it all over the yard. I was like, who is going to clean up this mess?? Sorry, that's me. Otherwise I enjoyed it a lot. :)
#29) "Lost in the Moment and Found" by Seanan McGuire, read by Jesse Vilinsky: A girl threatened by an abusive stepfather runs away and finds herself in a place with doors that go into other dimensions. It's the inside of the magical shop that people get that item at and then it's never seen again. It's the place where lost things go.
Okay, I guess that gets me up to date.