I'm not hot shit in a wineglass, more curried goat in a paper cup

2) "Small Gods", Terry Pratchett.
I think that, years ago, this was the first Pratchett book I read, and it's a great place to start if you've never read Discworld before, as it's a stand-alone and covers a lot of the basic themes which Pratchett was interested in. I love the perfect twist at the end of a deus ex machina which feels like the natural and right way to end this story (with a few prods from Lu-Tze). And I'm impressed by the lengths to which he was able to carry the turtle imagery; there's the obvious parallel between the world-turtle and Om incarnate as a tortoise, and at the end the different metal turtles built by Vorbis and Urn, but I was thinking that Brutha somehow seems to embody as a human a sense of turtleness - a tortoiselike ability to withdraw his head when threatened and then keep on plodding toward his goal.

54-59) "The Merchant Princes" series - Charles Stross.
I picked up the "Merchant Princes" series because I encountered Charles Stross in a discussion thread on rachelmanija's DW. The thread was about Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett's "Long Earth" series, and someone (possibly me) said they didn't like that particular series but would have been up for more alternate universe stories, and Stross himself replied, saying (IIRC) he had written a series that came out about the same time as the Long Earth and got overshadowed by it. (Unfortunately I don't recall his DW user name, because my highly developed Mainer instinct for protecting famous people's private lives caused me to erase it from my memory.) Eor bought it on the Kobo for me, in a version where the six books are combined into three, and I must have liked it well enough because I ripped through these in a few weeks. There are some small points I'd have liked more clearly explained, or where I might have suggested a little bit of a 'kill your darlings' approach on the occasional phrase, but who am I to judge given my epic book series is still mostly in my head. It's definitely edge of your seat adventure, and after six books I was still up for more. Wiki on it here, if you don't mind the potential of spoilers with your synopseseses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_Princes

The Family Trade
The Hidden Family
The Clan Corporate
The Merchants' War
The Revolution Business
The Trade of Queens

And if you want to look for the compiled copies we bought, it's
The Bloodline Feud
The Traders' War
The Revolution Trade

And I now learn from the Wiki that there IS a second series of three books! Well, there goes another couple of weeks. :) Focusing on, as I expected, the main protagonist's daughter she gave up for adoption. I thought sure she would show up before the end of the first series, but I'm glad she didn't. She was twelve at that point, and writing a kid in an action adventure story is always a tricky idea.

60) "The Machine's Child" - Kage Baker
The cyborgs continue to muddle on toward the end times, most of them at a rate of one second per second, but some have found ways to cut through time. Alec, Edward and Nathanial get their beloved Mendoza back, but she has complete amnesia. She knows there's something not right with her supposed 'husband', but accepts the explanation that he was damaged in an accident and doesn't realize he has three personalities sharing the same body. Joseph (who thinks of Mendoza as his daughter) is searching for Mendoza and wants to kill Alec/Edward/Nathanial for "ruining" Mendoza's life, like a typical overprotective and overcontrolling father. I adore Joseph's bumbling. He literally goes back in time and tries to make sure Alec is never born in an elaborate, terrifying scheme with typically amusing results. :) The weirdest shit happens at the end, I can't even.... it makes sense in context, I think. And that's where Baker shines, I think - making weird shit seem to make sense. It's a thing I like in all the authors I really adore.

I can't actually finish this post and get up to date, today, so I guess I'll just go with this.

#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.

I'm trying out audiobooks to see how they do for keeping my motivation going (if I'm not reading I can move around and get things done, is my theory). However, this book I chose as my first is kinda annoying. It's called "Leviathan" (I believe the author is Scott Westerfeld). Now, I know I made a pact with myself to never get involved with another book that was a New York Times Bestseller, because so many of them are absolute dogs, but it had Alan Cumming reading it, so I figured I'd give it a shot. His voice IS nice, but on this book he over-emotes constantly. Every frikken minute has to be at a nine, when I'm really the sort of person who likes things not to get past an eight unless it's the direst emergency, and about a four / five is where I'd prefer to spend my time. Yes, some intonation is good, but your really exciting bits will get lost if it's ALL EXCITING.

But that aside, the author goes to great lengths to do things the hard way. Like, right now the main character is up in a tethered "balloon" - which is an engineered creature - on lookout, and spots an enemy approaching. She signals down that information via semaphore, but then decides that she has to get back down quickly and will have to ditch out by sliding down the rope. I'm like... why? Shouldn't it be SOP that when the enemy is approaching you'd reel the lookout back in so they won't be a target and you'll have more fighters available? Or wouldn't simply asking to be reeled in be quicker than trying to get your beast to vent hydrogen by scaring it? Or, heaven forfend, if needing to get your beast to drop is something that happens sometimes, wouldn't you have it trained to respond to some particular stimulus rather than having to come up with silly ways to try to scare it? And
I love the concept of his invented creatures, but he leaves so much to flail in the wind. They all seem way too frikken intelligent. I mean, you should not be able to scare a creature made from a jellyfish by saying, "I'm going to light a match down here!"

But what might have been worse for me was when the main character drags someone's steamer trunk along the ground, apparently all the way from the door to the ship, with the owner present. There's a million ways the owner might respond to that, from helping by grabbing the other handle to whacking the kid across the ear, calling them an idiot and telling them to round up more help, but just letting it happen does not in any way strike me as one of the reactions I would expect. What about you?

(ETA: I just realized that Alan Cumming often makes the female scientist sound a little like Doctor Frankenfurter. Just a teeny bit.)

I'm not sure I'm going to count books, anymore, because that brings up the question of whether short stories should 'count'. And we count whole Asimov's magazines, and that's just a bunch of short stories, and I think short stories I read should somehow be remembered, but... I don't know. I think I just won't keep a count.

"The Charwoman's Shadow" - Lord Dunsany
I was amazed at how enthralling I found this book, this time around. I tried to read it once before and somehow couldn't get into it - the language felt to archaic and stilted, and somehow this made me feel less invested in the characters. This time around I must just have been ready for it. The language was dense, yes, and a lot was packed into each sentence. I couldn't just skim it. Now I've decided that the language is not archaic - it's gorgeous and lush and funny.
"And all the while as he walked on the darkening hill-side doubts asked him questions and despair hinted replies, which might neither of them ever spoken at all if he had thought to bring some food with him in a satchel."

61) Asimov's Science Fiction, July/August 2018

I had incorrectly thought that I had finished this, but when I picked it up again realized I'd stopped partway through a story and forgotten about it. It was actually a very good issue, all in all. This was the one which redeemed Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Allen M. Steele in my eyes. I have never before liked a story by either of them, but this issue saw breakthroughs on that front in "Lieutenant Tightass" (Rusch) and "Starship Mountain" (Steele). Steele's unemotional and stilted style works well with noir.

57) "Johnny and the Bomb" - Pratchett

58) "The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents" - Pratchett

I despair of figuring out what day I finished "Johnny," so not going to do a retropost this time. I've been doing a lot of them, lately, though I suppose nobody sees them because they're retro. You'd have to be stalking me to notice. ;)

I suppose I ought to write something about them... Very good, you should read them. Um. I need to get my shower and get ready to take Eor's car to servicing so I can be sure it will get him to his doctor's appointment on Monday, so I'm not really in the headspace for writing at the moment.

Next book ought to be another of the Oz series by Thompson, but I do also have three half-finished books on my desk waiting for me to continue on with them. I've been rereading Stephen Fry's autobiographical "The Fry Chronicles", I have two issues of Asimov's here, and there's "Fear: Trump in the Whitehous" by Bob Woodward. I can't seem to face anything that requires thought, lately, and Pratchett is being really great for distracting me from my world. And giving me courage, I must say.

55) "Guards! Guards!" - Pratchett

I had forgotten so much of this book. I forgot that Carrot has a stoop from banging his head on the tops of the dwarf tunnels, and that he's only sixteen years old when he joins the City Watch. I had somehow kind of forgotten how cool little Errol, the dragon who's eating everything, is. Somehow, without talking and seeming kind of like a one-trick-pony with that description, he's a character. I had forgotten how all the characters interact to produce character development. For some reason in my memory it was all Carrot driving Vimes's change of outlook and the ... revitalization of the Night Watch, when that's not really the case at all. It's a little bit Carrot, and it's something of Sybil, and it may be partly The Librarian.

53) "Only You Can Save Mankind" - Pratchett

It's so hard for me to read a Pratchett book and not start out my review "I just <3 this book!", but especially this one. See, this is why I don't usually post my review as soon as I finish the book - sometimes I need a day or two to disengage and not just gush. Or just tear the thing apart, if I hate it. Adults are really on the sidelines in this book. Yo-less has a mother who is a nurse, and she helps out when requested, but off screen. Another mom shows up with tea and cookies at one point, and Johnny's Dad tries to talk with him, awkwardly, for a minute, but adults do not get air time in this book.

This book is about Johnny, who it seems is a sort of natural shaman who lives partly in the world most people call real and partly in a dream state that he can share with other people on occasion. Except it's also about the fact that everyone has their own reality. And it's about the way people dehumanize other people in order to make war. And holy shit I can't talk about this book.

Also, it's from the '80s and is attempting to right some of the wrongs of sexism at the time. Which was a little tricky. Near the end Johnny tells the girl who is driven to win at everything that his secret to having friends is to be a little bit stupid. Yeah, we shouldn't have to dumb ourselves down for other people, but I think his 'stupidity' is a sort of kindness. You know, don't point out to people that they're just not as good as you. That one bit might have done with a little more explanation.

It had been so long since I had read this one that it was all new to me.

Oddly, I also read one of the 'Fleet' short stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch today, "Lieutenant Tightass", and actually liked it. I have never liked them before, but maybe because I usually skim through them. I was reading more slowly and carefully, today, because I was in the mode of reading this Johnny book, and found that it was not about the by-the-book guy being better than the sloppy crew he was assigned with, as I had expected it would be, but about him having to learn that there are times when procedures are useful and times they should be tossed to the winds. And that a sloppy appearance doesn't mean that people take their jobs less seriously, or are less good at them. Maybe I'll try giving her Fleet stories another chance.

I do a lot more reading than I claim in my 'books' posts, because I'm abiding by the rules and only claim full books or full issues of Asimov's. So when I don't finish the issue, because I skip one story because I can't stand that author, or when I read short stories, I often don't mention them.

52) "The Royal Book of Oz" - Ruth Plumly Thompson

So, she forgot all about the physics of falling through the earth, which (oddly enough) Baum at least somewhat remembered in "Tik Tok of Oz", but she came up with a reason why the Scarecrow became animated in the first place, and I found it a delightful reincarnation story.

And right now I'm SO glad that I just read "Tatterborn" (a short story by Daniel Heath Justice - thank you radientfracture! ) which used a similar concept. In Justice's story the Scarecrow remembers his past life, but it makes sense for Thompson's story that he can't remember it at all, or it would have slipped out before. In both stories someone was murdered and their soul inhabited and animated the scarecrow. Other than that the stories are pretty different.

But, I had to wonder why Baum never seemed to think that the Scarecrow being alive was not something that needed to be explained. He didn't always explain everything, but for most of the main non-human characters there was some explanation. Except for the very first friend and companion Dorothy has in Oz, and he's just there. Even he doesn't know why. This story does make the Scarecrow's assertion (in an earlier book) that he could hear the farmer as soon as his first ear was painted seem apocryphal, but then again he never seems to have spoken to the farmer or you'd have thought the farmer would never have put him up there - that would be just horribly cruel. Here, yes, you can talk and move around and I'll just stick you up here by yourself so that you'll be unable to move with nobody but the crows to talk to.

As I mentioned in my previous post, this book actually felt like there were actions going on, people doing things - it was much more engagingly written than Baum ever did. Maybe even a bit overboard, as there were names and details we didn't need, but motion. And there were two sets of characters doing different things who came together at the end and sorted it out, and every character gets much better developed than I've ever seen before. Glinda and Ozma don't ruin everything by looking in their magic book and picture and fixing all the problems before an proper end can be resolved by the characters, and there's reasons given for that - Ozma is off stopping a small war and Glinda can't make sense of the brief line which her magic news book gives her.

On the downside there's forgetting physics, there's some other stuff that happens at the end that wasn't necessary and didn't make sense, and there's some casual racism - she refers to 'Chinamen'. I feel like... as adults we can know that's not okay these days and move on, but probably parents should have a heads up that this is in there and talk to kids to make sure they don't go using that phrase to their friends at school and tick someone off. Baum didn't entirely escape that, though he did pretty well over all. I may have forgotten to mention that, in "Rinkitink in Oz", Ozma has to transform someone several times in order to work them back to their original form, and one of the in-between forms is (something like) 'a Hottentot - an inferior type of human.' Ow. Very wincey.