The next Black Water Book Club should be up this weekend. It’ll feature at least one story, maybe even two. I got caught up in some other reading this past week. Speaking of which, it used to be something of a regular feature on my blog to do a monthly post about the books I was reading. All that stopped back in March when the Fire Nation attacked… I mean, COVID-19 happened… I mean…

The truth is I started reading an SFF book* that everyone seemed to love, and which I too enjoyed at first, but then slowly I fell out of enjoyment with until I stopped reading it entirely, but I never quite admitted that I was giving up on it, so it would sit there on my Kindle taunting me with its “53% complete” every time I searched around for something else to read. And so it has been for weeks. The book sits there like an unusually small boulder of large-size. Since then I’ve been shamefacedly reading books with my head low and feeling all out of sorts with current genre.

As is often the case I feel it is less the book’s fault than the fact that the hype around it elevated my expectations. It’s a fine book, good in fact, but the way people talked about it made me expect more than what it was.

And I’ll say that I usually have no problem dropping books. A book gets a hundred pages (or 10% on my Kindle), and if I’m not hooked by then I have no problem moving on. But, this one remains interesting enough that I want to finish it, only not now but some day. Until then it’ll remain an unusually small boulder of large-size impeding my path. 

Now on to one or two sentence reviews for all the books I’ve read since March:

Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle: What if Ursula LeGuin’s Left-Hand of Darkness was about Klingons? An envoy from Earth travels to a post-technological world populated by a humanoid species of conservative warriors (Science Fiction)

Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself – edited by Sam Gorski and D.F. Lovett: A guide to daydreaming, full of in-depth scenarios, and which might possibly make you lose your mind… or save it! (How-To)

Out of Body by Jeffrey Ford: A librarian learns to astral project and gets involved in supernatural hi-jinx involving monsters and monster-slayers. (Urban Fantasy)

The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss: A young teen leaves home to take a job “breaking” horse, but does so in a way that impresses most everyone she encounters. This one got me in the feels. (Historical/Western)

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson: A tour across the solar system and the human habitats there in the early decades of the 24th century. Pretty thin plots and character, but lots of BIG IDEAS and marvels. (Science Fiction)

War of the Maps by Paul McAuley: A western set on a Dyson megastructure built around a brown dwarf star, in other words this has all the weird world-building of Gene Wolfe with less of the Catholicism. (Science Fiction)

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado: Memoir of an abusive lesbian relationship written in fragments across multiple genre styles like an Oulipo exercise. (Memoir)

The Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White: Rollicking space opera that manages to mash together Nascar racing and space-wizards while sitting between the feel-good works of Becky Chambers’s and the brutal violence of Kameron Hurley’s.

Lifelode by Jo Walton: Slice-of-life fantasy novel about polyamorous relationships on a farm in a world where the laws of reality change depending on which direction you travel. (Fantasy)

Lady Into Fox by David Garnett: One of those English stories that gets called allegorical because it was written at a time when society could not deal with either closeted gay men or unconventional women, and the tragedies that ensued when society forced the two together. (British Fantasy)

* Join my patreon and leave a comment there if you want to know the book’s name or if you simply want to support my many other mistakes and receive nothing in return.