This week, Ron from Harry Potter.
Ron: You know, it occurred to me this week that the basilisk was moving through the plumbing back in second year. Yet to hear Harry tell it, the basilisk was a bloody great snake big as a house or whatnot. So either the pipes in this school are just enormous or Harry was misremembering. Come to think of it, nobody’s ever around for the end of the adventures except Harry, most times, so no one’s there to tell him he’s seeing things or forgetting stuff. Maybe You-Know-Who never grew out the back of Quirrell’s head. Could have been a trick of the light – who’s to know? Or maybe there weren’t that many Death Eaters in that graveyard – always seemed a bit unlikely that he’d get away against a whole team of them. And maybe it’s a little unlikely that Harry single-handedly saves the school every… actually, maybe Harry’s just a lying git.
Marion: I finished up the Kat Richardson story collection Through the Grey. It was great to read some Richardson again! And V. Castro’s horror collection Mestiza Blood was a new discovery for me. The book is filled with gory, splattery, dismembery, graphically sexual, angry, funny, terrifying horror stories. At first, I didn’t think I was going to like them, but Castro’s virtuosity won me over. (Mestiza Blood falls clearly into the “not for everyone” category.) I’m about halfway through Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder by T.A. Willberg. It has a fascinating setup but Willberg hasn’t quite convinced me… yet. Still, a lot of people on Goodreads love it.
Sandy: Moi? I am currently reading another Lost World/Lost Race novel that has recently been released by those fine folks at Armchair Fiction. This one is entitled The Sea Demons, by Victor Rousseau, and was initially published in 1916. I look forward to sharing some thoughts on this one with you all very shortly….
Terry: I’ve been working so hard on this “finish everything with a bookmark in it before you start anything new” for over a month now, and even though I’ve finished 11 books this year, I don’t seem to have made a dent. How is that possible? I’ve been following the program with only three or four exceptions, which, come to think of it, is a pretty heavy percentage of 11, isn’t it? Anyway, this week I finished Sword of Destiny by Andrezej Sapkowski and moved on to Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories by A.S. Byatt, who is unutterably brilliant.
Fat fantasy gets criticized for not being very challenging, but sometimes that has value. For instance, I finished Anne of Avonlea (L. M. Montgomery) and saw the next book on the stack was Nova Express (William S. Burroughs). And that just seemed like a transition too far. So Django Wexler’s The Shadow Throne got interposed in the reading order, after which I was more prepared to “storm the Reality Studio” with William B. Then, next up was Three Men in a Boat, which again seemed like too jarring a change of pace. So another fantasy got pulled in. Unfortunately, had to DNF it at about 350 pages, but still I was ready then for the three men (to say nothing of the dog). Sometimes a “palate cleanser” is what you need.