Annals of Random Reading: The Eight Shelves, Part Two.

In December, I chose one audiobook per shelf from a column of eight shelves at my local branch library.  Last Monday, I told you how things went with the first three books.  Now, the exciting conclusion!


#4 Strata, by Terry Pratchett, 1981 (read in February)  * * *

Variations on a theme by Douglas Adams. Cute.

Terry Pratchett writes in a genre of “funny science fiction” that I tend to find rather grating. I’ve got friends who are fans, and from the choices at hand I picked this book to give him another try at winning me over. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really a win either.  And it really shares an awful lot of ideas and gags with the planet-factory episode in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Which was written first, I wonder.


#5 The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, 2009. (read in March)  * * *

Nicely written literary historical fiction, a series of vignettes really involving the staff and patients of a Victorian sanitarium. Good scenes and passages, but there's very little momentum driving the book forward. Fails to avoid landing on exactly the shocking dark secrets that you would expect from a novel treating of this time and setting.

I’ve since learned that this is a historical novel about the madness and incarceration of the famous British poet John Clare. What, you’ve never heard of John Clare? Oh good, than I feel better about not catching on.

#6 The Song Remains the Same, by Allison Winn Scotch, 2012. (begun in May) Abandoned

Adequately well-written soap opera. But life is short.

This was some sort of business about a woman who is one of only two survivors of a plane crash, and the other one is a famous but troubled movie star, and she has total amnesia, and must try to piece together her troubled relationships with her husband, mother, and sister. In retrospect, I probably should have jumped ship earlier than I did.

#7 Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell, 1998 (read in June)  * * * * *

I love this book.

This one was a real astonishment. Expecting nothing in particular, I wandered into a deeply intelligent science fiction novel that explores ecology, anthropology, history, ethics, and theology with wry wit, a full cast of well-drawn characters, plentiful violence, and a ripping story. I was stunned to discover this exciting new science fiction novel, and then more stunned to find that it’s fifteen years old; why haven’t I read this before? Why haven’t we all read it?

It turns out that it is a sequel, although it stood up just fine on its own. Mrs.5000, having noticed my stunned look, has eye-read both the first book (The Sparrow) and the second, and asked me the other night, “Why haven’t I read this before?”

A thoroughgoing win.

#8 Sea Change, by Karen White, 2012. (begun in June) Abandoned

I have no reason to think there's anything ~bad~ here, but it was emphatically not "my kind of thing," in that I was unable to pay attention to it.

Can’t win ‘em all.


Final Score

From my experiment of picking one audiobook each from eight shelves, my results were:

1 - Really Extraordinary novel
1 - Introduction into a rich seam of genre fiction.
4 - Books that did me no particular lasting good, but which all kept me company through a certain volume of road running or household chores
2 - Books that just sort of wasted my precious time, but only for as long as it took me to toss them overboard.

All in all, I’d have to say I fared pretty well. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime.