"50 book challenge"

In my case, the challenge is to get and pick up books, instead of net stuff (blogs don't count), newspapers, and computer/Palm games. If I were actually doing that challenge, it would also be to emphasize things that are new to me, rather than rereading. (Magazines seem almost irrelevant, since I'm basically using them as bathroom reading.)

I don't expect to post reviews of everything I read this year; it might be worth listing them all, in this entry, which I may or may not remember to update as I go. The last time I tried keeping such a list, my junior year of high school (a friend told me that some colleges would take that list instead of an essay about reading; she was right, and I got into the school in question), it came in at over 200, not counting textbooks but counting novels assigned for English class. I'm not going to bother listing re-reads unless it's been long enough that the book in question feels new to me; this may include things I'm not sure whether I've read before.

Thus far (posting 13 January, but haven't read anything but net stuff so far today): 253; 2 Nero Wolfes (Might As Well Be Dead; Champagne for One); Those Gentle Voices (Effinger); The Moon Children (Williamson). So, five new books in the first 12 days of the year, all of them novels. Next up should probably be the Tiptree bio, since it has a due date.

Addendum, 20 May: I'm trying to make this list complete, so I'm adding things here whether or not I do more detailed posts about them.

Jan. 21: Jokes and the Unconscious, Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa (graphic novel); disappointing
Jan. 25: Louisiana Lament,, Julie Smith (http://redbird.livejournal.com/932303.html)
Jan. 28: Julie Phillips's biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (http://redbird.livejournal.com/933147.html)

Feb. 1: Death of a Doxy, Rex Stout. Another Nero Wolfe, fun, Archie's voice in good form.
Feb. 9: Beowulf, Heaney trans. Post to follow. [ten]
Feb. 11: Night Passage, Robert Parker. Police procedural rather than mystery: for the most part, we watch the viewpoint detective, the criminals, and the other townspeople in real-time, so we see things being plotted and know who did them. Also character study of relationships and of the detective getting past his drinking problem, at least for a while. I'm getting tired of the rhythm imposed by Parker's extremely short chapters: it breaks things up and reduces my momentum and involvement in the story, rather than increasing them.
Feb. 17: Learning the World, Ken MacLeod. Good world-building (both the colony ship and the alien space bats, but it ends awfully suddenly.
Feb. 18: Not Quite Dead Enough, Rex Stout. Two novellas (or maybe a novella and a novelette by the WSFS rules), the title story and "Booby Trap". Set during World War II, Archie is "Major Goodwin" and spends a chunk of the first story persuading Wolfe to consult for the military using his detective skills rather than trying to get into shape and enlist as a soldier.
Feb. 25: Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best.

[I stopped halfway through rereading LeGuin's Gifts because I was finding it unpleasantly dark.]
March 8: The Doorbell Rang, Rex Stout. Nero Wolfe vs. Hoover's FBI. A bit atypical, Archie's voice is in good form, Wolfe's personality quirks (the agoraphobia and ego) get more attention than his size, and while there is a murder investigation it's not the focus of the job Wolfe has taken, or the narrative.
March 11: Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link. Short story collection, post to follow. [fifteen]
March 13: Over My Dead Body, Rex Stout. Early Nero Wolfe, with Balkan political intrigues, questions of identity, and a German agent who is about what you'd expect the Nazis to have sent abroad to look respectable while doing undercover things shortly before the War. I think rysmiel is right that Stout hadn't quite gotten a handle on the characters that early, but I enjoyed it.
March 17: The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner.
March 18: Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
March 23: The Mislaid Magician, Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Better than the previous in what's now looking like a series, but not as good as Sorcery and Cecilia. Back to the epistolary style of the first, but with four voices, not two, and I had more trouble distinguishing the voices.
March 25: This Dame for Hire, Sandra Scoppetone. Oddly toned WWII detective novel; viewpoint character is a stenographer-turned-PI, who took over the one-man detective agency because her boss is off in the army. A whim from the library, I don't think I'll bother with the sequel. [twenty]
March 29: The Line Between, Peter Beagle short story collection.
March 31: The Nero Wolfe Omnibus, comprising The Red Box and The League of Frightened Men. Two more early ones, the mystery better than the characterization. [Were I concerned about making it to fifty, for some kind of prize, I might count this as two books.]

April 7: Plot It Yourself, Rex Stout. More Nero Wolfe, another off rysmiel's shelf because I wanted something relatively light yesterday.
April 7: Designing Freedom, by Stafford Beer. Collection of six lectures on cybernetics, politics, and such, with notes on (among other things) Chile and the way that Allende was not allowed to succeed. "Every time that we hear that a proposal will destroy society as we know it, we should have the courage to say: 'Thank God; at last.'"
April 8: A Right to Die, Rex Stout [twenty-five]
April 14: Who Goes Here,, Bob Shaw, rather a romp: someone joins the Space Legion to forget, and then tries to find out what it is he wanted to forget. (They have memory-erasing technology, which usually removes only specifics and in his case has left him with no memory at all.) There turns out to be an explanation for why he's called Warren Peace, but there are lots of silly names like that: the next character met is a Capt. Widget.
April 21: Armageddon Rag, George R. R. Martin. Rock and roll, and fantasy, and a hell of a lot darker than War for the Oaks. Martin almost makes me believe in the Nazgul, an incredibly popular rock and roll band that never was; he does make me believe in Sandy Blair, and how powerful the dream of a reunion tour can be, and Larry Richmond wanting to be the musician he grew up worshipping, and the way people believe in magic, good and bad, and the power of music. Thank you, rysmiel.
April 29: The Rebirth of Pan, Jo Walton. And yes, the parts from the POV of the widowed boat are excellent. I found the plot easier to follow as I went along, as the strands came together. I like the ending, both in the sense that it's well-written and fits what came before, and that I like the mood and expansiveness of the last couple of chapters.

May 6: Tripoint, C. J. Cherryh. At Adrian's suggestion, because we were discussing Cherryh and she thought this would be a good place for me to start. The world-building is good (and I gather is part of a many-book thing). It was slow going for a bit near the middle, and I realized this was because there were lots of characters I disliked and almost none I liked (though the protagonist is sympathetic, albeit not someone I'd have wanted to be around). Also, partway through, I was saying things like "God, those are dysfunctional family dynamics." Adrian pointed out that it fits the world-building, and that this is exactly what could happen in that sort of society if one high-status person was that kind of crazy.
May 20: Travel in the Ancient World, Lionel Casson. [thirty]
(Reread Fun Home)
May 25: Tourist Season, Carl Hiaasen
May 28: O Pioneer, Frederick Pohl
May 29: Deadly Silents, Lee Killough

June 3: The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy. Recommended by a panelist at Wiscon, on a panel about "Adventuring in Peace."
June 7: Tomorrow Is Too Far, James White [thirty-five]
(Reread The King's Peace and The King's Name. Rereading is odd; I picked these up again because I remembered specific bits, and the overall shape was familiar, and lots of pieces came back as I read, but much of the detail and shape I hadn't remembered. I think I went through them a lot faster than when I read the first time, and I know I didn't spend as much time thinking about the geography. [began Saturday morning, finished Sunday early afternoon. 6/10)
June 16: A Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 1, Larry Gonick
June 17: Entry to Elsewhen, by John Brunner (2 novelettes and a novella)
June 23: The Princes of the Air, John M. Ford

July 3: Playmates, Robert Parker. Another Spenser mystery, from some years ago and better than the more recent one I read earlier this year--picked up off the library shelf at random as train reading.
July 5: Half Life, Shelley Jackson. Very weird, I liked it, I think it's good, may need to reread it again. Conjoined twins in large numbers--all with two heads on a single torso and the usual number of limbs--and parallels to gay liberation; identity, the malleability of memory and maybe reality, the National Penitence Ground; Venn diagrams as a form of therapy. I borrowed this one from the library because it won the Tiptree Award; I think the light cast on gender here is from the broad areas of identity and classification. [forty]
(July 13: Reread of Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant, in which we go to Uberwald and meet Igors. The more you know, the more jokes you get.)
July 15: The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 50th anniversary anthology, 1999, ed. Ed Ferman and Gordon van Gelder. I skipped one story that I remembered reading and not liking, and abandoned another midway.
[Reread of Elizabeth Lynn's The Dancers of Arun. I've been listing rereads that didn't feel essentially new, this definitely being such, but not counting them.]
July 18: Two more of rysmiel's Nero Wolfe books, Homicide Trio (three novelettes or maybe novellas) and The Mother Hunt, well-crafted although, as Rysmiel noted, the sort of thing that, today, would likely be resolved largely by DNA testing rather than lots of detective legwork.
July 19: His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik. Fun, in a light and cheerful way; Napoleonic wars in a world where dragons have been a given all along, but somehow all the historical events seem the same except that Africa is, we're told, inhabited by humans only near the coasts, the interior being too full of savage beasts.
July 20: The Jade Throne, Naomi Novik. [forty-five. I get a lot of reading done when I'm in Montreal.]; If Death Ever Slept, Rex Stout, decent (not exceptional) Nero Wolfe, meaningless title.
July 21: Novik, Black Powder War, didn't really feel like it had an ending so much as a "tune in next week" (the first two did better at that); Stout, The Silent Speaker, just-post-War Nero Wolfe, he more or less liked the FBI back then.
July 22: Theodore Sturgeon, collection, To Here and the Easel, includes "Shottle Bop" which I had somehow never read, and "There Is No Defense," which Saberhagen almost certain had.; Rex Stout, Triple Jeopardy, three Nero Wolfe novelettes. [fifty: If I were actually in a competition here, all these old, short books would feel like either cheating or good strategy.]
July 23: Alan Garner, The Owl Service, on various loose recommendations over the last few years, notably brisingamen's. I suspect I'm missing something, perhaps knowledge of the Mabinogion, and it felt as though it ended a scene or two before it should have. Points for geography and for depicting and talking about class differences; fewer for characterization, unfortunately.
Anthony Price, Other Paths to Glory, a historian working on trench warfare in the First World War gets tangled with murders, secrets, and secret agents. Well done, good characterization; an extra layer of "time passing" from the 30-odd years between when Price wrote it and the present, to go with the parts he intended, about the gap between the Battle of the Somme and the early 1970s. The war Price was writing about is also fading into history, and in 1973 there were a reasonable number of elderly WWI veterans who his characters could find and talk to; now, a last handful of centenarians. [cue Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," though the British veterans he depicts mostly lacked that bitterness, or wouldn't show it to strangers, even when talking about the "Pals Battalions."]
More Rex Stout, Gambit and Trouble in Triplicate. I should do a secondary count, of everything except the Nero Wolfe books, and see how close I am to fifty.
July 24: C. J. Cherryh, Rimrunners. Space opera, a bit slow to start: I put it down for a couple of days because I had trouble caring about the viewpoint character. When I picked it up again and she started seeming likeable, I realized that part of what Cherryh had been doing was showing us someone who didn't, at that point in her life, much care about herself. The interpersonal stuff is good, but the ending seems a bit odd given that. [fifty-five]
Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise, the only Tey (I think) I hadn't already read. Tey tells us up front who the corpse is going to be, then shows enough of his interactions with people to make me, at least, pleased when he's reported missing and presumably drowned in an extremely muddy river. From there, it's Inspector Grant trying to find the body, and a motive for murder. His friend Marta Hallard turns up again; the victim has been staying in a village where she has a home, and Hallard is happy to give him a few good dinners, and some useful information and conversation. In odd ways, a book about the advantages of being an adult. At one point, Grant thinks that the most important thing he'd want in a wife would be intelligence. The engagement that had been disrupted (though not actually broken) by the visitor was so vulnerable because the man has the bad habit of taking his fiancee, and other people he likes, for granted: it's the ones he dislikes that he's actively considerate of. (Not taking for granted in the sense of being confident of their continued love, but that of course she's listening to his radio broadcasts, and of course she loves him, that's only natural because he's him, while not taking much time to learn about her.)
July 25: Rubber Band, by Rex Stout, a relatively early Nero Wolfe. (I'd picked up a short story collection by someone else after finishing the Tey, and after half a story decided that I'd be better off not reading any further. Rather than skip to the next story and hope (a) it would be a better mood for me, and (b) I'd not go back to the one that bothered me, I shelved it and grabbed something I knew would be safe.
July 28: Lee Killough, Aventine, collection of short stories linked mostly by (made up) location.

August 1: Aaron Elkins, Murder in the Queen's Armes, part of a series, a detective who's mostly a physical anthropologist. Marred by some carelessnesses, noticeably of British history/background (Cromwell didn't have anyone executed in 1685, and the detail was incidental enough that it could be fixed or omitted without messing anything else up). I don't think I'll bother with more.
August 2: Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives. First-person narrative, set in 2005, but the same fast pace and soap-operatic plotting as the Tales of the City series. Fun. [sixty]
August 3: Daniel Keblman, Measuring the World, trans. Carol Brown Janeway. Finished mostly out of stubbornness.
August 5: Margery Allingham, The Allingham Case-book. Collection of shorts, many of them in voices closer to "here's a neat thing that happened to me" than is usual in mystery fiction. Some with her recurring detective Mr. Campion, and several one-offs from viewpoints including a journalist and a woman who wonders what on earth to do with a brooch that she doesn't think she can wear. [Technically a re-read, I think, since I found it on one of our bookshelves, but I think it had been sitting there at least a decade, and I had no recollection of any of the stories.]
August 12: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, Signet Classic collection of 22 stories, being I think most of them and almost everything I'd heard of. I realized at the library, on seeing this, that I'd actually read almost none of the Holmes stuff, so borrowed it.
August 12: Stout, In the Best Families. Mostly Archie in this one, as Wolfe spends most of the book out of sight as he investigates the head of a crime syndicate. I hadn't really thought before about how much Goodwin eats: beef stew, three whole tomatoes, and two pieces of blueberry pie is an ordinary dinner at a luncheonette for him, on a day when he did have lunch.
August 16: Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger, space opera, good. [sixty-five]
August 19: Le Guin, Voices, a book for us who love books.
August 24: Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress
August 26: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

September 3: Jackie Kay, Trumpet (based on a true story)
September 14: Sarah Monette (truepenny, Melusine [seventy]
Sept. 16: Elizabeth Moon, Marque and Reprisal
Sept. 22: Sarah Monette, The Virtu
Sept. 23: Neil Gaiman, M is for Magic, short story collection
Sept. 29: Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, trans. William Weaver (Qfwfq's tales of space-time, dinosaurs, would-be romance, moon milk, predicting the future [our present and recent past], the shape of space-time. No attempt at consistency from one story to the next.)

October 13: Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill, a little too metafictional. [seventy-five]
October 14: Terry Pratchett, Making Money
October 24: Sarah Monette, The Mirador

November 4: John M. Ford, The Scholars of Night
November 10: Jo Walton, Ha'penny
Nov. 14: Nick Sagan, Idlewild [eighty]

Dec. 1: Catherynne Valente, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden
Dec. 1: Rex Stout, And Be A Villain
Dec. 16: Esther Friesner, ed., The Chick Is in the Mail
Dec. 21: Geoff Ryman, Lust, or No Harm Rysmiel was right that I'd remember the Picasso section. Part 1 is not merely non- but anti-erotic, and rather a downer, the breakup of a relationship. Parts 2 and 3 make up for that--and need it, in order to work.

"50 book challenge"

In my case, the challenge is to get and pick up books, instead of net stuff (blogs don't count), newspapers, and computer/Palm games. If I were actually doing that challenge, it would also be to emphasize things that are new to me, rather than rereading. (Magazines seem almost irrelevant, since I'm basically using them as bathroom reading.)

I don't expect to post reviews of everything I read this year; it might be worth listing them all, in this entry, which I may or may not remember to update as I go. The last time I tried keeping such a list, my junior year of high school (a friend told me that some colleges would take that list instead of an essay about reading; she was right, and I got into the school in question), it came in at over 200, not counting textbooks but counting novels assigned for English class. I'm not going to bother listing re-reads unless it's been long enough that the book in question feels new to me; this may include things I'm not sure whether I've read before.

Thus far (posting 13 January, but haven't read anything but net stuff so far today): 253; 2 Nero Wolfes (Might As Well Be Dead; Champagne for One); Those Gentle Voices (Effinger); The Moon Children (Williamson). So, five new books in the first 12 days of the year, all of them novels. Next up should probably be the Tiptree bio, since it has a due date.

Addendum, 20 May: I'm trying to make this list complete, so I'm adding things here whether or not I do more detailed posts about them.

Jan. 21: Jokes and the Unconscious, Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa (graphic novel); disappointing
Jan. 25: Louisiana Lament,, Julie Smith (http://redbird.livejournal.com/932303.html)
Jan. 28: Julie Phillips's biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (http://redbird.livejournal.com/933147.html)

Feb. 1: Death of a Doxy, Rex Stout. Another Nero Wolfe, fun, Archie's voice in good form.
Feb. 9: Beowulf, Heaney trans. Post to follow. [ten]
Feb. 11: Night Passage, Robert Parker. Police procedural rather than mystery: for the most part, we watch the viewpoint detective, the criminals, and the other townspeople in real-time, so we see things being plotted and know who did them. Also character study of relationships and of the detective getting past his drinking problem, at least for a while. I'm getting tired of the rhythm imposed by Parker's extremely short chapters: it breaks things up and reduces my momentum and involvement in the story, rather than increasing them.
Feb. 17: Learning the World, Ken MacLeod. Good world-building (both the colony ship and the alien space bats, but it ends awfully suddenly.
Feb. 18: Not Quite Dead Enough, Rex Stout. Two novellas (or maybe a novella and a novelette by the WSFS rules), the title story and "Booby Trap". Set during World War II, Archie is "Major Goodwin" and spends a chunk of the first story persuading Wolfe to consult for the military using his detective skills rather than trying to get into shape and enlist as a soldier.
Feb. 25: Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best.

[I stopped halfway through rereading LeGuin's Gifts because I was finding it unpleasantly dark.]
March 8: The Doorbell Rang, Rex Stout. Nero Wolfe vs. Hoover's FBI. A bit atypical, Archie's voice is in good form, Wolfe's personality quirks (the agoraphobia and ego) get more attention than his size, and while there is a murder investigation it's not the focus of the job Wolfe has taken, or the narrative.
March 11: Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link. Short story collection, post to follow. [fifteen]
March 13: Over My Dead Body, Rex Stout. Early Nero Wolfe, with Balkan political intrigues, questions of identity, and a German agent who is about what you'd expect the Nazis to have sent abroad to look respectable while doing undercover things shortly before the War. I think rysmiel is right that Stout hadn't quite gotten a handle on the characters that early, but I enjoyed it.
March 17: The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner.
March 18: Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
March 23: The Mislaid Magician, Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Better than the previous in what's now looking like a series, but not as good as Sorcery and Cecilia. Back to the epistolary style of the first, but with four voices, not two, and I had more trouble distinguishing the voices.
March 25: This Dame for Hire, Sandra Scoppetone. Oddly toned WWII detective novel; viewpoint character is a stenographer-turned-PI, who took over the one-man detective agency because her boss is off in the army. A whim from the library, I don't think I'll bother with the sequel. [twenty]
March 29: The Line Between, Peter Beagle short story collection.
March 31: The Nero Wolfe Omnibus, comprising The Red Box and The League of Frightened Men. Two more early ones, the mystery better than the characterization. [Were I concerned about making it to fifty, for some kind of prize, I might count this as two books.]

April 7: Plot It Yourself, Rex Stout. More Nero Wolfe, another off rysmiel's shelf because I wanted something relatively light yesterday.
April 7: Designing Freedom, by Stafford Beer. Collection of six lectures on cybernetics, politics, and such, with notes on (among other things) Chile and the way that Allende was not allowed to succeed. "Every time that we hear that a proposal will destroy society as we know it, we should have the courage to say: 'Thank God; at last.'"
April 8: A Right to Die, Rex Stout [twenty-five]
April 14: Who Goes Here,, Bob Shaw, rather a romp: someone joins the Space Legion to forget, and then tries to find out what it is he wanted to forget. (They have memory-erasing technology, which usually removes only specifics and in his case has left him with no memory at all.) There turns out to be an explanation for why he's called Warren Peace, but there are lots of silly names like that: the next character met is a Capt. Widget.
April 21: Armageddon Rag, George R. R. Martin. Rock and roll, and fantasy, and a hell of a lot darker than War for the Oaks. Martin almost makes me believe in the Nazgul, an incredibly popular rock and roll band that never was; he does make me believe in Sandy Blair, and how powerful the dream of a reunion tour can be, and Larry Richmond wanting to be the musician he grew up worshipping, and the way people believe in magic, good and bad, and the power of music. Thank you, rysmiel.
April 29: The Rebirth of Pan, Jo Walton. And yes, the parts from the POV of the widowed boat are excellent. I found the plot easier to follow as I went along, as the strands came together. I like the ending, both in the sense that it's well-written and fits what came before, and that I like the mood and expansiveness of the last couple of chapters.

May 6: Tripoint, C. J. Cherryh. At Adrian's suggestion, because we were discussing Cherryh and she thought this would be a good place for me to start. The world-building is good (and I gather is part of a many-book thing). It was slow going for a bit near the middle, and I realized this was because there were lots of characters I disliked and almost none I liked (though the protagonist is sympathetic, albeit not someone I'd have wanted to be around). Also, partway through, I was saying things like "God, those are dysfunctional family dynamics." Adrian pointed out that it fits the world-building, and that this is exactly what could happen in that sort of society if one high-status person was that kind of crazy.
May 20: Travel in the Ancient World, Lionel Casson. [thirty]
(Reread Fun Home)
May 25: Tourist Season, Carl Hiaasen
May 28: O Pioneer, Frederick Pohl
May 29: Deadly Silents, Lee Killough

June 3: The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy. Recommended by a panelist at Wiscon, on a panel about "Adventuring in Peace."
June 7: Tomorrow Is Too Far, James White [thirty-five]
(Reread The King's Peace and The King's Name. Rereading is odd; I picked these up again because I remembered specific bits, and the overall shape was familiar, and lots of pieces came back as I read, but much of the detail and shape I hadn't remembered. I think I went through them a lot faster than when I read the first time, and I know I didn't spend as much time thinking about the geography. [began Saturday morning, finished Sunday early afternoon. 6/10)
June 16: A Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 1, Larry Gonick
June 17: Entry to Elsewhen, by John Brunner (2 novelettes and a novella)
June 23: The Princes of the Air, John M. Ford

July 3: Playmates, Robert Parker. Another Spenser mystery, from some years ago and better than the more recent one I read earlier this year--picked up off the library shelf at random as train reading.
July 5: Half Life, Shelley Jackson. Very weird, I liked it, I think it's good, may need to reread it again. Conjoined twins in large numbers--all with two heads on a single torso and the usual number of limbs--and parallels to gay liberation; identity, the malleability of memory and maybe reality, the National Penitence Ground; Venn diagrams as a form of therapy. I borrowed this one from the library because it won the Tiptree Award; I think the light cast on gender here is from the broad areas of identity and classification. [forty]
(July 13: Reread of Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant, in which we go to Uberwald and meet Igors. The more you know, the more jokes you get.)
July 15: The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 50th anniversary anthology, 1999, ed. Ed Ferman and Gordon van Gelder. I skipped one story that I remembered reading and not liking, and abandoned another midway.
[Reread of Elizabeth Lynn's The Dancers of Arun. I've been listing rereads that didn't feel essentially new, this definitely being such, but not counting them.]
July 18: Two more of rysmiel's Nero Wolfe books, Homicide Trio (three novelettes or maybe novellas) and The Mother Hunt, well-crafted although, as Rysmiel noted, the sort of thing that, today, would likely be resolved largely by DNA testing rather than lots of detective legwork.
July 19: His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik. Fun, in a light and cheerful way; Napoleonic wars in a world where dragons have been a given all along, but somehow all the historical events seem the same except that Africa is, we're told, inhabited by humans only near the coasts, the interior being too full of savage beasts.
July 20: The Jade Throne, Naomi Novik. [forty-five. I get a lot of reading done when I'm in Montreal.]; If Death Ever Slept, Rex Stout, decent (not exceptional) Nero Wolfe, meaningless title.
July 21: Novik, Black Powder War, didn't really feel like it had an ending so much as a "tune in next week" (the first two did better at that); Stout, The Silent Speaker, just-post-War Nero Wolfe, he more or less liked the FBI back then.
July 22: Theodore Sturgeon, collection, To Here and the Easel, includes "Shottle Bop" which I had somehow never read, and "There Is No Defense," which Saberhagen almost certain had.; Rex Stout, Triple Jeopardy, three Nero Wolfe novelettes. [fifty: If I were actually in a competition here, all these old, short books would feel like either cheating or good strategy.]
July 23: Alan Garner, The Owl Service, on various loose recommendations over the last few years, notably brisingamen's. I suspect I'm missing something, perhaps knowledge of the Mabinogion, and it felt as though it ended a scene or two before it should have. Points for geography and for depicting and talking about class differences; fewer for characterization, unfortunately.
Anthony Price, Other Paths to Glory, a historian working on trench warfare in the First World War gets tangled with murders, secrets, and secret agents. Well done, good characterization; an extra layer of "time passing" from the 30-odd years between when Price wrote it and the present, to go with the parts he intended, about the gap between the Battle of the Somme and the early 1970s. The war Price was writing about is also fading into history, and in 1973 there were a reasonable number of elderly WWI veterans who his characters could find and talk to; now, a last handful of centenarians. [cue Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," though the British veterans he depicts mostly lacked that bitterness, or wouldn't show it to strangers, even when talking about the "Pals Battalions."]
More Rex Stout, Gambit and Trouble in Triplicate. I should do a secondary count, of everything except the Nero Wolfe books, and see how close I am to fifty.
July 24: C. J. Cherryh, Rimrunners. Space opera, a bit slow to start: I put it down for a couple of days because I had trouble caring about the viewpoint character. When I picked it up again and she started seeming likeable, I realized that part of what Cherryh had been doing was showing us someone who didn't, at that point in her life, much care about herself. The interpersonal stuff is good, but the ending seems a bit odd given that. [fifty-five]
Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise, the only Tey (I think) I hadn't already read. Tey tells us up front who the corpse is going to be, then shows enough of his interactions with people to make me, at least, pleased when he's reported missing and presumably drowned in an extremely muddy river. From there, it's Inspector Grant trying to find the body, and a motive for murder. His friend Marta Hallard turns up again; the victim has been staying in a village where she has a home, and Hallard is happy to give him a few good dinners, and some useful information and conversation. In odd ways, a book about the advantages of being an adult. At one point, Grant thinks that the most important thing he'd want in a wife would be intelligence. The engagement that had been disrupted (though not actually broken) by the visitor was so vulnerable because the man has the bad habit of taking his fiancee, and other people he likes, for granted: it's the ones he dislikes that he's actively considerate of. (Not taking for granted in the sense of being confident of their continued love, but that of course she's listening to his radio broadcasts, and of course she loves him, that's only natural because he's him, while not taking much time to learn about her.)
July 25: Rubber Band, by Rex Stout, a relatively early Nero Wolfe. (I'd picked up a short story collection by someone else after finishing the Tey, and after half a story decided that I'd be better off not reading any further. Rather than skip to the next story and hope (a) it would be a better mood for me, and (b) I'd not go back to the one that bothered me, I shelved it and grabbed something I knew would be safe.
July 28: Lee Killough, Aventine, collection of short stories linked mostly by (made up) location.

August 1: Aaron Elkins, Murder in the Queen's Armes, part of a series, a detective who's mostly a physical anthropologist. Marred by some carelessnesses, noticeably of British history/background (Cromwell didn't have anyone executed in 1685, and the detail was incidental enough that it could be fixed or omitted without messing anything else up). I don't think I'll bother with more.
August 2: Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives. First-person narrative, set in 2005, but the same fast pace and soap-operatic plotting as the Tales of the City series. Fun. [sixty]
August 3: Daniel Keblman, Measuring the World, trans. Carol Brown Janeway. Finished mostly out of stubbornness.
August 5: Margery Allingham, The Allingham Case-book. Collection of shorts, many of them in voices closer to "here's a neat thing that happened to me" than is usual in mystery fiction. Some with her recurring detective Mr. Campion, and several one-offs from viewpoints including a journalist and a woman who wonders what on earth to do with a brooch that she doesn't think she can wear. [Technically a re-read, I think, since I found it on one of our bookshelves, but I think it had been sitting there at least a decade, and I had no recollection of any of the stories.]
August 12: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, Signet Classic collection of 22 stories, being I think most of them and almost everything I'd heard of. I realized at the library, on seeing this, that I'd actually read almost none of the Holmes stuff, so borrowed it.
August 12: Stout, In the Best Families. Mostly Archie in this one, as Wolfe spends most of the book out of sight as he investigates the head of a crime syndicate. I hadn't really thought before about how much Goodwin eats: beef stew, three whole tomatoes, and two pieces of blueberry pie is an ordinary dinner at a luncheonette for him, on a day when he did have lunch.
August 16: Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger, space opera, good. [sixty-five]
August 19: Le Guin, Voices, a book for us who love books.
August 24: Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress
August 26: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

September 3: Jackie Kay, Trumpet (based on a true story)
September 14: Sarah Monette (truepenny, Melusine [seventy]
Sept. 16: Elizabeth Moon, Marque and Reprisal
Sept. 22: Sarah Monette, The Virtu
Sept. 23: Neil Gaiman, M is for Magic, short story collection
Sept. 29: Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, trans. William Weaver (Qfwfq's tales of space-time, dinosaurs, would-be romance, moon milk, predicting the future [our present and recent past], the shape of space-time. No attempt at consistency from one story to the next.)

October 13: Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill, a little too metafictional. [seventy-five]
October 14: Terry Pratchett, Making Money
October 24: Sarah Monette, The Mirador

November 4: John M. Ford, The Scholars of Night
November 10: Jo Walton, Ha'penny
Nov. 14: Nick Sagan, Idlewild [eighty]

Dec. 1: Catherynne Valente, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden
Dec. 1: Rex Stout, And Be A Villain
Dec. 16: Esther Friesner, ed., The Chick Is in the Mail
Dec. 21: Geoff Ryman, Lust, or No Harm Rysmiel was right that I'd remember the Picasso section. Part 1 is not merely non- but anti-erotic, and rather a downer, the breakup of a relationship. Parts 2 and 3 make up for that--and need it, in order to work.