The City Of Seattle Public Library has also started a reading challenge, a kind of book bingo. You get a form at the library divided into 25 squares, and read a book of the topic listed in that square. The center square is a freebie. This challenge runs throughout the summer. I'm gonna double-deep with some of these ;-) Well, not that much, because the categories are different. There's a chance to win prizes which I like. The one other time I did a SPL reading challenge, I won something. (I think a Starbucks card? Memory's hazy.)
I did finish another one, the excellent
Harm by British SF author Brian Aldiss, who at the time my chosen book was published, 2007, was in his eighties. (!) I can only hope I write as long. Harm was the story of a young half-Muslim English writer who is imprisoned and tortured in a near-future London because of a seditious line in his humorous novel. As he is interrogated, he creates another story in his mind, that of a character on a recently colonized planet where society is not doing so well because of idealics and politics. It was a fascinating read, I blazed through it on my lunch hours which was not the case with Cinder, my previous read, which was a damn chore. I wonder why I could read something difficult and thought-provoking so readily, and something simple and spoon-fed, so slowly? Anyway, the book was not so much about Islam as about the paranoid environment after Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist attacks. Christianity actually figured in the story more, used as a plot element but neither derided nor espoused.
One of the things I liked about the book, and a thing I have never before seen done properly before, was how the protagonist creates the dream world he goes to, written in a way similar to the progression of real, REM-type dreams, where there's a bare skeleton of a place and situation at first that is later sketched out as the mind sleeps along, incorporated pieces of real-world recent events and memories also. The author explains this away as the hero's affliction of multiple personality disorder, which seems too obvious -- it's really about the creative process of a writer, whether or not they are dreaming, in coming up with a character and a situation, then musing it and adding more elements.
Next up is
Yellowtail, because I've got an interest now in reading some Native American stuff. Wow, I'm only four more books away from finishing!
- Coming to a theater near you: A book made into a major motion picture. (Stardust by Neil Gaimon) FINISHED ***
- East meets West: A book taking place in Asia (anywhere in Asia; Turkey to Japan, Siberia to Indonesia) (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See) FINISHED *****
- What you read: A book you loved as a child. (CHANGED: A Wrinkle Out of Time, by Madeleine L'Engle)
- Loose ends: A book you started last year and haven’t yet finished. (Cinder by Marissa Meyer) FINISHED *
- No hablo: A translation. (The King of the Fields, Isaac Bashevis Singer)
- Out of the park on first at bat: A debut. (Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer, by Laini Taylor) FINISHED **
- Huh, I never knew that: A book in a new-to-you genre. (The Aviary Gate, by Katie Hickman. It's Historical Romance.) FINISHED ***
- Rainbow warrior: A book with a color in the title. (Yellowtail, Crow Medicine Man and Sun Dance Chief, an Autobiography told to Michael Oren Fitzgerald)
- Who was that, again?: A book about a person you know little about. (The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, by Jack Weatherford)
- God’s mansion has many rooms: A book based in a religion not your own. (Harm, by Brian W. Aldiss) FINISHED *****
- Ye olde booke shoppe: A book written before 1700. (Gilgamesh.) FINISHED ***
- Three-color mythology: A graphic novel or comic book. (Tiger Lung, by Roy Simon) FINISHED *****