not in kansas anymore

I'm not entirely sure if I'm actually intending to follow my self-created reading challenge or not, but I did update that list with the things I've happened to have read so far.

It's interesting how unusual it feels to me to have 'so many' 20thC titles on my "read" list. By that I mean, I've been putting through PG Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers, which is really not a wide range of 20thC literature. Though it is fascinating, looking at their publication dates, to see that they're within just a few years of each other, and the Jeeves stories are closer to WWI chronologically. It hadn't occurred to me until just this moment to see them as sharing a core structure of "wealthy, dandyish gentleman and his butler live a life of unattached adventure", probably because they do extremely different things with that core structure.

Does this mean that there are more "dandy and his butler" stories from the 1920s? Was this a subgenre?? If so I would LOVE to read the ones that didn't famous!


whisperspace: Wednesday is my Very Long Work Day this term so Reading Wednesday will have to be a Wednesday-independent phenomenon for me, for a while.

This year was my first year since perhaps elementary school that I didn't have a school-mandated list of books to shape my reading habits. Obviously I couldn't live without rules, so I've been doing the Popsugar Reading Challenge! I've finished most of the 50 prompts and have really enjoyed figuring out creative ways to fulfill the prompts[1] (especially finding obscure 18thC titles for them![2])

However, I am not really as excited for the 2019 prompts. Several of them look really similar to this year's.[3] And in general, I think I might have gotten what I wanted out of the Popsugar experience. I didn't really spend time chatting in the forums, so it didn't matter to me that other people had the same list; all I really wanted was something to make a spreadsheet about, and something to search Eighteenth Century Collections Online for.

THEREFORE, I am thinking of making my own list, and seek wacky prompts from you, yes, you! What kinds of books should I try to find?

I particularly enjoy prompts like "a book with X word in the title": what are some words I should go on a scavenger hunt for this year?


[1] My proudest prompt-fill is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making for "A book that involves a bookstore or library," for which the library in question is a dragon.

[2] The best 18thC find is "The Effects of Tyranny & Disobedience!" by Lawrence Lovesense, for "A book by an author with the same first or last name as you." (Yes, it's true, my last name is Lovesense. Please don't doxx me.)

[3] "Nordic Noir" this year and "a book set in Scandinavia" next year; "a book set on a different planet" this year and "a book set in space" next year...