Month 49 of 260 (18.85 percent)
Size of list: 90,609 pages (16.50 percent above start)
Pages read: 24,870 (27.45 percent)
H-list: 6,883/23,907 (28.79 percent)
N-list: 9,628/36,960 (26.05 percent)O-list: 8,359/29,742 (28.11 percent)
Reading: A Crown of Swords, Tigana
Finished: Way Station
Added: The Calculating Stars, Space Opera
Removed: The Soft Machine
Way Station, the 1964 Hugo winner, is a book about a man who is impossibly old, because for the past hundred years he has been tending a house that aliens use to transit across the galaxy. Earth is not ready for contact, the galaxy has judged, but it's needed, so aliens recruit a soldier returned from the Civil War soldier to tend a house in rural Wisconsin. Everything in the book takes place in and around that house (except maybe a scene between two federal agents; I don't remember whether that was specifically in D.C., but I think it was). It's not about the aliens, but about how humans react to each other, and how mobs can be whipped up against someone or something that is different. Oh, and our predisposition for blowing ourselves up. It was good. (Also, the main character is named Enoch, but an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. writer told me on Twitter that the show's Enoch is not named after this one.)
I dropped The Soft Machine by Burroughs after maybe 50 pages. It was just... well, repellent. My copy hadn't been checked out of its library in decades, and I could see why.
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