[issybird]

Re: smut. I remember when this came up a year ago, there was an informal agreement to use The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as a placeholder for books that dare not speak their names. And if you seem to read and reread the Meditations? Surely it's for the inspiration and consolation they provide.

As for my own challenges, I'm finding it interesting to decide whether or not a book qualifies for my 25 Books about 25 Lands challenge. I didn't have a problem ascribing Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki to England, even though it's by an author surely Scottish in derivation who was born in Burma. The book is entirely English, and England is hardly an issue for me anyway. But book #2, Berlin 1961, was more difficult. It was tempting to check off Germany, but I decided that since the book was really about the Cold War and thus the US and the USSR, it didn't qualify, even though nominally set in Berlin.

On other fronts, even though I can't list or quantify them, two of my challenges were to read less junk and to stop letting Overdrive control my reading. I've had some success with both. I abandoned what would have been a two-star mystery, the first in Charles Todd's newer series about a WWI nurse. I also canceled serveral holds at Overdrive. My new mantra is that if I wouldn't check it out of the physical library, I don't need it from Overdrive.