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June Reading List:
Brown Girl in the Ring - Nalo Hopkinson - 5 stars - LGBT/MasterWorks/WoGF
Darker Than You Think - Jack Williamson - 4 stars - GrandMaster/MW/Fantasia
Little Brother - Cory Doctorow - 5 stars - 12 Awards
Shadow of the Torturer - Gene Wolfe - 4 stars - GM/F/The Number of the Counting Shall be 3
The Cold Commands - Richark K. Morgan - 3 stars - LGBT/F/3/I Just Have to Read...
The Stainless Steel Rat - Harry Harrison - 4 stars - GM

also read The Hobbit for book club. 5 stars of course.

The Cold Commands was a disappointment.  Sequel slump.  I'm hoping the third in the trilogy picks up.

My partner convinced me to read Little Brother, so decided to add 12 Awards in 12 Months. That way I could also include two more of the Gene Wolfe New Sun tetrology. That makes a trilogy, so I added The Number of the Counting Shall be 3. By adding those two challenges, I added 8 physical books to my list for the year. I now need 23 to finish (37 virtual books).

The stats:
I Just Have to Read... 12/12
Grand Master 6/12
LGBT 8/12
MasterWorks 7/12
WoGF 9/12
2nd Best 8/12
Fantasia 11/12
Elizabeth Noun 1/3
12 Awards in 12 Months 5/12
The Number ...3 4/9

Books Read in June

1 The Cryptonomicon  Neal Stephenson

2 Gathering Blue Lois Lowry

3 Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions Kate Wilhelm

4 Watership Down Richard Adams

5 The Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. Le Guin

6 Unnatural Creatures Neil Gaiman

7 The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories H. P. Lovecraft

8 The Thief Lord Cornelia Funke

9 The Freedom Maze Delia Sherman

10 A Stranger in Olondria Sophia Samatar

11 Ammonite Nicola Griffith

This month’s standouts: Cryptonomicon, Watership Down and The Freedom Maze

Pick and Mix 12/12

12 Awards/12 Months 9/12

Short Fiction 11/12

Authors of Color 1/12

The End of the World 8/12

Marxists, etc 8/12

The 35 25/35

Guardian  9/7

The Second Best 5/12

LGBT 8/12

Fantasia 11/12

The Bucket List 6/9

Read One More By 8/12

Translation Total: 6/12

Women of Genre Fiction 8/12

The Ones 10/12

Total Books Read 43.

At this point 154 of 219 slots filled, with two challenges finished. I should finish Short Fiction and Fantasia in July.

• 12 Awards 6/12
• Masterworks 4/12
• Short Fiction 12/12
• Authors of Color 2/12
• Women of Genre 12/12
• Pick and Mix (lists) 9/12
• Read the Sequel 6/12
• Young Adult 0/12
• Creature Feature 6/6
• End of the World 7/12
• Fantasia 9/12
• In Translation 6/12
• Mythopoeic 3/12
• The 35 17/35
• Guardian 2/7
• Trilogies 6/9
• Second Best 6/12
• Bucket List 4/9

• City of Dark Magic by "Magnus Flyte" (Christina Lynch & Meg Howrey) (2012) (8/10)  A good beach read - fast, fluffy & fun.
• Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman (2011) (7/10)  Well written but disjointed.
• After London: or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies (1885) (6/10)  In the kingdom of the lackwits, our halfwit protagonist, Sir Felix, declines the kingship in favor of, um, wandering about.  (He would really have been better named Sir Feckless).
• The Firelings by Carol Kendall (1981) (7/10)  Precious invented mythology.  OK at first, but it got old fast.
• Wake by Elizabeth Knox (2013) (7/10)  A middling tale centered about a hoary old trope.  Kind of fell off the cliff at the end.
• Tainaron by Leena Krohn (2004) (7/10)  Much strangeness, but not much that resonated.
• Sunshine by Robin McKinley (2003) (7/10)  A strong start, but it tapered off quickly.  At the end. I realized that every one of the characters, despite the attention to their surfaces, were all completely hollow - we hadn't gotten to know ANY of them.
• The Adjacent by Christopher Priest (2013) (9/10) Finally, a great book that made up for all the crap I read this month.  Not really a good entry point for Priest though - you should probably have read at least one or two of his Dream Archipelago books before picking this one up.
  

• Modem Times 2.0 by Michael Moorcock (2011) (7/10)  The fiction was meh, but the interview was interesting.
• James Tiptree, Jr.:  The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips (2006) (9/10)  Fascinating life, well illustrated by voluminous correspondance, the most interesting of which were the "Tiptree" exchanges with Le Guin and Russ.  There was much evidance of sexual frustration throughout her life, which Phillips suggests was due to unrealized lesbian tendencies.  However, I found myself leaning towards the theory that Sheldon was in fact transgendered, a theory well articulated by Farah Mendlesohn's review in Strange Horizons.
• My Real Children by Jo Walton (2014) (8/10)  A simple what-if exercise, endlessly played out on the domestic front.  Well written, but not much there...