50 book challenge: #19, #20, #21, #22, #23.

#19: The Fellowship of the Ring. It's been about 10 years, at least, since I last read this.

#20: The Farthest Shore. Third book in LeGuin's Earthsea series. Tombs of Atuan is the best; both this and the first suffer from vague plots, and unspecified plot devices. This is a hazard where magic forms a major element of the story, I guess.

#21: Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic. Meh. I was disappointed. As if Piers Anthony and Douglas Adams had a less funny love child. I will persist with the Discworld series because I've heard good things, though.

#22: Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene. Surprising; I didn't know what to expect, but I liked this. Reminded me in some ways of Lucky Jim, but with more serious stakes. (How could anything be more serious than the economy of the Dutch shipbuilding industry in 1630s?)

#23: Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome. Needs less dull, more droll. I really, really wanted to like this, and parts were funny, but in the end JKJ never seemed willing to let me get the joke on my own---there was always a sentence that made things a little too obvious (even if part of the humor was in the obvious overstatement). I guess I'm in the minority on this one, since it seems to be universally adored. On a personal note, I once visited Jerome's house in Buckinghamshire, when I was living in London. A friend of mine and his family were living there currently, and we made a pitstop there while driving to Wales for a camping trip. It was a v. v. charming English country house. Thank you, Henry Curran. (At least now I know that Jerome originated the phrase: "I love work, it fascinates me; I could sit and watch it all day," without which hundreds of office coffee mugs would be vacant.)

50 book challenge: #16, 17, 18.

#16: Inventing the Middle Ages:The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. Norman F. Cantor. I should have gone straight to the chapter on Lewis and Tolkien, and quit after that. The writing was fluid but sometimes florid, and you sometimes got the feeling that Cantor was settling scores. The hagiographic approach to R.W. Southern, too, was odd. The failure to found an institute in his name was "Arthurian tragedy"? Talk about defining tragedy downward.

#17: A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin. Yes, I've been reduced to reading young-adult fiction. These books are good, though.

#18: The Tombs of Atuan, LeGuin.