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This was originally posted to the Bring-Your-Own-Book-Club comm on Pillowfort for the June-August 2021 Challenge--summer reading decision flowchart--on August 17, 2021.

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Title: The Palace Job

Author: Patrick Weekes

Genre: Fantasy

Challenge category: Recommended by a website algorithm

Why did you choose this book? I don't know what I read that made Goodreads think this was the book for me, but I've been getting this book as a recommendation at least weekly--sometimes daily--for probably 5 or 6 years. Then I started a mystery challenge that required me to read a heist caper. Since that is very much not my genre, The Palace Job was literally the only one I could think of, courtesy of Goodreads' frequent bludgeoning.

General thoughts: I'm very conflicted. I really liked the characters and the author's writing style, but ultimately I'm just not into heist capers.

Hero: I'mma steal a thing. ::executes elaborate plan::

Villain: I foresaw your elaborate plan and countered it. Now you're at my mercy!

Hero: I foresaw that you would foresee my plan and it was part of my plan! Take that!

Villain: ::pulls a plot twist out of his ass:: Ha ha! I foresaw that you would foresee...etc., etc., etc.

Lather, rinse, repeat for a whole book.

I mean, I can see why people who like this sort of thing like this sort of thing. I thought it was fun at first too, but over the course of 300 pages, it was just emotionally exhausting. I couldn't really get invested in anything because I already knew that what it looked like was happening was not actually what was happening.

Would you recommend this book? Yes? It wasn't really for me, but I think that was more of a me problem than the book's problem. There were parts of it that I enjoyed very much, but none of those parts involved the heist caper, about which I did not care.

P.S. -- I finished it! I started reading this as an ebook on the first day of this challenge 2 1/2 months ago and I finally finished it! ::throws confetti::

( Flowchart behind cut )

This was originally posted to the Bring-Your-Own-Book-Club comm on Pillowfort for the February 2020 Challenge--a book about or featuring a historical figure--on February 17, 2020.

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Title: Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys

Author: Michael Collins

Genre: Memoir

Why did you choose this book? Years ago, I saw Michael Collins interviewed in a documentary about the space program. He was charming and funny and didn't seem too invested in the "Right Stuff" mythos of the astronaut. Then last summer I read Failure is Not an Option by Mission Control flight director Gene Kranz, and he singled out Carrying the Fire as the best book about what it was really like to be an astronaut.

Did you know much about the person featured in the book prior to reading? Pretty much. I knew he was the command module pilot on Apollo 11 (aka, the one guy who didn't get to land on the moon), that he'd done an EVA on Gemini 10, and that he was the first director of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. It was the little details I didn't know. When Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 fire, Collins was the one who had to break the news to Chaffee's wife.

General thoughts: You never really know what you're going to get with an astronaut memoir. Some are interested in maintaining the heroic image, some are engineers who will bury you in technobabble, and some will wax poetic about the stark beauty of the moon or the fragile beauty of the Earth. Michael Collins will tell you how hard he found it to sleep his first night in orbit aboard Gemini 10 because he couldn't figure out what to do with his hands. When weightless, if a person isn't making an effort to use their arms, the hands tend to float around, and the cockpit of Gemini 10 was so small that he was afraid one of his hands would float into a toggle switch while he was asleep and accidentally vent the oxygen or something.

There was some engineering info included, but Collins was not an engineer himself so all the technical stuff is brief, in layman's terms, and only there to show the kinds of things that had to be figured out, like how to make it easy enough to eject from the spacecraft in an emergency that it could be done quickly while under duress, but not so easy that an ejection could be triggered accidentally by bumping into the control or catching a sleeve on it.

Collins also goes over the very extensive training the astronauts were given in everything from jungle survival to geology to flying helicopters. But just when you're starting to get awestruck at what they accomplished, he'll turn around and present--verbatim--the 17 point checklist of the official Gemini urination procedure. He really does seem to like poking holes in the mystique of being an astronaut.

The only thing that really detracted from the book was the occasional comment that reminded you that this book was originally published in 1974 and written by someone who was career military (he didn't use a ghostwriter). He was very respectful when talking about his wife and clearly loved her very much, but then a sexist comment would come flying out of nowhere, like referring to flight attendants as "honeys." Fortunately, it didn't happen often, which is why it was so jarring when it did.

Would you recommend this book? Definitely.