Bout of Books 24 Day One Update

As I predicted, since it was the first day of classes at my university, I didn't do a whole lot of reading on Monday. I started in the morning with a very small amount of pages in Meera Nanda's Prophets Facing Backward, a book that I've known about for a while,since she was one of Alan Sokal's allies when he hoaxed the journal Social Text.  A lot of the people who were around Sokal seem to have gone further right politically, but Nanda does not seem to be one of them, as her other books are solidly left critiques of Hindu nationalism.  As interested as I am in how she develops her argument, which is relevant for research I'm doing on how people understand or define fascism, I had to leave to go to the office, at which point, more reading in that book was out of the question. Beyond reading stuff that I'll be teaching on Wednesday, I didn't get back to reading until the evening, when I read about 50 pages of Lauren Beukes' Zoo City before falling asleep. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, but either I got out of the swing of it for the second half, or the plot doesn't really cohere from the beginning to the end. I keep feeling like it's going along one line, then it seems to switch to a new direction, making it read like a series of unconnected scenes.  I'm close to being done, and it seems like I still barely have an idea of what's going on. That might be that the author's more interested in the world building than the story, so it seems like a travelogue in a cool fantasy land....or it might be that I'm always reading it when I'm not entirely awake.

Today's Bout of Books challenge:
 5 favorite fictional characters at a dinner party - who do I invite and what do I serve?  Hmm, I'll invite the main character of An Unnecessary Woman, Aaliya Sohbi. If I start with her, the group would need to be small, because she makes a point that she's quite anti-social. Milly from the novel Christadora, the artist who always feels in her husband's or her mother's shadow, would probably have something to talk with her about, despite their living in different places under radically different circumstances. To discuss the human condition with them, why not also invite Lilith Iyapo, the mother of hybrid human-oankali from Octavia Butler's xenogenesis trilogy? With myself and these three, I think we'd have plenty to discuss. We'd start with some olives and cheese and bread, and then eat something simple and delicious, roast chicken and vegetables maybe, with wine of course.