The Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

#22: Read a book that has a different setting (e.g. city, farm, boat, etc.) than the previous book.
(also the July random book selection)

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Quite a short book: this edition is around 100 pages, well-spaced, on pages small enough to fit in a pocket. There's some scene setting, but most of it is a collection of brief sayings on various topics, such as "Love", "Crime and Punishment", "Pleasure", "Buying and Selling", "Good and Evil", and so on.

It's written in a style that might be described as poetic but I found off-putting; I feel that a book written in New York City in the 1910s doesn't have a natural right to contain so much "verily" and "unto".

The blurb on the back would have it that it's been translated into many languages and sold millions of copies and changed many lives; I didn't find it life-changing, though I grant that reading it out of idle curiosity wouldn't have put me in the most receptive frame of mind. The bits that resonated with me most were things I already believed, although some of them could stand to be said more often (I particularly liked the section on "Children", the theme of which is that children are not possessions and that the role of a parent is not to mold a child into the parent's chosen image but to help the child find its own path).

#23: Read a book with a page count within 20 pages of the previous book's.
(also the August random book selection)

The Practical Princess, and other liberating fairy tales by Jay Williams. A collection of fairy tales featuring proactive princesses and unconventional heroes. Short and entertaining. I'd been worried that it might be mean-spirited, but I think I had it mixed up with a different book with a similar title.

My favourite story was "Stupid Marco", despite the title (which isn't even accurate; the story itself starts out by immediately stating that Prince Marco isn't actually stupid, just inattentive, poor at following directions, and incapable of remembering left from right). I also felt some kinship with the hero of "Philbert the Fearful", a knight who would rather stay at home and read a book than go on dangerous quests.

#24: Read a book that shares a word in the title (exactly or as a synonym) with the previous book.
(alternate pick for the August random book selection)

A Princess of the Chameln by Cherry Wilder. I've enjoyed a couple of other series by Cherry Wilder, but this one felt like it was lacking something that they had. It's (for the most part - one or two scenes are devastatingly effective exceptions) a slow, solemn book where the characters feel like they're at a remove from the reader.

One of the reviews on StoryGraph compares it to Tolkien, which prompts the thought that what it's missing is hobbits - not literally, of course, but in the sense that everybody is always very serious and one struggles to picture any of them having a silly conversation about taters, or an argument about the best way to translate a pun (something which, incidentally, does happen in my favourite of Wilder's novels). Seriousness is not inappropriate to the situation the characters are in, but when they're always serious the whole thing ends up feeling kind of flat; the novel covers ten years of in-story time, and that's a long time to go without finding anything to laugh about. I was reasonably satisfied by the end, but I'm not motivated to read any of the sequels.