Wednesday reading
Jun. 11th, 2025 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redbirdLast week:
*Cattitude read Blue Moose, by Daniel Pinkwater, aloud to us, because it's one of his favorites and Adrian had never read it. I've reread the book several times, and was happy to hear it out loud.
*I read Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, by Oliver Darkshire. Decidedly weird, funny fantasy. A lot of the humor is in the footnotes, which seem to be at least a quarter of the text. Also, the title does in fact describe the book. Isabella lives in a poor, out-of-the-way village, whose wizard keeps the local goblin market in check, until one day he doesn't. The goblins sell one thing, unnaturally tempting and dangerous fruit.
*Did not finish: Girls Against God, by Jenny Hval. I don't remember where I saw this recommended, and just couldn't get into it.
Currently reading:
*Installment Immortality, by Seanan McGuire, the latest book in her InCryptid series. I started it late last night, and only read a few pages before turning the light out.
*Twelve Trees, by Daniel Lewis, nonfiction about trees and climate change. I picked this up at the libraru, as a "book with a green caover" for the summer reading challenge.
delight of the evening
Jun. 11th, 2025 11:54 pmkaberettOkay. So.
Admin: the LRP has a variety of in-game resources. One of the more valuable ones is mithril, which gets used for all sorts of things, like armour and weaponry and building works, particularly military ones.
This event we are seeing the launch of The Cow Stock Market. This inevitably was a topic of discussion over this evening's pizza: discussion of the designs of the I Promise To Pay The Bearer On Demand One (1) Cow slips! speculation over Cow Futures! debate over the impact on the gold mithril standard!
It'll be fiiiiiiiiiine, says A. It'll all be TOTALLY fine. You can absolutely build fortifications out of cows!
-- and at this point, for those of you who are abruptly cackling, I need to point out that A has not read Nona the Ninth.
I also need to point out that I am in a specific groupchat, specifically set up following the event where someone managed to get their hands on some copies of Nona a few days before official release and there was consequently significant in-field bartering for who got to be next in the queue to inhale them, that is named after. well. the cows. did you know that cows have best friends.
But A had no idea why I was abruptly losing it, and I decided that rather than attempt to explain I was in fact first of all going to Depart Our Table, find my Nona dealers, and relate unto them the story of The Thing A, All Unawares, Just Said.
The reaction was extremely gratifying.
demos from the Latin American Games Showcase (1/2)
Jun. 11th, 2025 06:06 pmpauraqueI learned a few days ago that the Latin American Games Showcase is happening this week. This is very relevant to my interests, so I downloaded some demos. Too many demos, really, so I'm going to break my thoughts into two posts.
⭐ I want to play this.
❓ Maybe someday if it's on sale or if issues are fixed by release.
🚫 Not for me.
⚒️ Unreleased/early access.
⭐⚒️ ( Oscuro: Blossom's Glow (puzzle platformer - Hongoneon, Costa Rica )
⭐⚒️ ( PancitoMerge (Suika-like puzzle - Fáyer, Mexico )
⭐ ( I Did Not Buy This Ticket (surreal horror visual novel - Tiago Rech, Brazil )
❓ ( Adore (creature-collecting ARPG - Cadabra Games, Brazil )
❓⚒️ ( Beacon of Neyda - Ghost Creative Studio, Uruguay )
🚫 ( The End is Nahual (variety puzzles - Third World Productions, Mexico )
🚫 ( Alexandria IV (sci-fi visual novel - J.M. Beraldo, Brazil )
🚫 ( Dreamcore ('liminal space' walking sim - Montraluz, Argentina )
⭐ I want to play this.
❓ Maybe someday if it's on sale or if issues are fixed by release.
🚫 Not for me.
⚒️ Unreleased/early access.
⭐⚒️ ( Oscuro: Blossom's Glow (puzzle platformer - Hongoneon, Costa Rica )
⭐⚒️ ( PancitoMerge (Suika-like puzzle - Fáyer, Mexico )
⭐ ( I Did Not Buy This Ticket (surreal horror visual novel - Tiago Rech, Brazil )
❓ ( Adore (creature-collecting ARPG - Cadabra Games, Brazil )
❓⚒️ ( Beacon of Neyda - Ghost Creative Studio, Uruguay )
🚫 ( The End is Nahual (variety puzzles - Third World Productions, Mexico )
🚫 ( Alexandria IV (sci-fi visual novel - J.M. Beraldo, Brazil )
🚫 ( Dreamcore ('liminal space' walking sim - Montraluz, Argentina )
Blessings [work, status]
Jun. 11th, 2025 04:42 pmrebeccmeisterIt is already abundantly clear to me that this is an excellent student research team to work with this summer. I am so grateful; I am learning a lot from this group, just as they are clearly already learning a ton from me. It is reaffirming my love of research and teaching and mentoring.
I don't like to write much on public forums about people who don't know about the public forum, so I should leave it at that.
And in the meantime, I would really love it if this sinus/barometric headache could die already, kthxbai. Ibuprofen last night, allergy pill this morning, ibuprofen this afternoon; the ibuprofen briefly dulls the pain, but that's about it.
This research team was more than happy to curate a music playlist for our lab work, which I love so much. Rocking out weighing ants and measuring their heads!
I don't like to write much on public forums about people who don't know about the public forum, so I should leave it at that.
And in the meantime, I would really love it if this sinus/barometric headache could die already, kthxbai. Ibuprofen last night, allergy pill this morning, ibuprofen this afternoon; the ibuprofen briefly dulls the pain, but that's about it.
This research team was more than happy to curate a music playlist for our lab work, which I love so much. Rocking out weighing ants and measuring their heads!
Wednesday somehow agitated the feelings of a small dog in the park
Jun. 11th, 2025 07:18 pmoursinWhat I read
Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation (2024) - rather slight, one for the completist, which I suppose I am.
Robert Rodi, Bitch Goddess (2014): 'told entirely through interviews, e-mails, fan magazine puff pieces, film reviews, shooting scripts, greeting cards, extortion notes, and court depositions', the story of the star of a lot of dire B-movies who has a later-life move into soap-stardom. I hadn't read this one before and it was a lot of campy fun.
TC Parker, Tradwife (2024) - another of those mystery/thrillers which riffs off true-crime style investigation - somebody here I think mentioned it? - I thought it went a few narrative twists too far though was pretty readable up till then.
On the go
Apart from those, still ticking on with Upton Sinclair, Wide Is The Gate (Lanny Budd, #4), boy I am glad that I am reading these in e-form, because they must be monstrous great bricks otherwise. In this one he actually ventures back to Germany, his marriage starts to crumble, he continues his delicate dance between all the various opposed interests in his life while managing to get support to the anti-Nazi/Fascist cause, Spain is now in the picture, and I have just seen a passing mention to Earl Russell being sent down for his Reno divorce (that wasn't quite the story, but one can quite imagine that was what gossip might have made of it 30 years down the line).
Up next
New Literary Review.
The three books for the essay review.
I think more Robert Rodi might be a nice change of pace from Lanny's ordeals.
"And If You're Under Him, You Ain't Getting Over Him." (Vorkosigan Saga) R
Jun. 10th, 2025 08:12 pmlannamichaelsTitle: And If You're Under Him, You Ain't Getting Over Him.
Author:
lannamichaelsFandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Pairing: Ges Vorrutyer/Aral Vorkosigan, Ges Vorrutyer/Serg Vorbarra
Rating: R
A/N: The title is from New Rules, sung by Dua Lipa, written by Caroline Ailin, Emily Warren, and Ian Kirkpatrick.
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld
Summary: Ges Vorrutyer has ex-boyfriend problems.
( This has languished in Scrivener since 2019... )
sat up very straight at around this time last night and went "... oh"
Jun. 10th, 2025 11:29 pmkaberettTwo things:
I keep (especially post-surgery, cotemporal with relearning how to walk) finding more small ways that how I've been doing my various physio exercises isn't quite right. This is a good thing! Isn't it fascinating to be learning more about embodiment and how my body works and how I can best deploy my various muscles!
Up until the hypermobility clinic, all the physio I was ever prescribed made me worse, not better.
It abruptly dawned on me, all at once, that the subtlety of the changes I'm making with adjusting how I'm shifting my weight around and so on and so forth? Are almost certainly not actually externally visible. Like, yes, people not understanding hypermobility and problems with it was also Definitely A Problem, but -- the part where I'm still, mm, not necessarily fixing things but certainly developing them, finding places where even with What The Hypermobility Clinic Told Me To Do I wasn't getting quite right... well, the hypermobility specialists clearly went "eh, good enough", and in terms of the effects on my ability to Things I think they were clearly demonstrably provable correct, but -- yeah, okay, sudden understanding of some of just how difficult it would have been to correct some of this stuff.
(I'm very sure that all my various epiphanies will turn out to be about things that still aren't quite right, that I can still refine further -- I'm having an extended phase of that with Pilates right now -- but this is a good thing, actually. It's really nice to have such clear evidence that I'm getting to know and understand myself better.)
The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach (2019)
Jun. 10th, 2025 01:13 pmpauraqueNote: Stronach came out as trans after this book was published, so earlier reviews may misgender her, as does the cover bio.
In this first book of a planned fantasy trilogy (of which two books have so far been released), we're introduced to the city of Hainak, a seaport that's just been through a political revolution, as well as an alchemical-biological magitech revolution. Our main character is Yat, a naive cop who wants to be a hero, but instead she's just been demoted for being queer. As her life crumbles into a haze of drugs and disillusionment, she stumbles into the doings of a secret faction, gets murdered, and finds herself resurrected with new powers that allow her to manipulate life force with her mind, all of which gives her a very different perspective on what a hero is and what she actually wants to fight for.
So... I really wanted to like this. I did enjoy the Māori-inspired worldbuilding and the author's vivid visual imagination, filling the city with a profusion of bizarre wonders as well as a strong sense of place. I also liked a lot of the characters and cared what happened to them. But ultimately I found the book didn't have enough structure to hold together.
It's being marketed as akin to Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, and I think that comparison pinpoints the problem. Many aspects of the book do seem similar—there's magic with body horror, fantasy with sci-fi, loads of queerness... as well as byzantine political intrigue, misdirections about characters' identities, conversations that don't specify what's being discussed, and long monologues from unidentified speakers. But the reason all the confusing stuff works when Muir does it is that she does eventually provide enough information for you to fit all the pieces together, and on re-reading you discover that all the things that initially confused you actually make complete sense and Muir had a plan all along. And maybe Stronach also has a plan in her head, but if so it didn't make it onto the page. The book ends in a muddle of events that seem superficially dramatic but don't actually explain that much or draw the needed connections between the disparate plot elements.
The part of the book that's presented the most clearly is Yat's journey of realizing that the police only protect the powerful and serve the status quo, so if she wants to be a hero to the downtrodden then being a cop isn't the way to do it. Which would be a perfectly reasonable character arc, except that Yat's backstory is that she was an orphan living on the streets and she saw firsthand on a daily basis what cops are like, so why is her story about her "realizing" something she already knows? I guess she's supposed to be in deep denial, but it just didn't make any sense to me.
Some reviews I read had also led me to believe that the book has a lot more pirate content than it actually does. I mean, it does have pirates! But I felt cheated that we didn't spend more time with them, both because pirates are awesome and because the backstory of these specific pirates was super intriguing but criminally underexplained. I often felt like the book was barely intersecting the outskirts of a way more interesting story centered on the pirate captain and her crew, and wondered why they weren't the main characters.
Anyway, I think there was a lot of potential here but it didn't cohere enough for me to want to continue with the series. Too bad.
In this first book of a planned fantasy trilogy (of which two books have so far been released), we're introduced to the city of Hainak, a seaport that's just been through a political revolution, as well as an alchemical-biological magitech revolution. Our main character is Yat, a naive cop who wants to be a hero, but instead she's just been demoted for being queer. As her life crumbles into a haze of drugs and disillusionment, she stumbles into the doings of a secret faction, gets murdered, and finds herself resurrected with new powers that allow her to manipulate life force with her mind, all of which gives her a very different perspective on what a hero is and what she actually wants to fight for.
So... I really wanted to like this. I did enjoy the Māori-inspired worldbuilding and the author's vivid visual imagination, filling the city with a profusion of bizarre wonders as well as a strong sense of place. I also liked a lot of the characters and cared what happened to them. But ultimately I found the book didn't have enough structure to hold together.
It's being marketed as akin to Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, and I think that comparison pinpoints the problem. Many aspects of the book do seem similar—there's magic with body horror, fantasy with sci-fi, loads of queerness... as well as byzantine political intrigue, misdirections about characters' identities, conversations that don't specify what's being discussed, and long monologues from unidentified speakers. But the reason all the confusing stuff works when Muir does it is that she does eventually provide enough information for you to fit all the pieces together, and on re-reading you discover that all the things that initially confused you actually make complete sense and Muir had a plan all along. And maybe Stronach also has a plan in her head, but if so it didn't make it onto the page. The book ends in a muddle of events that seem superficially dramatic but don't actually explain that much or draw the needed connections between the disparate plot elements.
The part of the book that's presented the most clearly is Yat's journey of realizing that the police only protect the powerful and serve the status quo, so if she wants to be a hero to the downtrodden then being a cop isn't the way to do it. Which would be a perfectly reasonable character arc, except that Yat's backstory is that she was an orphan living on the streets and she saw firsthand on a daily basis what cops are like, so why is her story about her "realizing" something she already knows? I guess she's supposed to be in deep denial, but it just didn't make any sense to me.
Some reviews I read had also led me to believe that the book has a lot more pirate content than it actually does. I mean, it does have pirates! But I felt cheated that we didn't spend more time with them, both because pirates are awesome and because the backstory of these specific pirates was super intriguing but criminally underexplained. I often felt like the book was barely intersecting the outskirts of a way more interesting story centered on the pirate captain and her crew, and wondered why they weren't the main characters.
Anyway, I think there was a lot of potential here but it didn't cohere enough for me to want to continue with the series. Too bad.
This is one of my longstanding grouches and you are all probably used to it
Jun. 10th, 2025 03:13 pmoursinMy attention, as they say, was drawn to this: Why Have So Many Books by Women Been Lost to History?
The question itself is reasonable, I guess, but what is downright WEIRD is they actually namecheck Persephone Press's acts of rediscovery -
- and one of the first books in their own endeavour is one that PP did early on and being Persephone is STILL IN PRINT.
And one of the others has been repeatedly reprinted as a significant work including by Pandora Press.
Do we think there is a) not checking this sort of thing b) erasure of feminist publishing foremothers?
Okay I pointed out that even Virago were not actually digging up Entirely Forgotten Works (ahem ahem South Riding never out of print and paid for a lot of gels to get to Somerville).
However, this did lead me to look up certain rare faves of mine, and lo and behold, British Library Women Writers have actually just reprinted, all praise to them, GB Stern's The Woman in the Hall, 1939 and never republished. Yay. This to my mind is one of her top works.
Also remark here that Furrowed Middlebrow are bringing back works that have genuinely been hard to get hold of, like the non-Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons, and the early Margery Sharps, and so on. (Though Greyladies had already done Noel Streatfeild as Susan Scarlett.)
Confess I am waiting for the Big Publishing Rediscovery of EBC Jones. Would also not mind maybe some attention to Violet Hunt (unfortunately her life was perhaps so dramatic it has outshone her work? gosh the Wikipedia entry is a bit thin.)
not complaining about the weather too much????
Jun. 9th, 2025 10:31 pmlannamichaelsSomehow we got a spring this year -- after so many years of maybe a week between winter and summer -- and I am so so so happy and relieved. Summer is certainly icumen in, but we have had spring. An actual spring. Yay.
Some garden updates [gardening]
Jun. 9th, 2025 08:24 pmrebeccmeisterMy newest mulch pile:
Lovely little flowers on the French lavender:
The Dark Dahlia is behind the lavender, under some rhubarb leaves.
The wine barrel tomato plants are getting much bigger, and have some flowers going:
Some of the ripe strawberries (while walking Martha):
Yummy strawberry-arugula salad! Needed more strawberries. Next time.
Lovely little flowers on the French lavender:
The Dark Dahlia is behind the lavender, under some rhubarb leaves.
The wine barrel tomato plants are getting much bigger, and have some flowers going:
Some of the ripe strawberries (while walking Martha):
Yummy strawberry-arugula salad! Needed more strawberries. Next time.
The problem of too much to write about but not enough time to do so [status]
Jun. 9th, 2025 04:45 pmrebeccmeisterMy summer research team has started up today (3 students). It is going to be a good group, but is definitely going to require a lot of my time and bandwidth.
There are a couple of themes to write about from the Erie Canal trip. I want to write about Moss Island, and about all of the places where we ate food and drank coffee that were worth writing about (many!).
Also maybe about the locks we were able to check out, and learning about the original canal, the expansion about a decade later, and the contemporary canal. There are multiple canal museums along the trail, and we only visited a handful of them!
Then, we had National Learn to Row Day this past Saturday morning, where it rained cats, dogs, and elephants, but because of that I was able to tackle a handful of important boathouse projects. (and in spite of the rain we still had 44 people come to visit us!).
And on Sunday I managed to get some gardening projects done. We're well into strawberry season, although I suspect it's going to be a short season. The lavender has flowers, and the Dark Dahlia has emerged from the soil. I got a second round of branch shredding done, so now there's a newer mulch pile back by the compost. I just feel so much better with everything shredded!
Onward.
There are a couple of themes to write about from the Erie Canal trip. I want to write about Moss Island, and about all of the places where we ate food and drank coffee that were worth writing about (many!).
Also maybe about the locks we were able to check out, and learning about the original canal, the expansion about a decade later, and the contemporary canal. There are multiple canal museums along the trail, and we only visited a handful of them!
Then, we had National Learn to Row Day this past Saturday morning, where it rained cats, dogs, and elephants, but because of that I was able to tackle a handful of important boathouse projects. (and in spite of the rain we still had 44 people come to visit us!).
And on Sunday I managed to get some gardening projects done. We're well into strawberry season, although I suspect it's going to be a short season. The lavender has flowers, and the Dark Dahlia has emerged from the soil. I got a second round of branch shredding done, so now there's a newer mulch pile back by the compost. I just feel so much better with everything shredded!
Onward.
Weekly proof of life (belated again): sentimentality, reading habits, household things...
Jun. 9th, 2025 04:10 pmumadoshiCat Herding: Our beloved Jinksy!bear turned twelve on Saturday. Twelve! He's (by a margin of a good few years) the second-oldest cat I've ever had, and continues to be just the sweetest, softest boy. May he be with us in good health for years to come.
It was also Claudia's birthday, of course, and I always think of her on their birthday. Oh, my darling baby cat.
*The oldest was Jenny, the cat of my childhood who was still with my parents for years after I moved out. She made it to nineteen, most of that time in rock-solid health, and never really forgave me for moving to Toronto and thus straight-up vanishing from her life for months at a time.
Reading: I finished reading Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, which remained an interesting read right through, and read Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances, which I think is only the second thing of his I've read? (Elder Race is the other one I'm sure of.) Having finished it, I'm in a position that's annoyingly familiar, where I liked the book quite a bit and am curious about what happens next, but am not sure I cared enough that I'll ever actually get around to picking up the sequel.
(The thing where I've almost entirely been reading books I own for years now doesn't really help, where I've often picked up the first book of a trilogy of series or whatever on sale in ebook because I've heard it's good, and then am not sure I'm invested enough to pay full price on the next one when I own literally hundreds of yet-unread books. Feh.)
Watching:scruloose and I are up to date on Murderbot and have seen the first episode of Kingdom season 2.
In the case of the former, I'm skeptical about the nqqvgvba bs n punenpgre jub qbrfa'g nccrne va gur obbxf ng nyy--juvpu V'z abg vaureragyl ntnvafg, tvira gung gur fubj vf pyrneyl vgf bja guvat, naq V'z thrffvat fur'f gurer gb pbairl fbzrguvat gung jbhyq'ir orra gevpxl gb qb gur fnzr jnl va guvf sbezng nf va gur abiryyn. Ohg fur'fnaablvat , naq V'yy cebonoyl xrrc svaqvat ure naablvat jurgure fur vf va snpg freivat jung V pheeragyl guvax vf ure cebonoyr shapgvba (rarzl ntrag znfdhrenqvat nf nyyl) be fbzrguvat zber vagrerfgvat. [ROT13] Guess we'll find out soon!
Working: Thank goodness the manga I'm working right now is (as usual) a fairly easy rewrite and not a tight deadline, because scrounging the mental energy for freelance work has been frustratingly hard recently. I'm almost halfway through my draft and have about a week and a half left with it, so it's fine, but. :/
Weathering/Householding: We've had a lot of gray days and some high-ish temperatures combined with humidity (which I hate), and the air quality, while not remotely as bad as it is in a lot of places, has been fluctuating significantly...and the AC function of the heat pumps is essentially nonfunctional. >.< This is crappy timing, given how much of the time over the last several days has required having the windows closed (and the air purifiers running for good measure, although they don't address some of the nastiness from wildfire smoke). And for bonus fun, while the heat pumps are still under warranty, the company we bought them from went under a few months ago, which complicates things. (I think possibly the main person died. :/)
That said,scruloose made a bunch of calls today and we have reason to hope that someone can come in and take a look at them soon, if that particular company has the parts in stock. And while it's been uncomfortably warm inside some of the time because of this, at least it's not full summer yet. Hopefully we can get things dealt with by the time summer heat arrives in earnest.
And on a purely pleasant note, a couple nights ago we were in a phase of "somehow the air quality is fine outside right now, so we can just open the windows and run fans" while it was pleasantly cool and raining atmospherically and the wind was doing a wonderful job of wafting the smell of the lilacs into the living room.
It was also Claudia's birthday, of course, and I always think of her on their birthday. Oh, my darling baby cat.
*The oldest was Jenny, the cat of my childhood who was still with my parents for years after I moved out. She made it to nineteen, most of that time in rock-solid health, and never really forgave me for moving to Toronto and thus straight-up vanishing from her life for months at a time.
Reading: I finished reading Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, which remained an interesting read right through, and read Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances, which I think is only the second thing of his I've read? (Elder Race is the other one I'm sure of.) Having finished it, I'm in a position that's annoyingly familiar, where I liked the book quite a bit and am curious about what happens next, but am not sure I cared enough that I'll ever actually get around to picking up the sequel.
(The thing where I've almost entirely been reading books I own for years now doesn't really help, where I've often picked up the first book of a trilogy of series or whatever on sale in ebook because I've heard it's good, and then am not sure I'm invested enough to pay full price on the next one when I own literally hundreds of yet-unread books. Feh.)
Watching:
scruloose and I are up to date on Murderbot and have seen the first episode of Kingdom season 2.In the case of the former, I'm skeptical about the nqqvgvba bs n punenpgre jub qbrfa'g nccrne va gur obbxf ng nyy--juvpu V'z abg vaureragyl ntnvafg, tvira gung gur fubj vf pyrneyl vgf bja guvat, naq V'z thrffvat fur'f gurer gb pbairl fbzrguvat gung jbhyq'ir orra gevpxl gb qb gur fnzr jnl va guvf sbezng nf va gur abiryyn. Ohg fur'f
Working: Thank goodness the manga I'm working right now is (as usual) a fairly easy rewrite and not a tight deadline, because scrounging the mental energy for freelance work has been frustratingly hard recently. I'm almost halfway through my draft and have about a week and a half left with it, so it's fine, but. :/
Weathering/Householding: We've had a lot of gray days and some high-ish temperatures combined with humidity (which I hate), and the air quality, while not remotely as bad as it is in a lot of places, has been fluctuating significantly...and the AC function of the heat pumps is essentially nonfunctional. >.< This is crappy timing, given how much of the time over the last several days has required having the windows closed (and the air purifiers running for good measure, although they don't address some of the nastiness from wildfire smoke). And for bonus fun, while the heat pumps are still under warranty, the company we bought them from went under a few months ago, which complicates things. (I think possibly the main person died. :/)
That said,
scruloose made a bunch of calls today and we have reason to hope that someone can come in and take a look at them soon, if that particular company has the parts in stock. And while it's been uncomfortably warm inside some of the time because of this, at least it's not full summer yet. Hopefully we can get things dealt with by the time summer heat arrives in earnest.And on a purely pleasant note, a couple nights ago we were in a phase of "somehow the air quality is fine outside right now, so we can just open the windows and run fans" while it was pleasantly cool and raining atmospherically and the wind was doing a wonderful job of wafting the smell of the lilacs into the living room.
To-read pile, 2025, May
Jun. 9th, 2025 07:31 pmrmc28Books on pre-order:
- Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells (7 Oct 2025)
Books acquired in May:
- and read:
- Copper Script by KJ Charles
- Red Boar's Baby by Lauren Esker
- and unread:
- The Wrath & The Dawn by Renée Ahdieh [3]
- The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan [3]
- Kidnap on the California Comet by M.G. Leonard & Sam Sedgman [3]
- Betrayal (Trinity 1) by Fiona McIntosh [3]
Borrowed books read in May:
- The Good Thieves by Katherine Rundell
- One Christmas Wish by Katherine Rundell
- You Have a Match by Emma Lord [2][6]
I continue to not read much (by my standards). I did not manage to read any of the physical books I had out of the library until they needed to be returned, and I've got several half-finished books in progress. (Oh, and in writing this I've realised I already have the Renée Ahdieh book in ebook, and haven't read it there either!)
[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited
Last week was very mixed
Jun. 9th, 2025 05:06 pmoursinLast week was the one where there was PANIC over whether I would have new supply of prescription drug; credit card issues including FRAUD; and also bizarre phonecall from the musculo-skeletal people about scheduling an appointment which suggested they hadn't looked at my record or are very very confused about what my next session is actually for.
HOWEVER
Though I began writing a review on Wednesday, did a paragraph, and felt totally blank about where it was going from there, I returned to it the following day and lo and behold wrote enough to be considered an actual review, though have been tinkering and polishing since then. But is essentially DONE.
And in the realm of reviewing have received 3 books for essay review, have another one published this month coming sometime, and today heard that my offer to review for Yet Another Venue has been accepted, where can they send the book?
While in other not quite past it news, for many years I was heavily involved in a rather niche archival survey, which is no longer being hosted in its previous useful if rather outdated form but as a spreadsheet (I would say no use to man nor beast but it does have some value I suppose). But there is talk of reviving and updating it (yay) and I have been invited to a meeting to discuss this. Fortunately I can attend virtually rather than at ungodly hour of morning in distant reaches of West London.
Also professional org of which I am A (jolly good?) Fellow is doing a survey and has invited me to attend a virtual Focus Group.
Oh yes, and it looks as though a nerdy letter about Rebecca West I wrote to the Literary Review is likely to get published.
This is the overall driving/car situation in our household:
Jun. 9th, 2025 03:08 pmcimoreneCurrently, Wax and I are the little old ladies who only drive once a week. We live in a tiny town whose downtown is only a few streets across, on a small island, and we typically drive to the supermarket to get groceries once a week, not because walking there takes more than ten minutes, but because bringing a week's worth of groceries home (without a sled and a bunch of snow, or a little red wagon that we don't have) is uncomfortable on foot. Several winters in a row we have caused problems for our poor car by not driving often enough or for long enough when it was cold.
On the other hand, we have to have the car now for when we do need to leave town (buses into Kaarina and Turku from here are a pain; the regional 24h veterinary ER is on the other side of Turku, so we definitely did drive there at like 3 am one time when Snookums had a seizure).
I used to kind of enjoy driving, and I drove frequently aged 16-21, but only automatic transmissions.waxjism had an old car when I first moved here, but it was stick shift and I couldn't drive it and she couldn't teach me. We eventually got rid of it, and I never swapped my US driver's licence for a Finnish one (you can when it it hasn't expired yet).
Wax, who has never liked driving, has been urging me to learn to drive and get a license since we moved here and got the car.
Well, apparently, because I have at one time had a driver's licence from another country it's impossible to apply online for a learning-to-drive permit like everyone else can; I have to go in person to the office in Turku. I guess I'm doing that this week.
On the other hand, we have to have the car now for when we do need to leave town (buses into Kaarina and Turku from here are a pain; the regional 24h veterinary ER is on the other side of Turku, so we definitely did drive there at like 3 am one time when Snookums had a seizure).
I used to kind of enjoy driving, and I drove frequently aged 16-21, but only automatic transmissions.
waxjism had an old car when I first moved here, but it was stick shift and I couldn't drive it and she couldn't teach me. We eventually got rid of it, and I never swapped my US driver's licence for a Finnish one (you can when it it hasn't expired yet). Wax, who has never liked driving, has been urging me to learn to drive and get a license since we moved here and got the car.
Well, apparently, because I have at one time had a driver's licence from another country it's impossible to apply online for a learning-to-drive permit like everyone else can; I have to go in person to the office in Turku. I guess I'm doing that this week.