What I read -- Feb 2014

“The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman. Bought it to give it to my mother. It was so beautiful. Short, and no words were wasted.

“Radiant Days” by Elizabeth Hand. Got it for Christmas because I asked for it. EH’s short story collection “Errantry” blew me away -- it had more memorable stories than most collections do – the themes and characters really resonated. This was what I had meant to read after the KJF last month. EH is a punk rock star, wow.

“Siberian Dawn” by Jeffrey Tayler. He had exerpts in The Atlantic, I think. The current page-a-day has portions set in Russia, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It had a map in the front! That makes it a fat fantasy, as far as I’m concerned. The book is a travelogue of JT’s trip from eastern Siberia to Poland in 1993. It was delightful, especially the parts where he keeps trying to tell Russians that the US is not perfect, has corruption too, etc. They never seem to get it, and he never seems to get why they don’t. The ice road vodka drunks reminded me of my zombie novel, which I should go back and look at when I’m done WWS. Ed picked it up when I was done and found it depressing.

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...

Robynettely

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