What I read -- October 2014

“Jhereg” by Steven Brust. Yet another book I probably read because of Marie Brennan. It’s a caper, and very fast. The plotting reminded me of Diana Wynne Jones. The boy read the back (the scene were Vlad gets the jhereg egg) and thought it wasn’t a real bargain, but it’s one of the questions that kept me reading – what are the circumstances that make the little dragon want to make such a deal?

“Yendi” by Steven Brust. Having bought the omnibus, it only seemed logical to keep going and read the next novel. I always feel weird counting books separately when they’re in the same volume, but what do you do? I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the meaning of the title.

“Teckla” by Steven Brust. Book 3. Ed wanted to read the volume when I was done, so I guessed I should finish. I could see why he said in the intro that this would be a poor place to start. I found it rather stressful to read. In fact, I almost didn’t finish in fact. I really wanted one character in particular to just die already. I might have only finished because it was short. Which won’t necessarily preclude me from reading the next one. The ending was awesome, and the plotting as usual brilliant.

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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