What I read -- April 2016

“All Those Vanished Engines” by Paul Park. What a great title! I don’t know why I requested this originally, but it came and I wasn’t really in the mood for a “difficult” book. And it looked difficult. The blurbs made it sound difficult. But then I started, and I read like 50 pages (20%) in a sitting, so clearly it was fine. I didn’t really know what was going on most of the time. The characters were interesting, but after a while I lost track of time and who was who. This book might have gone better for me if I’d read it over a couple of days, rather than a couple of weeks. If I read it again right away, it might all make sense. Alas, it was a library book and already overdue, so that’s not going to happen.

“The Raven King” by Maggie Stiefvater. When this came in the mail the boy took off with it, and then said “read it by Sunday, we need to talk.” Not a problem actually. Though that conversation went something like
Oh my god Noah.
Oh my god Glendower.
Oh my god Cabeswater.
Oh my god Mr. Grey!
Oh my god Maura.
It probably didn’t help that Ed was wandering around, and he gets it next, so we couldn’t really say sentences with spoilers in them. Though really we were communicating pretty well.

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...

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