What I read -- November 2017

“A Gathering of Shadows” by V.E. Schwab. I asked the boy for this for my birthday, but apparently he’d already gotten it. My favorite thing is that it’s got a sticker on the cover saying that it’s Barb’s staff pick.

It’s been probably a year and a half since I read book 1, and I wonder if that’s why I found the first 350 pages pretty tough, because I had forgotten any reason I might have liked Lila Bard. I just found, every time I got to a Lila section, I hated her so much. I really wanted her to suffer.

“Water for Elephants” by Sarah Gruen. My sister gave me this one because she was done with it. I found it immensely readable, and while reading the interview at the end I totally could not guess what the whole biblical parallel to Jacob was, and woke up in the middle of the night thinking that one particular instance of redlighting was really convenient for the author (I hadn’t thought this while reading… so)

“All the Birds in the Sky” by Charlie Jane Anders. I’ve heard so much about this one! It’s very charming and stylish. I wonder how it will hold up.

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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