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What I read: December 2021



LHC #148: "A dance to the music of time: First movement, a question of upbringing; a buyer's market; the acceptance world" by Anthony Powell. It was a race between hard and virtual copies, and hard won. Not really my sort of thing. I mean, it's readable and entertaining, but I didn't care that much about young British men in the 20's so it was easy to put down. The library website said it was 216 pages long, and this was a lie. It's three novels, each 200+ pages, for a total of 718. So I didn't totally know what I was getting into when I requested it. 

LHC #149: "Fire Logic" by Laurie Marks. eBook. Much more my kind of thing. About a quarter of the way through, I started feeling like the author had loved "Three Winter's Tales" by Greer Gilman.

LHC #150: "The House on the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. It was on my sister's Christmas list, so I bought it and read it because if it's on both our lists, it's kismet. Then I wound up reading it on overdrive from the library because I always fall behind on everything in December. It's a little twee for my taste. 

LHC #151:"Stitched up: the anti-capitalist book of fashion" by Tansy E. Hoskins. It's a topic dear to my heart. I was hoping this book will help me clean up a short story I wrote last year that isn't... perfect. TPL only has it in hard copy, so when I wanted something to take on holiday with me, it seemed like a good choice. Reading eBooks on someone else's dodgy wifi might not be the best, I was thinking. 

Given the title, I shouldn't have been surprised that this book was basically a communist screed. Interesting, but not quite what I was looking for. I was looking for something more in-depth about the environmental horrors of sandblasted jeans and dye refuse in water supplies, but this was mostly workers' rights. Oh well. 

LHC #152: "My Uncle Napoleon" by Iraj Pizishkzad. Probably talked up in "Reading Lolita in Tehran". There's a pile of books translated out of Farsi on the LH list, and I'm trying to spread them out a little bit rather than read them in a giant sequence. This is only partly because most of them are only available in hard copy. 

This book was laugh-out-loud funny, which maybe isn't that appropriate on New Year's Eve in the ER, but what do you do. 

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  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